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CIO is the seventh title Ramon Richards has held at Fannie Mae, a number one supply of financing for mortgages within the US. The newest promotion got here in August 2021 for Richards, who’s in his twenty third 12 months with the corporate.
I lately spoke with Richards to be taught concerning the expertise and enterprise transformation underneath method at Fannie Mae, and to get his perspective on the way forward for the CIO function. What follows is an edited model of our interview.
Martha Heller: What’s Fannie Mae’s digital transformation?
Ramon Richards: Our purpose as an organization is to ship mortgage options that enhance the lives of debtors and renters. This implies remodeling our expertise, processes, expertise setting, and the best way we ship new options. Key to the digital transformation has been maturing our use of agile improvement, increasing agile past simply software program supply, migrating our expertise belongings to the cloud, and automating our software program pipeline by way of steady integration and deployment (CI/CD).
When the pandemic began, unemployment shortly jumped as much as round 14.7%. Our purpose as an organization was to assist renters and householders hold their houses. So, we shortly deployed a brand new fee deferral exercise answer. By leveraging our mature agile processes, we had been in a position to ship that functionality loads sooner than previously, and serve a vital want for the nation.
One other instance is the lender’s means to make use of rental fee historical past as a part of the credit score danger evaluation course of by way of Fannie Mae’s automated underwriting system to find out if a borrower is eligible. That is now an automatic course of that we’re in a position to ship shortly due to our information platforms and our CI/CD supply.
How would you educate a CEO on CI/CD?
I might begin with the enterprise consequence and the necessity for the software program to be top quality with no errors as soon as we’re in manufacturing. I might clarify that CI/CD permits our software program to go by way of automated checkpoints which assist decide if the answer is assembly the best controls and cybersecurity necessities. I might add that CI/CD permits us to make sure resiliency and extra non-functional necessities, similar to reliability, efficiency, and maintainability, are included proper into the product.
What was vital in your journey to agile improvement and CI/CD?
Our digital and expertise groups had been entrance and heart as we talked about how you can modernize our expertise setting in order that we might ship extra for lenders, householders, and renters. We talked about the necessity to put money into a brand new “one workforce” construction to higher combine expertise with our enterprise capabilities, and to encourage extra collaboration.
We additionally mentioned the significance of empowerment. If we convey a cross-functional group of individuals collectively in an agile workforce with a standard purpose, and provides them possession of the whole product supply life cycle, they are going to be motivated to construct the best answer with the best consequence.
Empowerment occurs once you transfer up the agile maturity curve. As soon as a workforce that’s working collectively on a standard purpose with an everyday cadence of characteristic supply will get just a few wins, then the workforce trusts the method, and administration trusts the groups. That’s once you get empowerment.
“Testing and studying” has additionally been an vital idea for us. We can not know that each concept would be the proper one, so we at the moment are structured to do the best proofs of idea with the best pilots and suggestions loops.
How do you measure the success of the agile groups?
After we had finalized our target-state CI/CD software program pipeline we set quarterly and annual aims for the speed of latest releases throughout all of our agile groups.
This allowed us to see which phases of the event course of had been slowing us down, in order that we might establish conflicts and highway blocks. After we eliminated these highway blocks and began to choose up the tempo, we tightened our subsequent quarterly purpose.
How have you ever saved the enterprise engaged by way of the digital transformation?
This digital transformation, which is to supply modern options to resolve America’s greatest housing challenges, is a enterprise transformation. This isn’t expertise “doing one thing” to the enterprise.
All of it comes right down to the “one workforce” mannequin. The product leaders come from the enterprise and lead cross-functional groups, so they’re engaged. Our enterprise companions are on our steering committees and assist work by way of our progress and challenges, so they’re engaged.
For a lot of the initiatives that fall underneath the transformation umbrella, our enterprise leaders are on the desk from an oversight perspective. So, the product chief is on the bottom executing, with enterprise management offering oversight on how we’re monitoring in opposition to our objectives, what obstacles we face, and what trade-off selections we have to make. And finally, we report on our progress to our administration committee, in addition to our board.
How is the CIO function evolving?
Right now, my obligations embrace Fannie Mae’s expertise belongings, cybersecurity, our enterprise information belongings, and implementation of our digital options.
I’m additionally on Fannie Mae’s administration committee, which displays the very important significance of knowledge safety to our enterprise, in addition to the significance of digital transformation to the way forward for our enterprise.
The CIO function will evolve to play a fair higher half in creating an agile mindset and setting. For a very long time, agile has been about altering the best way product and expertise supply groups function. However once we begin to have a look at the place our processes decelerate and the place there are alternatives for effectivity, it comes again to increasing our agile method of working and considering throughout the enterprise. The CIO function is vital to the event of an agile company tradition.
The CIO additionally performs an vital function in guaranteeing that our cybersecurity priorities are understood and accepted by our enterprise companions. This implies the CIO of the long run will spend much more time on schooling and danger administration than immediately.
What’s ahead considering immediately is legacy tomorrow, so the CIO has to interact in steady schooling, innovation, and constructing a workforce that brings new concepts to the desk.
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