May 2019CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM9borrowers, brokers, and other lenders flock to and moreover are fiercely loyal to? I wanted to look for opportunities like QuickBooks. I did not want another traditional IT team. I needed them to think and function like a startup that did not fear failure. In fact, I wanted them to fail fearlessly. I also sought to break with norms and have an experienced entrepreneur to lead the team.The first order of business was to create a platform from which the team could operate. It needed to be modern and not burdened by legacy technology and practices. We found Docker to be the perfect solution and partner for our transformational journey. The team would go on to present at Dockercon San Francisco and then again at Dockercon Europe and with stiff competition were a finalist and Rising Star for their Customer Innovation Award. With the platform in place, we sought to redesign the application experience and chose Blend, a leading fintech based in San Francisco. The result was a frictionless experience for our customers and colleagues that was delivered in under eight weeks. The new digital application experience offers a user-friendly interface, guidance and reminders, and massively simplifies document gathering and submission. The interaction with our Loan Origination System was seamless and efficient making adoption matter-of-fact. With the recent acquisition of Franklin American Mortgage by Citizens Bank the teams were able to once again partner with Blend and deliver a solution with a packaged loan origination system in six months in the midst of an integration.What would have taken six or more months to build and deploy in a traditional organizational construct had taken only a fraction of that time and with a lot less fanfare. This was only the first of their achievements and with the learning feedback loop from each endeavor, we now can go from concept to live software in forty-eight hours. It was a hard sell to carve out the time and resources for a highly skilled and dedicated team that had no preset objectives or deliverables. It was a risk for sure but one that had to be taken. The return on the investment will pay dividends for a long time to come. The challenge now is to export this capability across the reminder of the information technology organization and extend into the business. It will take more than just a team named `innovation' to succeed. Every team in the organization plays a part. The culture has to be right. The talent has to be there. And the passion.
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