To deliver value, a given business service must be highly reliable. What are the challenges to reliability? And, if reliability is based on broad accessibility, guaranteed continuity, and high performance – aren’t those all dependent on IT? If IT is driving reliability, who is accountable, IT or Business? Shouldn’t IT share accountability?

Contributor

• • Rob Reeg, President, Global Technology and Operations, MasterCard World Wide

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:00]:
Good morning and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. Today’s topic is Should IT Drive Business Service Reliability? And our guest for today’s show is Rob Reeg, who’s the President for Global Technology And Operations for MasterCard Worldwide. Good morning, Rob.

Rob Reeg [00:00:19]:
Good morning to Sanjog.  Nice to be here. How are you sir?

Sanjog Aul [00:00:22]:
How’s it going?

Rob Reeg [00:00:23]:
Going very well.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:24]:
So the life and the work and the economy, everything going in your favor?

Rob Reeg [00:00:29]:
We’d like to see the economy continue to pick up and see those unemployment numbers go down, but so far so good.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:35]:
Very good. So now in this day and age, when you hold such like a responsible title of handling the technology and operations for a company like MasterCard, it definitely is a serious role to be wearing at all times and the responsibility. So how is that coming along?

Rob Reeg [00:00:52]:
It really is an interesting role because you’re such a globally diverse. We’re such a globally diverse company. The fact that we operate in over 200 countries around the world and doing the transaction processing for 25,000 financial institutions gives us a scale that we operate on that’s pretty significant.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:13]:
So when your business, when somebody goes and tries to be at a dinner table or buying something for their wives or whatever they’re doing in terms of shopping and they give their MasterCard and it does not work, what are the ripple effects besides the person not being as happy there?

Rob Reeg [00:01:29]:
And that’s the whole premise on how we look at service reliability because our take join that card should work every time, no matter where they are. That giving that customer that expectation that when they see that MasterCard decal on the outside of the store, they know they can go in there and it’s going to work. It’s really tied to our whole mindset around service reliability. Concept in the end, in the card industry, payments industry, it’s called top-up wallet and when someone goes to a store or restaurant or any other place and makes a payment, if that card doesn’t work, there’s a tendency for that card to go down in order of the wallet and our goal is always to make MasterCard top of wallet.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:26]:
So with that being said, yes, technology does play a role where a card should work every time but then again, we know that garbage in, garbage out when we even brought computers out and people who manage it is what makes IT what IT is in different companies. That’s why most companies, many companies may have IT not as working as well versus others. They’re doing phenomenally good job and then we talk about business processes which make sure that when the card of course works, but then you do not get late charges or you are taken care of in terms of as a customer and how suppose your card gets locked and you have to get an immediate replacement. How is that done? So all that is included.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:04]:
So you got people, process and technology where technology is more of an enabler or automating a manual process which otherwise would have been a manual process. So do you think technology should really be the one which should be either blamed and or be the driver because it is a business and the people and the processes which are making a difference here?

Rob Reeg [00:03:21]:
I agree with where you’re going with that. I think it has to be that combination of people, process and technology. I think where people tend to get in trouble is when they over rely on any of one of those three. If you’re over reliant on people to make hook work and any kind of change you may have in your staff or working person for you wins the lottery and leave, then you put yourself and your company’s business processes at risk. So I think it’s really how you look at those three things and leverage process people and technology to get the best service reliability.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:03]:
Now different companies have different challenges. Would you say that it is a different mic which is going to be based on different companies is what is going to change their strategy of how someone would rely on technology more versus another. So would you say in your case is technology the driver or should be the driver given that it’s so technology centric, it’s all information flowing back and forth.

Rob Reeg [00:04:26]:
There’s definitely a large part of it driven by technology in the payments business. Just because like you said, the electronification of payments continues to grow and grow. I do think the where you have to look at and make sure you’re solving service reliability as for the business is how you balance cost and quality. I mean there are still areas in the world where a pure six sigma approach may not be the right solution for that particular area. So I think you do have to balance what’s the required, the necessary, the best service level you’re going to provide at the right cost.

