Lee Rennick, executive director of CIO.com’s CIO community, recently spoke with O’Sullivan about his career in financial services, clarity on business outcomes, and complete customer engagement. Watch the full video below to learn more.
About influencing: I remember early in my career listening to conversations on various occasions and looking for their secret sauce. Write down what you need to do. It’s about the journey, and for me, it’s about mastering the task at hand. Because that’s where the conversation begins. That’s when you start getting noticed. From there, people start talking about you and remembering you about things. Therefore, listen to such opportunities. One way I’ve found they manifest is when someone brings up an issue during a conversation and it keeps being discussed. No one seems to be able to tackle it and solve it. It’s a rich opportunity and often leads to the next step in your career.
About Generation AI: I’m very excited about the technology. This is the headline, but the marketing team did an incredibly good job. The challenge and the conversation shift for me is how Gen AI creates secure enterprise solutions from these amazing things that create digital content. I recently read an article about how you can create great food recipes with ChatGPT, which may or may not turn out to be delicious. Therefore, the first thing is safety. We talk about his LLM, which generates new and original content to present in front of customers and get them to respond to emails and phone calls. Many considerations are made regarding the appropriateness of the response, parameters, and method of training the model. And related to that is data quality. I ran a data quality program for a large UK bank for three years and spent millions of pounds just solving data quality issues. But it’s continuous training. Headlines about data quality never go away.
About digital transformation: My general observation is that first, be clear about business outcomes. It sounds like a cliché, but if you look at the modernization program that he started when I came to his OneFamily, from an initial fact-finding and RFI standpoint, he ran it in mid-to-late 2019, and of course after that. Many things followed. So we poured blood, sweat, and tears to create the perfect business case that survived a pandemic, a major acquisition, and three different CEOs. At the end of the day, you need to make sure your CEO understands the vision. But we’ve always had to go back to that and point out and say, this is why we do this. In other words, the people involved may have changed, but the effort and true north remained the same. I’ve seen change efforts work from front to back and change everything. Or can I overlay it and do something in parallel or something else? It depends on your situation. Our modernization was completely digital transformation. So if you talk to anyone in the company, they’ll tell you this is a modernization of our company, not an IT or customer service program, and it’s company-wide. It’s one thing to deploy a new toolset because you have to make it real for people, but are you really talking about a new way to make a new culture work?
Capture this moment: I’ve been involved in transformation for a long time, doing transformations in investment banking, retail banking, and now financial mutuals. The pattern is similar in that it begins with a recognition of the need for innovation and change because the problem, the technology stack, the business process it supports, or the product requires innovation. But equally, our employees and teams are here to help those whose digital journey is not native to them or who need additional support. In the mid-1990s, the British government launched a scheme that gave every child born in a certain period a £250 voucher to invest in the stock market. As a result, we had many new customers. Although we couldn’t engage with all of them directly as they were all children, we knew they wanted a digital journey. So we’re not sitting here with a crystal ball and saying, let’s transform and modernize. The order was to knock on the door and say, “What are you going to do?” This was a great use case for us because there were a lot of challenges. How can we enable a self-service digital journey while also serving other customers as well? This will help us understand why this is the right way to go and how we can do more of this by looking at the rest of our product set. It gave me the confidence to give it a try.
