I'm a chief information officer for a Fortune 1000 company and one of the largest regional banks in our country. I've taken a non-intuitive pact to my role as chief information officer. I graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in economics, both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree. I knew to be in banking was really something that I found purposeful so I intentionally pursued a career in banking and took the first opportunity, which was in information technology. I knew nothing about information technology audit, but I knew I wanted to be in banking and I knew my background in economics could serve me. What started then over 20 years ago was a lot of self-study in technology, so I could be effective in examining how technology deployments were working. It was a focus on leadership and on understanding how it is and processes connected that enabled me to start out of school 21 years old and every year, and so be promoted. And eventually, at the age of 28, I moved to San Francisco as the senior auditor director, senior vice president of technology and operations auditor at Wells Fargo. That was a fast path when I look back on my experience that then shifted to take on some risk related roles brought me back to Salt Lake City as a chief auditor for Zions Bancorporation. Then because of my leadership background, I was asked to head up operations for about four years and because of the success that I had there along with my team I was asked to be the chief information officer 4.5 years ago.

These last few months have been quite different than what normal looks like and I've had experiences in the past few months that have been quite defining. So let me talk about what normal looks like and then I can highlight what these past few months have looked like during a pandemic during a lot of economic uncertainty and due to just social upheaval. Day to day I'm looking at how to align the 2000 plus people in my organization to our strategy, the company's strategy, and that includes actively working on a digital strategy technology strategy overall and ensuring that we've got resources aligned to execute it. That's a key component but that maybe takes 30% of my time. I'm also running an organization that processes $8 billion dollar transactions and payments every single night. So we have to make sure for our customers that those transactions are processing accurately and securely that our customer's information is protected. I spend a lot of time on our cybersecurity protocols and the governance around that to make sure that we are safe. I also spend a lot of time focused on supporting the development of culture and my team. In fact, that's one of the most important elements because everything I just described before couldn't happen without them so it's making few decisions on where we spend money at. Creating a technology strategy that complemented in alignment with a company strategy since objectives. Making sure we have the right technology that can skill to support that strategy that our customer's experience in our digital channels will meet their expectations. It's managing the aligning 2000 plus people towards that strategy. It's not just the strategy it's also on our commitments day to day around operational excellence. We process over 8 billion dollars in payments every single night that means that we have to have a highly resilient technology environment. We have passed solid processes and operations and we have to have all the processes around that to support, whether it's monitoring system availability or reconciliation practices. Another key area and one of the most important elements of my jobs is managing culture and creating culture or allowing culture to unfold that supports what we're trying to do in our communities and also to support the execution of our strategies. So how does that actually look in the last few months? back in March, it looked like getting the entire company positioned to work at home and 48 hours taking the capability of having 1500 people in the company that could work at home to 8000 or 80% of our employees to work at home. That included making sure that we have the right authentication practices in place it included the foresight of knowing how to scale our network. From years ago planning to skill our environment so we could support this kind of capacity growth. We had that rolled out, fortunately a lot of collaboration tools that we had to move more quickly on and make sure they were in everybody's hands. We had to get devices in people's hands so they could take those home, amazing work to happen in 48 hours. Then a few weeks later, we were challenged to deliver a new digital product for the paycheck protection program administered by the Small Business Administration so that millions across the country who were suffering during this time could have access to the paycheck protection program funds. We had to stand up for a digital product solution in eight days! which is unheard of. So we gave agile development a whole new meaning actually, I don't want to do that again, but fortunately, would make the investments in our automation platforms and our integration PI platforms in outsource environments and workflow tools that allowed us to move really quickly. That was 24/7 work for a few weeks for many of our team members. And then in the last few weeks, in my role as an executive in our company I've had the responsibility to help make sense of what we were going through and helping our team members who were feeling exhausted, hurt, and in pain. Move forward to acknowledge what that pain was like. So we had a lot of work still to do. To build an organization where everybody feels like they belong, voices are heard, and opportunities are equal. So the last few months have been quite challenging and throw on that earthquake that we had to respond to and make sure all over systems were resilient, and able to continue to operate. Normally, my work has some surprises every few months, but not every few days at that kind of agility is important in this role. We had a lot of people who are accustomed to working at home and it pushed us to understand that many more who never had actually supported working at home because in the past they were to paper-based processes that required being in the office. So we created these habits of assuming they had to be in the office but because we have digitized so much and some of those jobs were rather and the problem set that many are working on every day is very similar. So it actually wasn't too hard to shift those teams to work at home that was in operations its more of a cultural shift for us. Now we're all trying to figure out how we entice people to come back into the office so we can innovate and how those hallway conversations are so important to allow us to see what magic can happen in this kind of space between us.

The challenges are on focus, and focus is really the art of deciding what you're not going to do as you move forward. I have a lot of priorities and I get to choose to focus on about 20% of them. That is the most challenging aspect of my job, sifting through what's important and it is critical. How I think that's important and maybe how students can think about that themselves is, we are operating in an environment today where information is coming at us not stop. We have sources of data, the amount of data you're all aware of that it's in the next 18 months will have produced more than that has been produced up until this point in the history of mankind. So those are the kinds of things we have to sort through. So it's very important to stop filtering what's coming in and being able to put boundaries around what's coming in but making sure that you're not limiting the critical information or diverse thought and opinion that's coming in. Then what I find very important in that prioritization process is what you choose to do, do it exceptionally well and that work then looks like when you've sliced down to 20% that you can work on what it appears, how it shows up is you've actually focused on the most important items and so it's not a matter of you've got 80% of what was most critical completed. So that prioritization is quite critical in my role that also includes discerning risk and where things can break out. In the technology environment there are a lot of things you can chase after. There are a lot of right and shiny objects and they're fantastic ideas. Being able to understand how what we're pursuing aligns with exactly what a customer wants helps us discern what we want to focus on as well.