Rick Roy, senior vice president and CIO of CUNA Mutual, says to manage stakeholders up front because it will pay huge dividends down the road.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
"Early on we discovered that part of innovation is moving, sometimes, at a very different speed and perhaps even using different processes or methodologies than you may use in your normal course of running the business. If you don't manage the stakeholders outside of IT, around that change and shift, you will run into some really big internal barriers fast.
It's not that they're against innovation, but you have to paint a context for them of what you're trying to do and why and why this maybe different. The other thing that we really have wrestled with is we've resisted the temptation to create an innovation center or one group charged with solely innovating. And that is an approach, and there are some very successful innovative companies that use that approach."
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"I think the stakeholder management piece of this particularly outside of IT, but stakeholders that have a very direct interest in not only, what is IT is doing, but how it's doing it, becomes crucial for your ability to actually get things done in different ways.
So I think a great example of this, and this is a few years ago now, but the first thing we had to do when we decided to go to agile, and again we didn't do it across the enterprise, but on specific teams is, we had to update and actually you know what, this is an alternate methodology and document it. And then say, here is where we think it's appropriate to use that methodology. But by investing time in that approach, it helped us, not run into a brick wall later, from an internal controls perspective when we were actually trying to get product out the door. So that is probably a really good example of, as you are doing things differently and you are doing them faster, if you don't educate and really help those, very interested stakeholders come along on the journey with you, they can really slow you down in the end. So, you invest up front, but it pays huge dividends down the road."
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Rick Roy is the former Senior Vice President of Shared Services and Chief Information Officer for CUNA Mutual Group; a $16 billion diversified financial services company, headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin. He is responsible for corporate shared services including information technology, project management office, security, real estate and facilities, and vendor sourcing and procurement. His organization has been honored by CIO 100, InformationWeek 500, and Insurance Networking News for innovative business technology.
