Michael Harte

CIO, Commonwealth Bank

Michael Harte

CIO, Commonwealth Bank

THERE'S an adage that the best IT system upgrades are the ones that users don't notice. If that's the case, Michael Harte must be a very happy man.

As Commonwealth Bank chief information officer, Harte has been responsible for driving a program of change that's touched every facet of the giant organisation's operations. Core systems have been replaced and delivery channels enhanced to improve customer service.

Such things are not for the faint hearted. Changing the technology that underpins the bank's fundamental activities could have caused massive disruption, cost blowouts and customer frustration. Yet the four-year project has been completed without any major hitches.

While many CIOs would have taken the chance to revel in their success, Harte has pressed on with further plans.

He and his technology team are now focused on making use of sophisticated analytics to better match products with customers. The strategy will make use of the masses of information the bank gleans from transactions to tailor offerings for specific market segments and even individuals.
Custodian of one of the largest IT budgets in Australia, Harte is also constantly on the lookout for ways in which to extract more value from his investments.

A longtime advocate of cloud computing, he oversaw last year the move of some of the bank's computing resources to the hosted Amazon Web Services platform.  "We are now running some of our important customer-facing web properties on AWS, which scales seamlessly to meet all kind of peaks and this has freed up our IT resources to focus on developing more innovative customer offerings," he told The Australian IT.

Harte is an example of how a focused CIO can achieve significant change within a very large organisation.

His combination of deep technical knowledge and ability to explain it in business terms has enabled him to establish a computing architecture that will support the bank for the next decade and beyond.