Wells Fargo IT Manager Shares, Data POV
Today’s contributor is Jeff Cooper, IT Services Manager specializing in Financial Operations and IT Infrastructure. Cooper’s background in IT and strengths in translating non-technical into technical requirements, and vise verse, began his career in as a Telecom Specialist for the United States Air-force in the early 80s. Since then Cooper has held such positions as Services Engineer, Senior Network Analyst, and Lead Production Systems Consultant. In his current position, Cooper works as a liaison between the Bank’s Operations Support Groups and the IT infrastructure and application monitoring technologies group. This interview shares Cooper’s unique perspectives on Data, Business Intelligence, and Mobile.
What is it you do in your current role? I work closely with Operations managers to understand their monitoring and response needs and translate those needs into deliverable technical solutions. The Operations Support Groups are responsible for ensuring Bank systems and applications are online, running efficiently, and available to our customer – I, and the organization I am part of, provide the tools and technologies that facilitate their ability to meet those responsibilities.
Is the financial enterprise unique in its data requirements? While my experience within the bank is centered on IT specific needs, I do know that through government regulation and plain old common sense the bank as a whole is very keen to provide easy customer access to, but at the same time, provide a very secure environment for the maintenance and storage of sensitive customer data. Does that make them unique? Probably not in today’s world.
What would you say are the technical priorities of today’s financial organization? Much of our IT infrastructure is dedicated to data encryption, data access security, and intrusion detection. Up-time requirements for banking and other financial applications and systems is also a very high priority; when people and businesses need to access their financial information and accounts, they tend to need it now.
How do you think an iPad app like miVEDiX could be useful to the teams you support? I could see uses for this application in the area of event management, particularity in Event Volume Analysis. Currently, analysis is done through SQL queries with results dumped into spreadsheets, followed then by a lot of column sorting and staring. Analysts will pick the ‘Top Talkers” (sources of high event volume) from those reports, and begin researching why the number of events were generated, and further, how to mitigate the root cause. If a root cause is determined and mitigated, follow-up analysis (more SQL queries and spreadsheets) is done to track success and impact. Having a visualization tool such as miVEDiX could assist with analysis by visually plotting ‘Top Talkers”, where they live in the network, and what they are linked to. We have all of that data, but nothing to pull it together in one screen. Staff resource and infrastructure planning may also benefit from miVEDiX. Imagine being an Operations Center Manager managing a worldwide staff of ~400 and constantly having to deal with an ever growing network and volume of work. Not fun. Having the ability to visually represent staff vs volume of work and projected growth is quite useful.
Thanks for reading. We’d like to hear from you. Do you have any examples of innovative ways the financial industry is implementing business intelligence?
