Helen Cousins represents the quintessential curious networker that a chief information officer ought to be. Until recently, she was the Executive Vice President and CIO of Lincoln Trust Company. She was also a board member of the company. Prior to that, she was CIO both of Dex Media and of Cendant Corporation. She was also in the 2012 class of CIO magazine’s prestigious CIO Hall of Fame. You would think then that she was destined to be a CIO from the outset of her career. Far from it.
After Cousins graduated from high school, she became the receptionist for a bank. Realizing she could do those duties pretty easily, her curiosity led her to other departments of the company, slowly learning how each department fit with others. She began filling in for people if they were away on a temporary basis. She eventually received a bachelor’s degree and then an MBA, but it was this curiosity to understand businesses that began when she was the most junior person at a bank that has served her well as she has risen. Upon becoming CIO, she realized that an ability to network through the organization, and to find common needs or opportunities articulated in multiple parts of the organization, tying them together before the leaders who articulated them realized they could be that set her apart as an extraordinary leader. She is a rare CIO to become a board member of her own company, but that was the role she played at Lincoln Trust. Although Cousins has many skills that are innate, and therefore tough to teach, she nevertheless imparts a great many insights in my interview with her for IT executives who wish to follow in her footsteps.
(To listen to my unabridged interview with Helen Cousins in podcast form, please visit this link. This is the third in the Board-Level CIO’s series. To read the first two, please follow this link. To read future interviews in this series with the CIOs of companies like Cardinal Health, Texas Instruments, and Capital One, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Helen, you have a non-traditional path: You don’t have an engineering degree, you didn’t grow up in the IT department and you didn’t have a lot of female IT leaders to look up to. Can you tell us a bit about your path to the CIO role?
Helen Cousins: I do have a pretty non-traditional path. My first job was right out of high school as a receptionist for a small international branch of a domestic bank. I always volunteered to learn what other departments were doing. We were very small – only about 30 people – so there was always somebody I could fill in for. I really learned how all of the departments interact together, how important it is as a task flows from one department to another department and to look at the end-to-end process.
As I started moving up, I decided to get my BS in Accounting & Economics and an MBA in computer science. I got involved in IT as a Project Manager for a System Implementation in one of the largest global banks because of my knowledge of the different areas in banking. Once that was successfully implemented, I found myself getting more responsibility until eventually I was running all the development for the bank within the US as the only female VP before leaving. My career in IT was really cast from there and I have since held three CIO positions: Corporate CIO of a large New York holding company, then a large yellow page company in Denver and lastly, Lincoln Trust.
High: Historically, many people have risen from programmer all the way to the top chair in IT. I imagine coming with a broader perspective on the financial services industry and how the business actually operates gave you a more well-rounded perspective on that role?
Cousins: A lot of people will do one particular task never realizing the effect on other departments. Starting out in a small company, I learned all sides of what you do and how it affects what the next person is going to do. I became very process-focused looking at things from an end-to-end process. As a project manager I was invited to work on a system implementation since I understood the business. From there I got more projects, more departments, bigger areas and eventually ended up as corporate CIO.
High: When you began your current role of CIO of Lincoln Trust, the IT department had a contentious relationship with the rest of the organization. Can you share some of the processes or methods that you used in order to turn IT’s reputation around in the business?
Cousins: It all started when I interviewed with my peer on the business side. I asked her what she thought of my IT team. She said, “If I had control of them I would fire them all.” I knew I was getting into an environment where there was no trust between the business and IT: Things were very unstable, systems were going down, there were a lot of technical issues. I really had to go back to the basics: people, process and planning. People were being rewarded for being firefighters – if people worked all weekend they would come in on Monday morning and everyone would celebrate all the hard work they did. If you are going to reward firefighters then you are going to get a lot of fires so we had to look at changing the culture – the relationship in the whole company. I believe that you cannot change culture: You can wait around for 100 years for the culture to change or you can bring in a new culture.
One of the first things I did was to bring in new people. The staff I had were working very hard, but they weren’t working very smart – a lot of times people were in the wrong roles. We set aside a team of people to work on “quick wins and fixing things” – working on root causes. The same people who were doing development work were also supporting the business and putting out the fires so everything was always late. We put aside a few people just to focus on stabilizing the environment before thinking of innovation & projects.
We then started looking at how to get the business to trust us more. We put together a team of people focused on quick wins and had IT staff sit within the departments, observe, and at the end of the week, come back with suggestions on how things could be done better. A lot of times these were things that might take three to ten days to fix, but the business would never even ask us because they would always be told that there were too many other things on the priority list. Tackling things that affected people on a day to day basis started turning around the perception of the technology team showing that we could deliver and understand what the issues were.
High: I know you are passionate about and cognizant of the fact that IT leaders and IT teams tend not to be very good marketers of their accomplishments. You believe successes should be celebrated/marketed across the organization so the reputation heads in the right direction. Can you talk a bit about your methods?
