Transforming IT culture for business success

Not only does culture define who you are and how you interact with one another, it also impacts a team’s performance and productivity. “Poor culture impacts a team’s delivery — having a really good culture means delivering what’s needed for the business,” Dundas says.

Making culture stick

One of the most important rules of making culture stick is breaking down silos and creating a more holistic community of IT. First Citizens Bank, which over the past decade-plus has grown from $17 billion to $210 billion in assets driven by a flurry of mergers and acquisitions, has made a concerted effort over the years to establish a “team DNA” instead of individual fiefdoms.

“If the network team, DBA team, or application team drops the ball, it should reflect on all of us in IT, not just on individual team delivery,” explains Dede Ramoneda, executive vice president and CIO for the bank. “We broke down silos and redefined our identity as delivering the whole of an IT solution rather than delivering a specific piece. Sometimes you have to suboptimize individual parts to optimize the whole and that changes how you work with your peers and how you challenge each other.”

First Citizens Bank

It’s also important to be intentional and explicit in reinforcing key values to keep everyone onboard. Ramoneda’s leadership team makes it a point to constantly connect the impact of the services IT delivers to its customers’ lives, especially when there’s a problem. For example, IT leaders shared stories of when a downed ATM network prevented a customer from getting cash to fund the purchase of an engagement ring or another missing their cruise departure time because they were waylaid by a faulty ATM. “We use these types of storytelling to underscore that we’re not just supporting systems, we’re supporting technology that affects people’s lives,” Ramoneda says.

At Brown & Brown Insurance, the IT culture is all about building close alignment with the business to drive positive outcomes — a partnership that is continually reinforced by listening, immersing IT leaders in the business, and changing its interviewing and recruiting process to zero in on people who are partnership- and business-focused, not just technically literate, says Gray Nestor, BBNI’s executive vice president and CIO.

Patience and grace must be part of the process as people may not initially understand what you’re asking them to do and why they might need to change behaviors.

Brown & Brown Insurance

“You have to be willing to give people feedback and examples on a regular basis to drive a different result,” Nestor says. “The real hard part starts with moving the needle — you have to be willing to spend time with the business, spend time with leadership, and be willing to put progress over perfection.”

What’s a key measure that an IT culture is well formed and delivering results? For Deepa Soni, CIO at The Hartford, it’s tied up in validation that the IT organization is seen as a strategic partner to the business — a point driven home when organizational leaders, including the CEO, cite technology transformation as a key lever for the insurance giant’s competitive advantage.

“When business leaders talk about how enhanced capabilities and digital tools help them take market share or feel good about how they’re competing in the market, that’s what success looks like to us,” Soni says.

The Hartford

Perhaps the most important advice from Soni and other CIOs focused on IT culture: Don’t take your foot off the gas.

“You realize pretty quickly that without continuous reinforcement of principles, culture can erode pretty quickly,” says PNNI’s Abrahamson. “Patience and staying power on strategy is really key.”