Sanjog Aul [00:05:13]:
How much are we totally in this day and age when we are so externally hendrick in the sense like we have to have a partner network, we have to have people who are going to be handling those credit card machine the last mile challenge, if you will. How much is our success and or failure dependent on those people who may, we may or may not have influence on and if we don’t have as much influence. What can you do as an IT leader or your crew can do to mitigate such risk?

Rob Reeg [00:05:40]:
I think that’s the interesting challenge in the model that we operate in. It is a hand in glove environment between the issuers of card payment cards, the network providing the transmission and the acquiring banks who support the merchant end to end and without all those different parties working together, you do potentially impact the overall quality of transaction. The good thing is in our environment we’ve been doing this with our bank and financial institution partners for a long time and those processes and the way things are worked and defined are very well known and orchestrated.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:24]:
So would you say then a merchant at like, the shop and they the card is not working for whatever reason, would you be the scapegoat by default?

Rob Reeg [00:06:35]:
I can’t say for in particular without knowing the situation. I think there are times when it’s just easier for store to say do you have another card as a default, sir? Especially in the US where almost everyone carries multiple payment cards. That again points back to we gotta provide a solution that hopefully keeps that question from being answered so that MasterCard stays at top of wallet.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:05]:
You’re a business leader. What is your, what is the expectation that they bring to you?

Rob Reeg [00:07:12]:
The expectation is that MasterCard, the way we look at IT, IT is part of the business, business leaders having an expectation. IT has to have the mindset that we are part of the business and part of driving those business solutions and opportunities. I think that’s an interesting thing. When there’s obviously a lot of commentary writing about business IT alignment. I think to a certain extent that almost a self perpetuating fallacy because if you’re not in IT and you’re not thinking yourself as part of the business, then you’ve got the wrong mindset.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:52]:
Now if you were to really look at the resource constraints and IT has to do more with less and sometimes people start joking that you have to do more with nothing. So, it’s typically the way the world has been at least in the last couple of years. So when it happens as a resource constraint and then you got somebody hammering saying that I need the quality, I need the customer satisfaction, I need everything but the kitchen sink and I do not have enough funds to give you. So what does that do in terms of your service reliability? Would you compromise it or would you just lay the cards on the table and say hey, if you don’t give me the money, I cannot give you the reliability but then they say you’re fired.

Rob Reeg [00:08:27]:
We take very much on project that come in. We work with part of the business team to assess what is the risk of that project and we make a conscious decision. This is the level of service we expect to get and that’s different depending on if we’re doing this a proof of concept or a pilot just to see if it’s going to work versus something we’re going to institutionalize and make part of our overall MasterCard family of product. The right answer there is to work up front as part of the overall team defining this product and set the characteristics accordingly. If there’s not money to do a project that is institutional and part of core fabric, then that risk needs to be identified and discussed and make sure everybody’s on board with how we’re going to deal with that. That’s something that we would tend not to have a good solution there

Rob Reeg [00:09:37]:
is a point on to your earlier comment to do more with less. I think that’s a valid expectation for companies to have of IT as part of the business. As technology improves, as you improve business processes every year, as you improve how you bring employees on board and the mindset that they take with them, there ought to be an expectation that we can do more with less.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:07]:
So when we are talking about the disruption and disruptions not only like something which was off for two seconds or if it is extended, then what is the answer given or what can be the best way to sustain the business and or maintain the customer goodwill while going about solving the problem. It’s more like crisis management at the same time, a customer expectation management, all to be done at the same time. So what do you need? Who do you need besides you and what do you need to make that.

Rob Reeg [00:10:39]:
Again, that’s something where IT has to be considered part of the business to really make that work effectively. In my experience, thinking back in the past, where there have been situation even prior coming to MasterCard where things didn’t go exactly right and that’s going to happen anytime you’ve got a machine or a processor or person involved, there’s always something that can. I can go south on you but when you look at things that have happened, the way it was handled, the way it was communicated, always seems to jump to the forefront. So if you’re dealing with your customers up front and having established good communication mechanisms prior to anything not working as planned, you’re much better off than if you’re trying to reach them for the first time during a crisis.