Cousins: My senior team and I focused on the “marketing of IT.” Back to basics: Product, Price, Place and Promotion.
- Product: Understanding what the product was you were offering: Are we offering a product that the business even wants? What are we trying to do? Are we really understanding what their issues are? This can be at a very high level.
- Price: Are we offering at a price that they can afford? If you come up with solutions the business can’t afford to pay for or don’t make sense then it is not a good solution. We were a build versus buy so we had to turn around the whole emphasis to buy versus build. We had to look at cheaper way to do things like outsourcing partners. Just that one area led to us being able to deliver in a much cheaper way.
- Place: Are we offering things the correct way? Are we offering them to the departments that really need them? Are we offering the right type of information? We have different type users – some needed high level reports, others needed more data to manipulate.
- Promotion: I think it is very important that as we had these successes that we celebrated them. We celebrated them internally but not as IT successes, as a combination. We had a business sponsor for all our projects and celebrated those. We also looked for areas where we could promote what we did outside: Anytime there were awards, we would write up for them. We tried to get some recognition for the company and once that was achieved, it made everybody proud to be a part of Lincoln Trust and the team.
High: CIOs who are on boards of their own company or outside boards are still a rare, although growing, phenomenon. Can you reflect on your journey to becoming a board member and some of the things you lend your company as an IT Executive that rounds out the perspectives of the board?
Cousins: I am on the board at Lincoln Trust because our CEO recognizes the importance of technology and how it can enable both revenue generation and cost reductions. We are also a very close knit Executive team – we work as partners on everything; everything is a joint project.
I believe there should be more CIOs on boards. IT is usually one of the larger expense items in a business and with new technologies being introduced all the time, it is imperative that any business ensures their board understands that IT and technology could be a very strong catalyst for innovation.
High: Do you have any thoughts, especially now that you are counseling other CIOs, as to what sorts of things CIOs might do in order to increase their chances of becoming board level CIOs?
Cousins: It is very important that you really have a passion for the business you are in – if you do what you love, you are going to be successful. I think it is important that you understand the business, speak business terms, talk business value and not IT value. It is not important to report to an executive team (whose systems are up 99% of the time) when a customer says they couldn’t log into a system – you really have to see what matters to the business.
High: It strikes me the degree to which you have a clear and deep understanding of business operations and marketing basics and can translate that to terms both IT and the rest of the organization will understand. Perhaps, a reason why other IT executives tend not to rise to board level is that they speak a different language, have a different skill set or simply don’t understand what it is like to run a P&L and translate those things from an IT lens back to that of the business. Is that a fair assessment?
Cousins: What helped us a lot at Lincoln Trust was going through the BPM program. We brought in tools that allowed the business to map out their processes so we had a common language. A lot of times some of the solutions weren’t even technology solutions so putting the right tools in the hands of the business and allowing them to control their processes helped us very much. The efficiencies our BPM program created were so successful, our largest competitor purchased our technology, the staff and the line of business that it supported. Lincoln is now a leading provider of trust and custodial services with an open architecture for 401k plans.
I also feel very strongly that you are only as successful as your team is. I have been very proud to have a fantastic team especially at Lincoln Trust – if you have a good team that understands business, you can do amazing things.
High: In light of the divestiture of many sides of Lincoln Trust, you advise other CIOs. Obviously the nature of those conversations are confidential, but now that you have a great network of IT leaders, are getting into the knitting of specific plans and strategies and assisting and consulting to CIOs, what perspectives do you have about the evolution of the role, where it stands now and where it is going?
Cousins: I just sit on the board of Lincoln Trust which gives me time, in my semi-retirement, to look at what I will do next. I am working on coaching and mentoring the next generations of leaders coming up and one of the amazing things I find is the problems are still the same: How do I deal with the business? How do I prioritize my projects? Why don’t they understand me? How do I get funding? I talk about a variety of things – marketing of IT, good change management and showing business value instead of IT value. A lot of times, it is just the way IT departments report: What are they reporting? Is what they report actionable? If not, then they probably shouldn’t be reporting it. I try to get them to talk in more business terms.
I am coaching people in some very large organizations where it is harder to get direct contact with the external customer. I teach them how to collaborate with each other and become a team, not really thinking of themselves as IT people. If I ask somebody what they do, they should tell me that they are doing something their company does, not that they code or are database administrators.
High: Are there any technology or business trends that you find particularly exciting and remaining abreast of in terms of their adoption into companies or even pushing for their adoption yourself?
Cousins: The big things that everybody talks about – cloud & mobile are what a lot of companies are struggling with. I talk to a lot of people about how to put applications in the cloud safely, trying to get them through analyzing risk and presenting that to their organizations to get approval for projects. I certainly believe that that’s the way of the future.
Peter High is the President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs, and the moderator of the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. To read his series on CIO-pluses, visit this link. To read his series profiling CIOs who have risen beyond that role, visit this link. Follow him on Twitter @WorldClassIT.
