When Bill Packer came on board in mid-2015 as CIO at mortgage lender American Financial Resources, Inc., he was attracted by the company’s stated goal to differentiate itself along two dimensions: service and technological prowess. Once he dived into the job, it became clear to him that fulfilling that second goal would best be achieved by taking the company’s IT environment 100 percent into the cloud. The company is making rapid progress toward that goal and the results are much what Packer expected.
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): What did the IT environment look like when you arrived at American Financial Resources?
Packer: It was an on-premises operation first. In some cases, they would use a colocation provider but in general, the mindset was to build and operate IT resources and applications themselves. When I came in the door, I said the conversations I want to have with business partners and the board have nothing to do with running a data center. I want to talk about technology capabilities that enhance and augment our business model. So I endeavored to sell the team on the idea that we should be a cloud-first company. So now discussions with business partners have to do with expanding our capabilities and we let the cloud provider worry about how to run and operate a data center.
TEP: How did you sell the idea internally?
Packer: Some folks sell a migration to cloud as a way to save costs. That’s not my view. You generally are at parity and, in some cases, because of how easy it is to spin up environments and experiment, may wind up paying a bit more with cloud, particularly if you don’t have good governance around who can create environments. So for me, it’s not a cost play. We only have so much mindshare of our colleagues, boards and business partners, and I want to focus on the things we do that earn us revenue, promote customer-centricity, and deliver outstanding results. Let someone else worry about whether the servers have enough power and if there’s enough HVAC in the data center and the like.
TEP: How far along are you with your cloud migration?
Packer: Our customer-facing digital properties – eLend.com and AFRwholesale.com – are 99.9 percent in the cloud. For our internal office automation, we’re about 20 complete. We’re coming into our slower season so we will focus on those products in the winter. I expect that at the end of my second year, we’ll be fully in the cloud.
TEP: Have the results so far been what you expected?
Packer: They have. It’s enormously empowering to never have to walk into a board meeting and talk about financing a large infrastructure upgrade, or why a project is delayed because we have to wait for servers. The people running the business have little interest in these topics, nor should they; to them, it’s mind-numbing. Now all my conversations are about features, functions, speed to market rather than infrastructure.
TEP: What about the internal IT team? All this must be a big change for them.
Packer: The development team finds it enormously freeing. If they need a test environment, they spin one up. When you don’t need it anymore, you tear it down. We’re mostly an agile shop, so it’s very helpful to have that kind of infrastructure flexibility.
For the infrastructure team it’s a little unnerving. For 15 or 20 years, they’ve defined themselves by their knowledge of big iron or switches and routers. Now those skills are significantly less important. The focus now becomes, “How do I find and identify places where I can leverage the cloud to advance business goals?” They continue to worry about technology, in terms of business continuity, information security, how we’re architected, how we’re reaching the Internet, all those kinds of things – but now they also have to think about what business problems the company is facing and how they can leverage cloud investments to advance the business.
TEP: That sounds like a completely different skillset. How do you educate them to think along those lines?
Packer: It is a different skillset. It really puts an onus on management to make sure you’re constantly communicating the direction you’re trying to go in, why you’re trying to go there and what the business is trying to achieve. The idea is to enable those infrastructure professionals to see opportunities for how to use these newfound tools to help the business achieve its goals
TEP: Any advice for others who may be considering a cloud migration?
Packer: Always start with the business case. Figure out what you’re trying to achieve and look for the most appropriate tool to achieve it. Cloud migration to me is a tool. It’s a tool that was very effective for us, but I wouldn’t say that you should start with, “I want to do a cloud migration.” I didn’t know cloud was for American Financial Resources until I arrived here, completed the analysis and determined what the company needed. Fortunately for us, we didn’t have a big investment in legacy infrastructure so it was relatively easy to do that migration.
