IT uncovered

Have you ever wanted to know what really goes in the IT departments of Europe’s biggest banks? Well now you can find thanks to IT’s Hidden Face, a book dubbed the essential guide for every CIO. CXO meets its author Claude Roeltgen.

“The economic downturn has had a detrimental impact on some CIOs and their departments”
-Claude Roeltgen

After 22 years spent running the IT departments of some of Europe's biggest banks Claude Roeltgen knows a thing or two about what goes on behind the scenes. Now he has put pen to paper and written a book designed to be the CIO's bible – an overview of the key issues they face today including the pitfalls of failing to bridge the gap between the business and the IT department. Roeltgen says IT's Hidden Face is written in a style designed to appeal to professionals at all levels of a business particularly "if you are a business manager who needs to work successfully with IT or a professional who needs to be able to explain why something can indeed be installed in 10 minutes but that success demands many more steps before or after that."

Reality bites

Roeltgen admits that it was the many obstacles that he has faced in his job that inspired him to write the book. He says one of the biggest challenges is the lack of understanding by other parts of the business of the task faced by the IT department. He hopes the book will help to break down some of those communication barriers: "I've been a CEO now for 22 years and I've always had to deal with situations such as failing projects, crashing software, delays, not meeting budgets, all this sort of stuff. Our users always wonder why this is the case. We are very bad at explaining to them why our world is the way it is. So I thought that rather than explaining it all the time I would put the things issues together in a book that everybody can understand, even those who are not IT guys."

Roeltgen claims that it took him just three months to put the book together and that he spent just one month compiling the materials to put it together.

He drew inspiration from his own position as CIO of Luxembourg-based private banking firm Banque LBLux, which he says, like all companies, faces the problem that much of the software it adopts is fraught with problems. This leads to frustration from IT users who cannot understand why it takes so long to install the new software. He says: "The main problem is that we are dealing with an industry, which is far from being mature. When we introduce new software we get something that is basically not working in most cases. We have faulty software. We have providers who don't have quality assurance processes in place. "The software packages we use in banking are very big and include hundreds of millions of lines of code but also thousands of errors. It is not getting better over time. Not at all. We don't see the problems at the beginning of the process and so the expectations of the business are totally different to what we can actually can keep as a promise." He hopes the Hidden Face of IT will help to address this problem: "I have tried to build a bridge between those two worlds. I cannot change our world but I can explain our world. I can make the business user aware of the difficulties we are fighting with."

Roeltgen says the CIOs of financial institutions face particularly big challenges because of the constantly changing nature of the industry and the types of applications and processes that are used to process financial transactions:

"I think the difficulty is predicting where the banking industry will be in let's say 12 months from now. We don't know what mergers there will be and what financial products we will continue to offer and which ones not. So trying to understand the whole industry is a real challenge."

One of Roeltgen's key aims when writing the book was to use language that could be understood by all parts of the business and to avoid overly technical terms. However he says he believes that in general CIOs have improved greatly in the way they communicate with the rest of the business: "I think we have the language problem maybe much less now than we did ten years ago. We have people now in IT who talk the business language and who can discuss with them in more or less open ways. So the times when we had those nerd programmers explaining what a programme is are finished. But we are still very bad at explaining the framework of IT and explaining the difficulties that we really have." Roeltgen goes on to say that given the key role IT now plays in helping businesses to meet their business objectives, clear channels of communication between the CIO and the boardroom are crucial. This is particularly the case, as he has experienced, within the banking industry: "Without IT you cannot achieve any business goals today. But it depends a bit on what industry you are in. In the banking industry every topic that comes in is an IT topic because of the sheer mass of transactions you put through. In other industries it might be different but I don't have that experience."

