Don't pitch transformational ideas if you don't have trust, warns financial services CIO

Tom Clark, CIO of Leeds Building Society explains how and when to pitch ideas to the board, speaking at Computing's recent Cloud and Infrastructure Summit North

IT leaders shouldn't pitch transformational ideas to their boards if they don't have a trusted relationship.

That's the opinion of Tom Clark, CIO of Leeds Building Society, speaking at Computing's recent Cloud and Infrastructure Summit North.

"If you're in fire-fighting mode, don't bother pitching things like cloud, as you don't have the reputation to do it," Clark began. "It's the same if you're in an unstable, ad hoc mode of operation. I heard of one firm where the CEO couldn't get his PC working. In that instance you've got bigger problems, and no trust basis."

Clark added that IT departments which are in the "trusted operator" or "business partner" space can feel free to pitch new ideas, whilst true innovators can go further still.

"If you're in the innovator space, you drive the agenda rather than simply being a subsidiary business partner."

Clark's department runs on a cloud-first basis, but he explained that doesn't necessarily mean every new service or piece of software is consumed that way.

"When a new project comes forward, we put it through our enterprise architecture principles in order of prority. Can we get a new services as SaaS? If not, can we get it as PaaS, or IaaS?

"If we can't it's usually down to cost, so then we move on to examining whether we can bring it on premises. Usually then we'll put it on our standard platform, which is VMWare, giving us future cloud adoption possibilities.

"And if that looks unworkable our final option is bespoke, where we can't put it on cloud at all."

He explained that when he joined the business four years ago, he looked at the department's relationship with the business, and decided that at his organisation, IT would work like a vendor to the business.

"We came up with IT4 brand. We put together a brand statement and logo with the marketing department.

"The department now has 150 people. It offers a full service, with dev, test, ops, and security. Everything we do needs to be secure, resilient and risk-managed.

"We don't know what the future holds, what we build needs to be flexible enough to cope with change."

Clark is ranked 12th in Computing's latest IT Leaders 100 list for 2018.