Sanjog Aul [00:11:39]:
Let’s take a quick break. We’ll be right back after these messages and extend this conversation because the way the crisis happens and the people who are involved in the crisis, they all have to get together and can we have a pull the plug test of some things which is truly a crisis which is beyond our control and every time we will see a new flavor. How does IT Leader and how does IT crew come together and make sure that every time something like this happens, they come out as successful heroes who made the crisis go away and destroy themselves. Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:15:06]:
Welcome back. So we’ll continue our discussion about the level of extended issues that we will face in case when there is a crisis and then we have to have a crew and everybody else come together and then there would be people who may not be reporting to IT, but they’re also going to be required to solve that crisis. So what is that influence management or what is that business process and or people management that needs to be there in order for us to bring that reliability back?

Rob Reeg [00:15:39]:
The when you look at some of the recent catastrophes with Haiti and Chile and Turkey the last few days, the situation that occurs from financial services perspective and there are people there who are trying to make payments, get out of hotel, get flights, all those kind of things. So again we’ve got to be in a physician where we’re helping them, making sure those transactions are going through. I think that sometimes catches people is that we don’t, we haven’t had the foresight and for that worst case situation. So when we go to just the very basics of the infrastructure on a payment network, it goes around the network itself. So how have we designed and built the network to provide just redundancies, ensure those transactions are being processed. In our case we have this concept around tri dundancy because again those kind of situations we’re trying to do everything we can to help MasterCard cardholder get done what they need done.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:00]:
Now with respect to your service reliability issues in your company or any other company, we also know that there are some time bombs that we sit on in many cases and it’s not something that somebody does intentionally. Equipments degrade over time and you would have people turn over. There could be cultural changes that are happening and while you could be the best IT leader with the best IT crew but then since we said that it’s a people process and technology with business involved in it is what constitutes what level of business reliability, service reliability you will experience then this is what is going to be the weakest link or there will be a number of weakest links you may not know about and they’re time bound. So what is that IT can do to bring them to the surface proactively and timely so that we do not see these time bombs blowing on us?

Rob Reeg [00:17:53]:
Sanjog, you’re right. Anytime you have a solution that involves people, processes and machines, there’s always chances for failure. So having that mindset going in, culturally looking at, we’re here to provide that 100% reliable solution and in the case there is an issue that we have those escalation plans, those project management plans that can be kicked off immediately as part of the overall business solution to get service restored. One of the keys around that, because we do operate globally, a very diverse environment, is the vendor partner collection process. So we take that very seriously about who we use as our key partners in providing the service because they have to have that same mindset as well.

Sanjog Aul [00:18:56]:
Now disruptions are the enemies of service reliability. So disruptions could be a healthy disruption, which is that you had M&A, so you acquired a company and then you could have these disasters that you spoke about. Is your strategy leveraging IT, people, processes, other business unit leaders and their respective crew coming together. Is your strategy changed when it’s a healthy disruption versus it’s a disaster?

Rob Reeg [00:19:24]:
Again, when we look at acquisition, we make an assessment on where we think that acquisition is on the continuum of reliability and service and again, like you talked about earlier, not all. It’s not a one, it can’t be a one size fits all solution. Each business has its own unique requirements and expectations. I think it’s making that assessment up front early in the M&A analysis, due diligence process. It helps you understand how well they’re supporting the customers they have today before you buy them.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:04]:
Who drives reliability in such cases? M&A is that a business knows that there may be a degradation for a little bit.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:11]:
Will we come back up?

