ARN

The Grill: Catherine P. Bessant

Two years ago, Catherine P. Bessant was tapped to lead Bank of America's Global Technology and Operations (GT&O) group, which has more than 100,000 staffers and contractors in 40 countries. Here Bessant talks about leading a tech group that includes five CIOs as direct reports, the importance of employee diversity, and how relying too much on third parties for IT services can backfire.

You came into an IT leadership position from the business side. Was it a hard transition? I was helped by the fact that I've been a part of most of the businesses we serve. I came to the field having had a fair amount of experience using the technology.

What has been one of your most effective projects? After a lot of planning over many years, we're in the final stages of transitioning our California and Northwest regions' core banking systems into the model platform used by the company so that we have a single, core banking platform across the U.S. We retired 11,000 different batch jobs that ran daily and decommissioned 110 obsolete applications.

To continue reading, register here to become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Nominations for the 2012 ARN IT Industry Awards open on Tuesday, June 12.

More about: etwork, Technology
References show all

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the ARN comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: Bank of America, CIO role, finance, financial services, freemium, industry verticals, IT Leadership, it management, Management and Careers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to ARN's news, research and invitation only events.
ARN Distributor Directory
Find distributors by name | vendor | location
Channel Deals
/deals/aca-pacific/441_tape-media-and-imation-dataguard-t5r-reseller-
ACA Pacific

Tape Media and Imation DataGuard T5R Reseller Promotion. Ends June 30, 2012

More details »
ARN Vendor Directory
Find vendors by name | category

iAsset is a channel management ecosystem that automates all major aspects of the entire sales,marketing and service process, including data tracking, integrated learning, knowledge management and product lifecycle management.