Profile: Nottingham Building Society head of IT Jack Cutts

Jack Cutts is a name to conjure with. Reminiscent of a buccaneer perhaps? Possibly one of the legendary accounting pirates from Monty Python's Crimson Permanent Assurance short film.

Like the finance privateers in the film, Jack Cutts, head of IT at Nottingham Building Society, has blown the dust away from the company aided by the winds of change.

Cutts is certainly no wallflower - it's obvious that his force of character has helped to drive fundamental changes through an organisation that is used to doing things the traditional way.

He began his career as an analyst and programmer almost 20 years ago at British Steel. At the time, the conglomerate was experimenting with a new concept called outsourcing. Here he learned some valuable lessons about keeping his nerve with third-party suppliers.

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Subsequently, he has had extensive experience with multi-channel retailing at Argos, Boots and travel company Gold Medal Travel, before joining Nottingham Building Society. This experience will prove valuable as he brings the building society into the web 2.0 age.

If he comes across as a maverick in this sometimes conservative IT business, his approach to change is straightforward and disciplined. It has to be, as he has been charged with a root-and-branch rip-and-replace project for the building society.

Cutts was brought in two years ago, as the organisation was going through a full strategic review, following the replacement of the CEO. As a result the company found it needed to do a significant amount of work to update the infrastructure for the business and the core systems in place.

For a long period of time there was no new investment and the organisation was being held back by IT.

Cutts recalls: "I joined three months later primarily to replace the core system but to do that, a significant amount needed to be done to improve the infrastructure, the processes we had in place and the staff training."

Not only did the IT need replacing, so did the general attitude of the IT team.

Cutts said: "The people we had, the average level of service was ten to twelve years, which is very unusual in IT. Very much Nottingham Building Society people, so they saw value in the organisation and really cared about what they were doing but to a certain extent only knew what they knew. They had no outside experience. When people came in they learned the system from the people around them. Then I came in and started to ask what I thought were sensible reasonable questions and I wasn't getting the answers."

From a technology point of view, the core systems were being upgraded but Cutt's first priority was stabilisation of what was already in place. It was a priority to keep the business running and not affect customer service. Cutts replaced the hardware for existing core systems with a view to throwing that hardware away once the new core system arrived but to stabilise the business at that period of time made it worthwhile.

Next, Cutts set about creating processes to monitor key systems, so that the team could tell where the problems were about to occur, rather than have to spend all their time putting out bush fires.

He said: "I'm a firm believer that a system knows when it has a problem. You shouldn't have to look, the system should be telling you. So, now we've become a lot more proactive than we were in the past."

Cutts enlisted the services of systems integrator Esteem to complement the skills in-house but he made sure that any know-how was passed on to his team.

He said: "We are not an organisation which is going to be bleeding edge. So, the architecture we designed was reasonably industry standard. We put in blade servers, we put in SANs, we put in a virtual tape library (VTL). We designed an architecture around no one single point of failure. People always move on but the architecture is designed so I know we have someone with the skills to fix problems."

Cutts believes that the risks in a project of this scale means the third-party relationships are always going to be key. When he joined, he spent the first three months in his office with his systems manager on contracts with the suppliers, to get all of the issues out of the way there and then.

He said: "My rule on contracts is if I have to get that out of the cupboard again, then we've failed, both sides. We haven't because we put a lot of time and effort on what the problems might be from the start. It's no good trying to wring every penny you spent with your suppliers - at some time they are going to get their own back. When you've got something of scale, you want all the supporting people behind you."

Cutts has seen great gains from really quite straightforward advances. The previous policy of banning internet use was lifted. Bottlenecks in the network were removed. This improved communications and speeded up simple processes that had a direct impact on customer service.

He said: "Having an IT problem when you have a customer in front of you is just wrong. I don't want people talking about IT, I want marketing people talking about marketing, I want salespeople talking about sales. IT is just a tool and the only time you worry about how it works is when it doesn't."

Although funding had been released from the highest levels, the senior management team needed to be reassured that the risk to the organisation was properly managed. Innovations like remote access had to be demonstrated as watertight.

Cutts said: "That's my key role in this place - to protect the organisation from itself."

From a mindset point of view, the organisation now sees how IT will significantly drive the business. One of the themes emerging from the strategic review two years ago was the ability to launch new banking products to market more quickly.

At the moment, everything is paper based. With the new core system, the thousands of mortgage application intermediaries employed by the building society around the country will be able to get full applications permission online.

So, instead of building society staff retyping all the information through its systems, intermediaries will input the data remotely and immediately get a decision on that application there and then. That improves their service to their customers.

Cutts said: "We want to be in a position where we only touch paper when we need to. If we get to a position where 80 per cent of our [loan] applications go through to the people who need decisions, then that would be brilliant. Then we can focus our attention on the other 20 per cent which really need people's time."

From now on every single piece of documentation from the organisation is scanned, allowing the building society to have a single view of the customer. Wherever staff access a customer profile, they access the information in the same way and they can see the full account profile, enabling staff to cross-sell financial products to customers.

So, what's the key to Cutts' success? Its about setting standards and making sure staff stick to them. This removes silos of knowledge and encourages everyone to internally police the standard.

He said: "If not, you end up back where you started. So, you have to make sure any change you make is built on a solid foundation. Then the next change is built on that one. But, it's step-by-step. If you try to achieve everything at the same time, you'll just implode."

Straight talking stuff, but in a way, Cutt's didn't have a choice. Not to have done the IT overhaul was not an option.

He said: "It's too difficult to say what would have happened if we hadn't done this project. The organisation would have had to have done something. The technology was coming to the end of its life."