Hard times

Because of the big role that IT plays in running the business smoothly, the economic downturn has had a detrimental impact on some CIOs and their departments, says Roeltgen: "It definitely does have an impact because you have cost cutting exercises almost everywhere and the biggest cost block is normally IT and staff. IT departments tend to employ a lot of staff so they are touched two times really. It makes our life much more difficult." He says this situation becomes particularly difficult when the company has a long-term contract with an IT software provider that it can no longer honour because its IT budget has been cut. "There are running contracts where costs are fixed so you cannot react very quickly on this. But the targets you have to get are set in a very short time frame. And explaining to the business that it is not so easy to get out of a running contract to change to another system can be very difficult in some places. He says he is currently facing the problem of slashed budgets at Banque LBLux, which has been hit by the economic downturn. The bank is a subsidiary of BayernLB and Helaba and previously it had provided IT services to the rest of the group. However he says that because it is now reducing in size it is no longer in a position to act as an insourcer and now has to outsource the services it once provided.

"Our situation is changing in the sense that we were a big insourcer for the group. Our group is getting restructured very heavily which means that the services we offer for the group are reduced. We did services for a number of other entities in the group. But as everything is re-sized, downsized and changed, we basically lose our customers that we were servicing within the group. So we go from an insourcing strategy to an outsourcing strategy. This is a very painful process but also a very challenging and a very different situation to the one we had before."

It's the type of situation that Roltgen hopes to prepare his readers for in his book. However he admits it is not always easy to practice what he preaches: "I think most people have read the book and sometimes they confront me when I don't do what I wrote in the book. But at least I try. I know it's very difficult very often to really have the perfect world. It's a day to day challenge to follow what I think is the best way to do things."

An extract from Chapter One of IT's Hidden Face:

Again, a program has crashed. Again, the PC is frozen; not even the mouse moves. "What on earth did I do wrong?" you are asking yourself, slowly but surely becoming frustrated. The only correct answer to that question would be "Nothing," but there is no one to tell you this. Computers should work in all circumstances, but they don't, and this is almost never the user's fault. The only way to avoid this situation would be to constantly have an IT expert available to you.

The Information Technology (IT) is an impenetrable and ever-growing jungle for a layman. The computer systems that are used in the business need to be compared to a fragile ecosystem. The common man looks at an IT expert with a mix of respect and compassion.

Most people think the world of computers is treacherous. Everything is so complicated, inscrutable, and-for some people-even menacing. Since the computer has become a massive part of our daily life, renouncing it would be neither possible nor desirable, so taking a discerning look behind the scenes is worth it. It's profitable to understand why this world is so imperfect.

A gap the size of the Grand Canyon exists between the computer user's expectations and that what an IT department can effectively do. Business computer users lack basic knowledge about the specificities of the IT world. Electronics and computers are everywhere around us, but to talk about a high maturity grade of that industry is simply nonsense. Later in the book, I will describe the situation as "storm-and-stress" behavior. A renowned colleague of mine goes even further and describes the situation as an "infantile stadium." It is important to me to close the massive gap between the understanding of laymen and the expertise of IT professionals. It is obvious that IT experts need to master their own universe and understand the business in the company they work for. On the other hand, users should endeavor to understand the specificities of the IT world. That they don't is one of the main reasons for the comprehension problems that we face.

Too often, we hear from our users in the business that a task should be done at the "push of a button." Many misunderstandings between IT experts and users are based on this misjudgment. The tendency of IT experts (who are of a rather calm nature) is to not talk a lot about their world. They are doing far too little (or none at all) marketing for their own sake. It is about time to change this.

This is not a complicated reference book. You don't need any computer know-how; it is enough if you use a PC from time to time. This book will open a door to a closed world, and it will explain in a no-frills style why things are the way they are. It has deliberately been written in an entertaining form to keep it easily readable. There are already too many complicated reference books around. This book will tell you about things that you cannot know. (For instance, the requirements for security are totally different for a professional environment than for a private PC.) Further interesting topics are: disaster recovery planning, supervision by auditors, job interviews, and problems generated by users developing their own software. If you are an IT expert, once in a while I'm sure you had to explain what you were doing all day. If you are not an expert, you might have asked yourself what your colleagues in the IT department do all day and why there are so many of them. Well, this book answers those questions.