This week Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference is going on and the phrases; "Internet of Customers," "Customer Companies," and "Intersections of the CIO and CMO" have been resounding themes.
Last night Forbes posted a blog entitled - "Lessons From The Businesswoman With The Largest IT Job In Financial Services"
Cathy Bessant, Global Technology and Operations at Bank of America, has a role overseeing nearly 100,000 employees and contractors on her team in 35 countries. This interview is a good quick read highlighting the importance of talent, getting sticky with your customers, and the importance of IT and Marketing synergies:
- "I seek highly intellectual, highly energized, very passionate people directed towards solving the business problems of the company..."
- Current and future focus surrounds
- Mobile banking
- Data analytics
- Customer facing technology with features and functions that make us magnetic to clients
- "Businesses bet on technologists and capabilities that solve business problems, that serve customers brilliantly and that make the internal workings of a company easier."
- ..."It is the ability to identify and understand a business problem and apply technology as the solution, not technology as a destination to itself."
- "There needs to be a strong coexistence between IT and Marketing to enable companies to be brilliant for their customers and clients."
- Business needs the brilliant manufacturing of data, data that is well organized, that can be delivered on a timely, accurate, comprehensive basis.
- Taking the data and actually causing it to mean something, getting insights from it that absent the work of the technologist wouldn’t be possible.