Tour de Cure, Indianapolis, Indiana June 13

Bill Arnold of Team Type 2 (yours truly) and Bob Schrank of Team Type
1 will be attending the American Diabetes Association Tour de Cure at
the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on June 13.

Time for a Change

Things change in life – changing gears, changing lives. I’m changing gears…when I started this blog, I was crass, or brash, enough to claim that I had “lost my diabetes”. Well, it turns out that it’s more like gum you drop on the street than it is like gum you throw in the trash can…it sticks to your sole. I find myself more and more connecting to the diabetes community, in particular, the part of that community that intersects with the cycling community.

So, let’s throw another topic on the mix – let’s bring back discussion of diabetes, and health, and what it is like to face a number every morning that defines who you are (diabetic? not?), and how that plays out in everything I do, and everything I am…

I have a goal for 2010, when I turn 50. I want to compete in the Race Across America, Solo. Seems crazy for a diabetic to even think such a think. But I am hooking up with a group called Team Type 2 (connected to pro team Team Type 1) that is doing the team competition in RAAM this year. I will be crewing for that team, and we’ll see how it goes. It’s a perfect intersection of cycling and diabetes.

Information Technology Strategy and Resource Utilization

For a look at something totally different, how about trying to figure out how to manage a huge technology infrastructure in an organization that wants to be nimble and have fast time to market for new products and services, and where the organization and membership sizes have not grown over the past 7 years. Seven years ago, we had six servers, and a cohesive core system, with virtually no test systems and no in house development capabilities. now, we are approaching 130 servers, many of which are virtual, and our core system is really not a core any more – it is a transaction processing system, a separate scheduler, a separate set of application servers for running the web-based front-end applications, a separate backup server, and a complete set of test environments for all of that. The recent question was, “what about outsourcing management of the core to the host processor company, and using our resources for vendor management instead of technical work?”. It’s a valid question, I suppose. For me, I want us to control our own future, and I think that means not only having the hardware and software in-house, but employing the expertise to make it hum. We have some bottlenecks, and one of them is personnel. Mostly, it’s hard to get technically competent people to want to move to the midwest to work for a credit union. So, we constantly struggle to find the talent we need. Those people who are local and have the skill set are usually looking to get out of town as soon as possible. I don’t know the whole answer to this puzzle, but I know that I don’t want to run a group where vendor management is our primary skill set.

Does New Membership Bring Product Sales or Do We Market Product to Increase Membership?

I’m on an early flight to Atlanta, which had me out of the house at 3:30 this morning. Needless to say, I was a little groggy when we took off at 6:00. I fell asleep, and dreamed that our CFO told me we were hiring someone to market a new share account that we thought could drive some deposit growth. I am all for deposit growth. I am against adding headcount needlessly. My dream reaction to the CFO was strong enough that it woke me up, causing me to sit in the dark plane ruminating about membership and how we can bring it to more people. Should that happen as a result of a particular product, or should we extol the benefits of membership and let the growth in membership naturally lift share and loan balances? While I am not the person in my organization charged with membership growth or product growth, I am on Senior Leadership, which means I am part of the group that is charged with asking and answering these questions. My bias is to grow membership, and let the individual products take care of themselves. We tend, however, to market products. How do we re-energize the value of credit union membership and let that drive our growth? That seems like the ultimate question. Answers, anyone?

Net Promoter

I sat in on a session at the Partnership Symposium at Forum last week, in which Denise Wymore and Ron Shevlin talked about their competing views of the value of the Net Promoter score. I won’t bore you with the details of what Net Promoter is, or my discussion with Denise about the core of the credit union movement, but it did occur to me that the credit union I work for has a very local presence (one county in NW Indiana), but also holds the affinity credit card for a large public university through its alumni association, which gives us a national membership. We use the Net Promoter score to measure how we are doing, but I don’t know if we weight the surveys to reflect the national/local differentiation (many of the national members have no one to recommend us to, since the cardholder needs to belong to the alumni association). Also made me wonder about the usefulness of the Net Promoter in that kind of setting, and whether or not there were other brands that would have the same experience that we could compare to. I haven’t come up with any – if you do, drop me a comment.

Introduction to the World

I’ve been lurking around the blogosphere for a couple of years now, and spent some time writing a blog about the impact of being diagnosed with diabetes. I lost interest when a lost the diagnosis, but hey, that’s what happens when you change your lifestyle. Lately, though, I have been spending more time reading the blogs of people with whom I share common interests, so I thought it might be time to move from lurking and occasionally commenting on other people’s blogs to writing my own. Less reactionary, more thoughtful.

That being said, there are a couple of content areas that will probably predominate in this space. The first will be technology. Who needs another technology blog?! Well, I guess I do; I have some things to say, and there are sometimes people that care what I say, but I don’t always have time to talk to them. This will give them a place to see what I think (provided they care). The second will be the credit union movement. I am proud to be a credit union employee, and I spend a lot of time thinking about our business and where we fit into the world of financial services. The third would be innovation. It seems a lot like technology, but different. Once upon a time, I ran a company called Applied Innovations. We did lots of different things (not necessarily any of them well), but we focused on the technology side of life, especially the (then nascent) internet. Those days are gone, but the spirit of problem solving that is at the heart of innovation is something that holds my interest. I can’t help but believe there will be some posts related to personal items, and the content area that will be the largest there will have to be a mix of diet, exercise, healthcare, wellness, and cycling. We’ll see where (if anywhere) that takes us.