Marc Wijnants is head of IT at Belgian bank J Van Breda & Co, a 400-employee financial institution that targets family-owned small and medium-sized enterprises and professional services firms.

In IT terms, the bank has outsourced everything related to infrastructure, including network, operations, helpdesk, systems management and security.

It uses a shared-service model, where the outsourcing company is 40 per cent owned by the bank and the rest is owned by two other companies.

‘But IT strategy, project management and all development is handled internally,’ says Wijnants. ‘We have a rather small development team and most of our applications are bespoke, except some package solutions.

‘Our core banking platform is mainframe based on mainframe technology, while all our front end applications are built in .Net,’ he says.

Some years ago, the bank aligned its IT strategy to the business strategy.

‘We want to focus our resources on the things that differentiate us from our competitors,’ he says. ‘For example, CRM is seen as strategic, so we maintain that in-house, while other applications are more commodity and are to be replaced by packages.’

Strategic projects are often initiated by so-called workgroups, where at least one of the participants is from the IT department and at least one individual is a member of the executive committee.

Such workgroups define the business needs and expectations of the project and make sure it dovetails with the business strategy.

‘Often we – IT and the business – will translate the specification of the workgroup into one or more prototypes,’ says Wijnants. ‘Based on these prototypes, the scope of the project gets finalised.’

For more tactical projects, every department within the business has an account manager within the technology organisation. The IT account manager, therefore, has a thorough knowledge of day-to-day problems within the business – and for every project, the account manager, or someone on the technology team, is involved from the start.

‘Three or four times a year, I propose the outline of the larger or strategic projects to the executive committee,’ says Wijnants.

‘This has a time horizon of 18 to 24 months and gives the executive team the opportunity to change the priorities.’

Wijnants also says he is in the right place, in terms of the organisational structure. ‘I report to the chief executive (CEO), though I am not on the executive committee,’ he says.

‘I am a member of the board of the shared-service centre and I agree completely that the ideal place in the organisation for a chief information officer (CIO) is within the executive committee. Directly reporting to the CEO is the second-best option and it works well here, because it is a non-hierarchical organisation.’

Wijnants believes in any company IT should be on the executive committee. ‘This will make it much easier for the technology leader to play the partner role,’ he says. ‘So, yes, the CIO should aspire to the executive committee.’