Matt Craig, vice-president of Performance and Management at BNY Mellon
A management framework spearheaded by Intel and NUI Maynooth has been used to train more than 400 staff at prominent Wall Street bank BNY Mellon, which has more than US$1.4trn in assets under management and US$28bn in assets under custody.
Matt Craig, head of Performance & Value Management at BNY Mellon, told Siliconrepublic.com that the bank has deployed the IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF) developed by the NUI Maynooth and Intel-led Innovation Value Institute (IVI).
“Last year we had a new CIO come in and one of the things he wanted to do was get a clear picture of the capability of the overall organisation. My team and others had been looking at a number of ways of doing this in terms of performance and competence, and we had been using a range of different frameworks, but trying to get a good picture of how mature and capable the organisation was proved difficult.
“We then heard about the IT-CMF and our new CIO said, ‘why don’t you look at that and make an effective reference framework – what are our areas of strength and can we improve upon them?’ ”
NUI Maynooth and Intel co-founded the IVI in 2006 to help drive the transformation of IT management and to create a global gold standard for IT management.
IVI has developed the IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF), a system now used by more than 450 organisations worldwide across 22 industry sectors to evaluate an organisation’s IT maturity level, benchmark with industry peers and best practice, and identify a road map for improvement. IVI has completed more than 1,000 IT-CMF assessments in client organisations over the past five years.
Craig said BNY Mellon augmented the IT-CMF to best suit the realities of the bank’s organisations and challenges. “Some of the benefits we saw quickly acted as a helpful common framework that put us all on the same page, gave us an understanding of what we look like and we asked the question do we speak a common language with professionals across the global supporting different businesses?
“The framework and assessment was helpful in giving us that common basis of understanding.
“We went from there identifying people who could be responsible for different areas and built out teams to drive the response.
“It goes beyond the technology itself – it’s about leadership, strategy and people – it’s about good innovation management and the financial management capabilities that support our delivery.”
Craig said that the IT-CMF hasn’t pushed BNY Mellon’s IT organisation in a new direction per se, but rather has given the bank a better sense of how to talk about the direction it is going in.
“We look at technology, but the overall package of how we manage technology on behalf of the enterprise and improving the capability of the organisation overall. It’s a guiding reference for that effort.”
The DNA of knowledge – follow design patterns
Intel’s Martin Curley with speakers Peter Breunig from Chevron and Gerry Quinn from the Central Bank at the recent IVI Autumn Summit in Dublin
IVI co-founder and Intel Labs vice-president Martin Curley said the IT-CMF is, in essence, a body of knowledge. “The DNA of which is various design patterns contained within. As in BNY Mellon’s case, it is a generally reusable solution to a commonly recurring set of problems. The context is always different whether it is BNY Mellon, BP, the Central Bank or the Revenue Commissioners.
“The idea is to pool the knowledge into design patterns, and use that knowledge to identify particular capabilities.
“You might have a problem, such as limited IT innovation – this in turn has an impact on controlling IT costs or accelerating your organisation into the cloud, raising questions like which IT systems to keep and merge.
“It’s all problem or opportunity-driven, and organisations can opt to use different pieces of it for specific problems.”
Curley pointed to the Roman philosopher Seneca who said: “The way is long if one follows precepts or rules.”
“The road gets shorter if they follow patterns, it lowers the learning curve, otherwise it would take a long time if you keep repeating the mistakes that others have made,” Curley added.
Data and analytics will be the subject of Silicon Republic’s Irish Data Forum on 22 November. For more information and speaker updates, visit the Irish Data Forum website