Rob Reeg [00:20:12]:
We’ll definitely make that assessment. So in MasterCard’s case, our due diligence team are composed of financial experts, M&A lead people from that run that type of business or that area of the business from the company, as well as one integrated team doing that due diligence effort.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:35]:
Now, in terms of we spoke about catastrophic events and we saw terrorist threats

Sanjog Aul [00:20:40]:
et cetera.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:41]:
Can we truly insulate ourselves? Does the customer understand that my credit card stopped working because there was turbulence in other part of the world?

Rob Reeg [00:20:52]:
I don’t think from a cardholder perspective they necessarily care what caused the disruption and it’s our responsibility to manage any disruption or minimize any disruption to make sure that their business needs are satisfied. In the payments industry, again, there are plenty of bad guys out there always trying to do things with fraud, hosting events, disrupt the business. So one of mastercard’s larger investments always is how do we stay ahead of those people who have bad end games in mind?

Sanjog Aul [00:21:34]:
So how do you get that paranoia out of somebody’s head?

Rob Reeg [00:21:38]:
I don’t know that I want that paranoia out of the head of the people who are thinking about that MasterCard. I want a certain level a paranoia that there’s someone trying to do something that we don’t want done and how do we stop them from doing that? From the cardholder perspective, our goal is to not have to have them think about it at all and their card always work.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:01]:
So that trust what is specifically done from a business standpoint, from IT standpoint, by looking at trends, yes, you would do do your investigative work and yes, you will put some of those checks in place but then thieves are almost always ahead of the cops. So you have to play some catch up. What do you do so that the trust is maintained?

Rob Reeg [00:22:20]:
That’s the key, is making sure we don’t break that trust. You’ll go back to the whole concept again of top of wallet where your payment vehicle ranks with everybody else. There’s almost a point when we talked about service reliability and whether it can be a differentiator or not in this case in the payment arena, how well fraud and things like that are handled in the service differentiator.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:49]:
So if you are as an IT leader and of course your department, which is touching almost every part of the organization, it has the potential to make a positive difference but then you could also be at the same time very liable for, or you can be blamed for anything that goes wrong also. So is an IT leader supposed to be a politician and a lawyer or a negotiator in order to be able to fend those blames off so that they can continue doing their job, because people will be trying to use that as an opportunity. We live in a world where we are human beings still.

Rob Reeg [00:23:27]:
I don’t quite look at it that way. I look at it more. You have to be a business leader and if you’re not thinking of IT as integral to the business, that’s part of the business and you probably do end up getting a situation where you’re trying to either justify things or explain things away. To me, it’s not productive. You’re much better off establishing IT as part of the business, integral to the business and part of the decision making process. That doesn’t have to be a focus for your day to day job.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:09]:
Now coming to the specific areas where you measure and or improve service reliability so it’s accessibility, continuity and performance. So these are different areas and they have got related expectations that are set by you for your customers or they create expectations for themselves. How, what is your upfront due diligence and or what’s your upfront effort to know more about those areas because what you don’t know much about you cannot measure and what you cannot measure, you cannot improve.

Rob Reeg [00:24:41]:
I agree with you. At Fanta, I have a boss in my past who that was always his mantra, you can’t fix this, you can’t measure it. So I think that’s you’re absolutely right. Going into any kind of new business, new opportunity, new geographic location, you have to be part of the business decision process to define what level of service we’re going to provide as we go in there. Again, if it’s a proof of concept or a pilot or a limited introduction that may have an initial level of service that would be have to be enhanced if you rolled it out more broadly.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:25]:
So with respect to each one of those, if you were to take one at a time, when we say accessibility, what is in your view, maybe perhaps also in MasterCard, but other companies that you may have worked with, what is understood and or how is accessibility defined in the sense that you are able to then measure it and then further work towards as a continuous pursuit towards improving it?

Rob Reeg [00:25:46]:
It’s an interesting, in this environment, payment arena, a lot of the growth that you see is in geographic locations or emerging markets. So a lot of what we do from an investment standpoint is making our services accessible and available in markets that don’t necessarily have high volumes at this point, but we anticipate them growing significantly. So one of our more recent investments is in satellite connectivity for parts of Africa. We see that as a great emerging market, lots of potential as people become more and more banked and more have higher expectations of being able to be supported by payment, electronic payment, and doing that has us investing in technology that you wouldn’t have a one year return on investment but it’s something we believe is the right thing to do and will set us up to really help those areas jump into this technology as soon as they’re ready.

