Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »April 28, 2008 — CIO —
"It used to take four people five days to test the software every month," says Kevin Bingham, vice president of IT at Arizona Federal Credit Union. "Now, we can do it in six hours."
Bingham was explaining how Arizona Federal got an ROI of five months by implementing test automation and a structured process using TestPartner. But that's just the measurable, quantifiable benefits. The real payoff, he points out, has been in the IT department improving the credit union's ability to do its real job: Paying attention to making its members happy.
Arizona Federal has 750 employees and manages over $1.9 billion in assets from 232,000 member accounts in 27 branch locations. Like most credit unions, Arizona Federal relies on a vendor's software package to manage day-to-day financial transactions. The suite of applications helps them do everything from creating a new account to preparing loan applications.
Most of the applications in Fiserv Telenavigator are updated quarterly, and the credit union has always tested each release thoroughly before deployment. Doing so provided an opportunity to resolve issues with the vendor before the software went into production.
But the testing was disruptive and time consuming, especially since it was done by Arizona Federal staff members who were not IT specialists. "The people who did the testing have day jobs," explains Bingham. For those staff, testing the software was an additional job requirement, something that pulled them away from smiling at a customer across a desk or from crunching accounting numbers. As a result, it took 60 to 90 days to test a new version of Telenavigator; if the release arrived on January 1, it'd be deployed in March. And a new release comes out every quarter.
Plus, the line-of-business employees weren't QA specialists, so the IT department had no way to validate the testing methodology. While the accounting and finance users had the advantage of knowing how they used the software every day, it would never occur to them to check for code coverage—much less to be familiar with the term.
Clearly, there was room for process improvement.
To learn more about process improvement and workflow, see ABC: An Introduction to Business Process Management and Workflow Gone Wrong.
Bingham had used test automation tools in a previous role, so when he came to Arizona Federal, he suggested a similar approach and began shopping for software to create maintainable and reusable test scenarios. Price was an issue, he explained, because the credit union is not-for-profit. Whatever they chose had to clearly add member benefits and improve the organization's ability to serve those members.