CAR Financial CIO on new ways for IT to create value

One of the seismic shifts underway in enterprise technology involves a growing number of business units taking on IT-related tasks independent of the IT team. Increasingly, software tools are being designed for non-IT professionals to gather their own insights from data and serve their own customers. 

While this shift demands adjustments within an organization's processes and structures, it can also create opportunities for CIOs to redefine their team's value and purpose. CAR Financial Services, a unit of CompuCredit Corp. in Atlanta, uses a technology from Pagos Inc. that allows business units to quickly convert spreadsheets into database-driven applications that can be accessed by their customers via a browser. In an interview with FierceCIO, CAR Financial CIO Kas Naderi talks about the evolving role of his IT organization and new ways to create value as some IT-related tasks migrate to non-IT professionals.

FierceCIO: Can you give us a brief description of the services your company provides?

Kas Naderi: We provide auto dealers with the ability to price a loan with us. We buy existing loans and service those loans. What we do is no different from what is done to your home mortgage, which probably changes hands a few times, except we do it with automotive loans. 

The challenge dealers have is that when they originate a loan they don't know if they can sell it or not sell it. The price changes based on a lot of indicators in the market. Wouldn't it be valuable for a dealer to see that in real time through a portal? [With our service], dealers in can go into a website and assess what they are going to get for this loan in the secondary market. They can assess the risk of the loan before they finalize it with the consumer. The business opportunity for us has to do with providing a real-time assessment of what an asset--a loan--could be worth. 

FCIO: How has the role of the IT group at your company evolved in recent years?  

Naderi: We have come to grips, over the past four or five years, with the idea that our value proposition is to commoditize the technology pieces that can be commoditized. We believe there is minimal value in worrying about documenting requirements that can be captured by subject matter experts. Wherever possible, we think our role is to create value where off-the-shelf products cannot create the value. We are a very business-driven IT team. 

FCIO: Can you offer some examples of technology tasks that are being commoditized?

Naderi: Watching a server run, or making sure patches are up-to-date. I'm a big believer in the idea that as you start paring down and removing the commodities from your daily tasks, you can become more agile. 

FCIO: What about some examples of creating value where off-the-shelf products can't?

Naderi: One of the key areas that we focus on is how to develop more sophisticated lending instruments that support our dealer community. That's an area where it is essential to understand our business--such as how debits and credits work, how risk processes work--and it's an area where we can create value. Having the ability to create customer score cards that allow us to price an opportunity more accurately than our competitors can, that creates value. Being able to look at cost of ownership and try to minimize operational cost and workflow processes, that creates value. 

FCIO: What technologies have you deployed that empower the business units at your company?

Naderi: We wanted to create a web portal to provide real-time information for our dealers. Putting a portal together is a relatively easy function now, but the part that becomes complex is the interaction between developers, business analysts and subject matter experts. 

Before, all the web-facing functions and services typically required collaboration between the information technology team and the business units to address redundancy, security, and programming business unit logic. We use a tool that kind of bypasses a lot of those steps. We don't have to worry about millions of hits, so for the size of the dealer market that we interface with, this is an ideal tool to give the business units autonomy. We're all trying to push autonomy and control to our customers.

Our business units use a simple Excel spreadsheet to play around with formulas, and [with SpreadsheetWEB from Pagos] they very quickly turn around and deploy changes without the help of IT staff. That capability gave us a time-to-market advantage that we never could achieve before. The dealer community has no insight that this is a simple Excel spreadsheet behind the scenes. This is truly a web portal. 

FCIO: What kind of training was necessary for your business units?

Naderi: The beauty of this tool was how little training was necessary. Once we had the spreadsheet, making it a web-enabled application took a matter of days. Once we set it up, the user community had to go through a very easy interface.  

FCIO: What kinds of changes are taking place in your group as a result of more non-IT professionals becoming adept at using information technology?

Naderi: We are shifting to capture greater understanding about our business and our customer. We want to anticipate their needs rather than solve problems that, quite frankly, can be solved by others. We have realigned our information technology organization. We have aligned ourselves with our business units. Our IT professionals are now becoming thought leaders versus order takers. 

We clearly are moving toward more focus on program management, business analysis, workflow analysis, and business processes optimization than your day-to-day block and tackling of technology. But don't get me wrong, we still have a long way to go. We still have a good portion of our team focused on block and tackling, but even if your role is to be a Unix administrator, you have to understand the business cycle. Even at the lowest level of technology, which may be a disk defragmentation task, we insist that those individuals understand the business cycles and schedule their events so that impacts will be minimized. We're not becoming business IT folks, but we are IT folks who understand the business.

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