Sanjog Aul [00:27:02]:
With respect to the continuity, how do you see the company, any company for that matter, if they have to maintain continuity yet we do our business continuity exercises and disaster recovery but is that something done without recognizing the needs as much or what is that upfront work that needs to be performed for us to say let’s look at the continuity aspect?

Rob Reeg [00:27:23]:
We’ll start on any kind of new effort up front looking at the different levels of continuity that needs to be provided. In some cases, we may say up front we want this to be in a co processing environment right from the very start. It’s not a continuity discussion. It’s about how many nodes we’re going to set up that are processing all at the same time. So if any one node goes down, there’s no, absolutely no interruption service. I think again, it being part of that business decision, not making a recommendation from an IT standpoint, but being part of the business decision right from the start for and this is a product line, this is a service we’re going to provide that absolutely can never be down. That’s the case and everyone sees that as the way that it’s going to be a differentiated product or a product that’s going to have a higher return on investment, then that’s how we’ll design it from the very start

Rob Reeg [00:28:26]:
and then you may, and again you may have products or projects in limited release proof of concept that we will not invest in a disaster recovery scenario. It may be a we rebuild it if it would ever go down because of the limited introduction and doing that again goes back to the communication to your customer. The customer that may be on that pilot or proof of concept is aware of what the worst case scenario is up front before anything happens in a crisis environment.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:00]:
Lets take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back after these messages and while we spoke about accessibility and continuity, we’ll get on to the performance side but before we go there, how about asking a question or exploring the question, can we truly have a hundred percent business service reliability? Is that a realistic expectation? Is it a tall order? Is it the holy grail that we all strive towards or is it even achievable? Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:32:17]:
Welcome back. So we’ve spoken briefly about accessibility and the continuity aspect of can we and or should we truly promise and or expect 100% continuity and or accessibility? Is that still the holy grail or is it still been achieved or has that been achieved?

Rob Reeg [00:32:36]:
I would still say in most cases, probably still not achievable at the state of where we are, but I think it’s still the ultimate goal and the mindset that we need to create that in cases where the service we’re talking about is core to our business, MasterCard’s case, the network, we want people working on the network to have that expectation. It’s going to be up 100% of the time. In reality, I know that’s not going to be the case, but the expectation needs to be.

Sanjog Aul [00:33:13]:
So does by setting expectation do they just work harder or smarter?

Rob Reeg [00:33:17]:
I think it’s that combination we talked about of people, process and technology and how do we leverage those three legged stool. to get the best result. In the payment industry we process a typical authorization transaction. So that transaction where you swipe your card at the store and it’s delivered to your issuing bank for approval in the MasterCard transmission time is about 142 milliseconds. So a disruption that’s as long as the blink of an eye just impacted three or four transactions. That volume thing you have in the back of your mind too, why disruptions are not tolerated.

Sanjog Aul [00:34:07]:
Now? So what’s your true tolerance versus what has been set on the other stage?

Rob Reeg [00:34:14]:
We monitor on a six sigma basis that’s how we look at mastercard’s overall performance. Billions and billions of transactions that we process through our network every year we take a very deep dive look into anything that causes a transaction not to be satisfied from a cardholder perspective. We talked a little bit earlier about different parts of the model. Whether it’s the financial institutions that mastercard connect to, the merchant clerk at the store that’s actually swiping the card, there are various failure points. So managing those down to the lowest possible level is what gives our cardholder the assurance and builds that trust that anytime, anywhere they’re at where they see that MasterCard decal, they can go in and use their card.

Sanjog Aul [00:35:12]:
Now coming to the performance that is a sometimes a very subjective area to dig into that okay, what do, how do we define performance for any business? You can always say that I could do better. What’s your benchmark?

