IT Strategic Planning:
A Better Way to Serve Members
By Teresa Brent, Product Manager, Alloya Corporate FCU
Technology connects members and it is essential in the highly competitive financial services industry. Members demand simple, anytime, anywhere access to their data, propelling self- service as a good fit for members and business. Self-service lowers the average cost of transactions and members are happier with the financial institution. However, the problem many encounter is finding a cost-effective solution to enable and sustain the availability, reliability and security of the technology. That is why it is important in an area such as IT (where change can happen so quickly) to ensure you treat strategic versus non-strategic IT tasks differently.
Strategic planning provides an opportunity to evaluate where you are and where you are going over the short-term and longer-term horizons. Having an IT strategy can go a long way in increasing your member satisfaction and decreasing your credit union’s expenses.
Getting Started
Begin by completing a user needs assessment that addresses the following:
- What unique and core applications does your credit union have or should acquire to meet your needs?
- As part of your business and IT planning, evaluate IT optimization alternatives for cost savings, increased efficiencies and better user experiences.
- What changes can you make to ensure application and database integration are being optimized to provide you with the best member information available to increase your services opportunities?
Consider outsourcing items that are not your core-competency and that are too costly in terms of resources and time from your key IT personnel. Let your IT resources be focused entirely on meeting the needs of member service and credit union staff. Items such as power; cooling connectivity; reliability; network administration; storage, server and back-up administration and management; disaster recovery restoration exercises; and commodity application support, such as email, can almost always be outsourced at a lesser cost than “doing it yourself.”
Cooperative Savings & Other Benefits
By creating a strategic IT plan that focuses on both the needs of the member and the information needs of credit union staff, you can eliminate or greatly reduce your credit union’s capital expense. In addition, you can reduce the cost and time your credit union spends on regulatory compliance. By cooperatively sharing resources with other like-minded credit unions through the outsourcing of non-strategic IT items, you can leverage your IT staff resources to better meet member needs and internal information requirements, thus leading to more service offerings.
A strategic IT plan also helps reduce the risk of going it alone. You no longer have the responsibility for 24/7/365 monitoring, care and “feeding” of physical facilities, power, HVAC, Internet, network, storage, servers, governance, compliance, information security threats, data protection and back up, disaster recovery and business continuity. This frees up resources, affording you a better way to direct your IT investment!
Six Steps to IT Strategic Planning Success
Performing the following six tasks and moving those non-strategic IT requirements to a trusted partner will provide you with a well-thought-out IT strategic plan. Plus, these steps will help you discover what resources are needed to ensure that your plan can be implemented on time, within budget and resulting in the expected outcomes.
- Meet initiatives by mapping your business objectives to IT requirements.
- Automate and integrate member and employee activities to your core data processing system to streamline tasks.
- Access your data to provide business intelligence reporting metrics for use by your management team.
- Identify options for cost reductions and capability increases.
- Understand the regulator’s statements on new IT direction.
- Spend time with your members to understand how they use and want to use technology for financials activities.
Your well-thought out IT strategic plan can mean a world of difference to your members, and your bottom-line.
Teresa Brent can be contacted at teresa.brent@alloyacorp.org.