F
OR MOST TECHNOLOGY LEADERS, on time and on budget
are pillars for success. Often, however, customer service is over-
looked as IT groups strive to meet business demands. For Scott
Blandford, CTO at TIAA-CREF, pleasing the user is just as important.
When Blandford joined TIAA-CREF as CTO nearly four years ago, he
faced an all-too-familiar challenge: The firm had a complex applica-
tion environment with suboptimal information flow. Client-facing
staffs, like call center employees, were stitching together client infor-
mation with a collection of homegrown and third-party tools, and
the customer experience was suffering.
This didn't sit well with Blandford, who admits to being "relentless"
about customer experience. His motto for his IT team: "On time, on
scope, and on budget is great, but it does not count unless your us-
ers love it."
So he put his 25 years of experience with innovative technology
systems to work and set out to create a new client service interface
for the organization, one that would connect all the information in
various applications and leverage the company's existing talent and
October 2014 13
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The best-built system or platform that hits all business deliverables is
useless if the customers don't love the functionality.
By Becca Lipman
@BeccaLipman
Focus On Customer Is More
Important Than On Budget
T I A A - C R E F
SCOTT BLANDFORD
Chief technology officer of retirement
and individual technology, TIAA-CREF
CAREER BIO: Before joining TIAA-CREF, Blandford served as the managing
director, head of online and retirement technology, at Bank of America Merrill
Lynch for four years. He was also the CTO for Merrill's Institutional Retirement
business. Prior to that, Blandford spent 11 years at Fidelity Investments, where
he served as senior VP for Fidelity eBusiness.
EDUCATION: Bachelor 's and master 's degrees in electrical engineering from
the University of Dayton.
WHO INFLUENCED YOU MOST IN YOUR CAREER? "I had a man-
ager early in my career who basically told us IT is not an order-taker. Your job is to
do the hard work, understand the whole business problem, and to show up with
a point of view. To this day I can still feel him staring at me and telling me that."
WHAT WORK EXPERIENCE HAD THE MOST LONG-LASTING
EFFECT ON YOUR CAREER? "I was on a project years ago where I got
to see firsthand the connection between how the project is structured, how the
people are organized, and how decisions are made. I saw how that's connected to
the outcomes of the project and the pace of the project. Since then, I make sure
the structure of every project is in harmony with the intended outcome."
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