Demonstrating Business Value is Key To Success

Mark Schlesinger, SVP & CIO, Broadridge

Mark Schlesinger, SVP & CIO, Broadridge

Steering transformational initiatives within business environment that typically required IT

After several years of reorganizing and realigning our corporate information technology organizations, we are now focused on realignment of our development teams. Since we now have IT infrastructure, corporate development, information security, vendor management, and governance teams aligned organizationally as well as with a unified strategic plan, relooking our application development strategy was a logical next step. The overall goals are to create additional business and financial value by realigning these teams to unified development executives. This will provide for additional foundational technologies to be leveraged across product and business lines as well as enhanced application reuse to drive efficiencies.

Manner in which data is used to head off problems and complications before they happen

Two examples that come to mind are: The continued implementation and standardization of our billing needs onto the Oracle Financials EBS platform. This enormous project provides the appropriate standardization of processes, improved efficiencies for our financial teams as well as enhanced governance and automation for our revenue generating applications.

We are also continuing to develop our “cloud” strategy. In order to make this a huge success, we are engaging key business unit leaders, key product owners, and key strategy

associates in helping shape the business drivers for our cloud strategy. We have also included key associates from finance, security, audit, marketing, sales, risk, and legal to participate to ensure we are taking a holistic view of this extremely important strategic initiative.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier

A couple of key wish list items include: true end-to-end application monitoring that spans platforms and technologies that provides real time reactive and proactive monitoring of key application suites as well as provides tools to reduce meantime- to-remediate when outages do occur. Additionally, better data and application security tools that continually protect applications from the ever changing threat landscape with minimal infrastructure and/or application changes.

Technology trends impacting enterprise business environment

We have been supporting mobile and tablet solutions for several years at this point. We have implemented secure tablet solutions for internal use and consumption that have greatly enhanced mobility and productivity. In fact, the most illustrative example of mobile technology having a meaningful impact on our business, and on the financial industry as a whole, is our 2011 launch of Mobile ProxyVote®.com. Upon the launch, one-third of the shareholders that voted on mobile devices were first-time voters, indicating that technology enabled a new generation of shareholders to exercise their voting rights because both their access to information and their ability to act upon it was improved.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

The ability to constantly demonstrate business value is an absolute key to success. By understanding the businesses supported, the clients supported, and the products supported provides the true value-add to the business. This alignment allows technology leaders to be at the “business tables”. Then constantly enhancing the service delivery, effectiveness, and efficiencies of the application suite continues to foster the appropriate business relationships and partnerships.

Lessons learned and advice for fellow CIOs

This is very simple, deliver business aligned technology strategies and ensure you are using the appropriate “business language” when communicating this strategy and solutions.