Rob Reeg [00:35:28]:
I think the again it how we define that service up front as part of the business. So if we’re working with the business as we look at the launch of that new service and we work with as part of that team with the business to define what the expectation of in this case payment card holder may be having that as the one of the key drivers and how we develop, implement like the vendors drive the infrastructure, create the redundancy or continuity. It all has to go together or we’ll miss out on the opportunity in the end.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:13]:
You’re saying you’re rolling up continuity and accessibility as part of performance or you’re still measuring it independently?

Rob Reeg [00:36:19]:
I think you have to look at them an overall perspective otherwise you miss it. From the end customer standpoint, performance in and of itself isn’t going to drive customers behavior.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:38]:
So you’re right about the way we would look at it but when we will solve the problem? You cannot solve the problem if you don’t structure it and put it in pieces because otherwise it’ll be like boiling the ocean we say we are going to take all three at one time and try to solve all of them at the same time.

Rob Reeg [00:36:52]:
Absolutely, again, what I’m saying, you have to define those up front in the definition of this product or service. What we’re going to look for, what are the key characteristics that are going to drive its success and make the parameters that are pushed in front of any kind of vendor solution built solution, the infrastructure we deploy.

Sanjog Aul [00:37:15]:
Are there any unknown or any areas which are not as easy to measure, which play a very important part in the way you are able to establish or not establish business service reliability?

Rob Reeg [00:37:29]:
Especially for a company like MasterCard where we are in many areas of the world emerging have emerging technology. There’s always unknowns associated with in those cases having the right vast recovery, risk monitoring, escalation paths with the customers pre built to try to keep those risks managed. You’re absolutely right there. There’s no way to anticipate everything when you’re going into a brand new geography or a brand new product line.

Sanjog Aul [00:38:07]:
So do you categorize those unknowns and try to see if you can get any better in knowing more about them upfront? If you’ve had a something happened to as an event we told you, oh, this is, these are the three areas that we should look at next time. You do kind of keep building that inventory.

Rob Reeg [00:38:23]:
You have to look at that in terms of making sure you’re solving the problem once, but you’re solving any problem for every other opportunity could hit that same situation. Making sure knowledge you’ve just gained is institutionalized and not like we talked about earlier, embedded in just a person mind, but it’s available to the technology overall as part of the solution.

Sanjog Aul [00:38:54]:
There have been instances when you as a company are trying to give 100% up or 5, 9 type of uptime and you are trying to do that where at some point as a human being who’s taking responsibility of one area of technology and for some reason he or she has a personal issue because of which they’re not in the right mindset. It’s almost like having a designated driver for someone who’s drunk after a party. The person is not truly in the right state of mind, which you do not know upfront but then do you have a backup because your service reliability again is dependent on that individual who even if wants to has the right intent but is not capable at that very moment.

Rob Reeg [00:39:36]:
I think again that’s why you have to look at service reliability. Three legged stool with technology process and people. If you’re over reliant on a person making sure they do the right thing every time, that’s probably an unrealistic expectation but if you have the process of supporting that person hopefully defined correctly, there are safeguards in there that help alleviate the potential at risk that could occur. For example, in our world, one of the things we found is key to keeping processing up and running is how we manage our customers processing parameters that really dictates how a payment transaction is going to be handled. So while we have lots of people who enter those parameters and update those parameters, those rules for our core system, there are safeguards in the process itself that help make sure this is the type of change that’s being made that has a certain level of risk associated with it. It probably requires a second set of eyes just to make sure that everyone’s comfortable with what they put in the system. So those processes linked to the technology linked to the people again drives what kind of reliability you’re going to get out of that overall situation.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:07]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back after these messages and look at the suppliers and or service providers who are also equally important as our own individual organization’s crew in order for us to provide the reliability that we all strive for. So now how do you measure their availability and continuity with respect to whether they have the right credit status? Do they have the right performance levels? How do you measure, how do you keep them performing as if they were the same business as odd? Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back and we’ll talk more.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:52]:
Welcome back. So suppliers and our service providers, they could have credit issues, they could have performance issues and the risk would get introduced into the very business service reliability that we are working so hard to maintain and improve. So can IT truly play a role there?

Rob Reeg [00:44:10]:
Absolutely, Sanjog, I’m lucky here at MasterCard in that I got a great partner on our with our Chief Financial Officer, Martina Hanmagin,

Rob Reeg [00:44:22]:
who

Rob Reeg [00:44:24]:
has really looked at how do we make purchasing our purchasing function key to vendor management and so driving that overall service quality for a company like us really has to involve the vendors and partners that we bring in at a very high level. So that partnership between IT and purchasing to help drive the business solution is really one of the upfront keys to success you look for.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:00]:
So with respect to the credit and performance risks that could get introduced and you don’t know much about. So is there something specifically in IT like contract management or other type of things that you would do to have your suppliers at least provide you timely information?

Rob Reeg [00:45:15]:
We get into the definition around how our service level is going to work, how the communication escalations are going to work. We typically for our larger partners, IT person assigned as their part of their vendor management program and then with our purchasing organization, we constantly look at what their characteristics are from a financial standpoint, how well they’re meeting their service level, how well they’re communicating to us in when there are issues on the table and how accurate the information is that they provide.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:51]:
Now coming to these frameworks that we all know about, like whether we call them best practices or we call them whatever, but then at the same time these are very broad guidelines. People could talk about service reliability, people can talk about performance management. Everything has a best practice which could be a self proclaimed set of guidelines that somebody has to fine tune to their own needs. So truly it’s not one best practice. So you don’t have a yard detect. As an IT leader, what do you look up to when you’re trying to explore or get into an unchartered territory.

Rob Reeg [00:46:22]:
For something that is new to MasterCard as a business opportunity, having mindset that IT is part of the business and we’re jointly with our partners around the company defining what the characteristics of this opportunity are going to look like and making that a part of the decision process to how we take it forward, whether that’s financially and how we’re going to fund it or how we’re going to pick the vendors who are going to help provide the solution and how we’re going to communicate to the customers that we expect to sell the solution to but again it didn’t all and how you do that up front and help make this successful or not.

Sanjog Aul [00:47:07]:
This is very interesting that we work so hard on maintaining the business service reliability and as IT leaders really we put our best efforts in there. Now from an outside customer perspective, it is still, it may or may not be still a differentiator. That’s a given that you have to do at least. So then if this is itself or such a tall order, when do you get the time and the resources and the energy to do beyond that one extra thing which will put you, as you said, at the top of the wallet.

Rob Reeg [00:47:37]:
I think there’s old saying the expectation of for IT’s contributions better, faster and cheaper and lots of times people will say pick two out of the three. I think we’ve evolved past that and we need to be looking at how we achieve better, faster and cheaper to really help provide business solutions. The investment that companies make in launching a new product or going after a new geography are obviously very significant and making those investments wisely with full knowledge of what overall cost or quality equation is going to be makes and gives us an opportunity to make better business decision. So again IT being part of the business, not just aligned with the going to help you be more successful.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:35]:
On behalf of the show and listeners, I’d really like to thank you Rob. It was a great discussion and I think the IT driving business service reliability could really happen where you have the support and the understanding of the business and they are giving you the right blessings and resources and your crew has the right type of lieutenant who are able to understand what your vision is and be able to carry it.

Rob Reeg [00:49:00]:
I really appreciate the opportunity. I do feel very lucky to be in this position at a great company like MasterCard where an IT are all one and the same and it gives us culturally an opportunity to really take things in a different direction.

Sanjog Aul [00:49:16]:
Thank you so much again. Now the listeners, if you have any questions, if you see the business service reliability being a key issue and if you have any thoughts and or questions or concerns for Rob or us, please send us the email to view@ciotalkradio.com that is views@ciotalkradio.com thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio. This is Sanjog Aul your talk show host. Till next week take care and god bless.

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