John Beran Leads Technology Transformation at Comerica

Elite 8 honoree Comerica CIO John Beran has led the bank as it has transformed its IT infrastructure and restructured its IT organization.
The career of Comerica EVP and CIO John Beran almost went in a very different direction. In 1974 he was set to leave the University of Dayton (Ohio) with undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering disciplines. "I did not have any intent at all of going into the financial services industry," Beran says. "I was all set to build nuclear submarines and already accepted a position to do so."

Just weeks before graduation, though, Dayton-based Winters National Bank (since acquired by Bank One) contacted the college and expressed an interest in engineering students. The school reached out to Beran, who was intrigued by the opportunity to work in the Dayton area. After meeting with executives at the bank, Beran decided to pass on the nuclear submarines and instead enter the world of financial services.

"[Winters] had just a great, incredible view of what they wanted to do in terms of applying engineering techniques to manage their operations," Beran says, recalling that all his other job prospects were traditional engineering positions. "Here was an opportunity to go into an environment, an organization that didn't have anyone else like me."

Over the ensuing three decades, Beran forged an impressive career path through financial services -- starting in operations research before moving to the IT side of the industry. Since May 1995 Beranhas served as EVP and CIO at Comerica ($63.6 billion in total assets), and over the past few years he has transformed the bank's technology operations, leading to stronger IT-business alignment, improved decision making and a more-efficient IT operation.

In the Beginning

The transformation effort began about two years ago, when Comerica recognized a need to standardize and simplify its IT environment, according to Beran. The transformation work concluded this year.

"Comerica Bank is not a small, community bank that can basically buy everything from the outside, nor [is it] a megabank that has the capability, resources and wherewithal to do a lot of things in-house," relates Beran, who splits his time between the bank's Dallas headquarters and its former headquarters in Detroit. "We had to develop the models and the structures that would work best for us given the environment in which we were operating."

Beran says he first set out to restructure the IT organization's infrastructure to align functions end to end. "Previously we were siloed in that we would engineer servers and then manage servers, we would engineer mainframe products and then we would manage mainframe production, we would engineer network and we would manage network," Beran explains. "We never had an end-to-end view of our technology."

After realigning and gaining a better view of the technology operations, Beran and the IT group significantly changed how they thought about vendor technology and in-house development. For the previous decade, he reports, Comerica had sought to purchase vendor solutions whenever possible. But a changing marketplace and competitive pressures forced a change in thinking. "There are fewer suppliers of technology, and our competition is taking more and more development in-house," Beran says. "We knew we couldn't take it all in-house, yet we knew we couldn't be reliant on vendors."

According to Beran, he found that in order to reduce its reliance on vendor technologies, the bank had to restructure its organization rather than just create a new application development and deployment model. "It frankly was not something I anticipated. I thought it would be more about putting in processes and governance around development and then deployment, which would allow us to do more building than buying, or at least integrate the two a little bit more," Beran admits. "In order to be successful in that, though, we had to make some pretty significant structural changes in our application development and maintenance group [known as the business technology services group] as well."

The final, key component of the transformation was the development of new criteria to determine whether a particular function is or is not core to the business or whether a given technology is a competitive differentiator or just a utility. "We put everything we do through these filters," Beran relates. "It's a pretty disciplined process that leads us to conclusions about whether we buy a technology or built it, and if we are going to buy, which partners, and if we [are going to] build, what the methodologies of doing that are."

As a result, Beran says, the company is making better decisions about technology. Before, Comerica was buying vendor packages and then spending an equal amount of money in customization, he acknowledges. Now the bank is determining its development approach much earlier in the process and is, as a result, completing projects more quickly and closer to budget. "We're doing a lot more work upfront rather than doing a lot of rework afterwards," Beran comments.

Straight out of college and working at Winters National, Beran says, he quickly developed a thirst for leadership opportunities. At first, he primarily focused on operations research, working in workflow analysis and computer modeling. "What I discovered was that I would make a lot of recommendations about doing things and some would be accepted and some would not," he recalls. "While I really liked what I was doing, I wanted to be the person making the decisions."

Soon after, Beran received just such an opportunity when he was appointed to a management position in Winters' information services group. Years later at Comerica, Beran has continued to thrive in a position of leadership. He describes his management style as high-demand and collaborative, with a particular attention to detail. "What I try to do is set direction and say, 'This is, strategically, what I'm trying to get done,' " Beran relates. "I don't abdicate responsibility, but I definitely delegate a lot of authority and, along with that, responsibility."

The Elite 8 2009

In addition to the transformation work that was completed in early 2009, Beran has overseen several major IT projects. Most notably, the bank recently finished a next-generation network implementation based around converged voice, data and video communications using IP telephony. Beran names Cisco Systems (San Jose, Calif.) and AT&T (Dallas) as key partners in the initiative, which started in fall 2008 and was completed in May 2009.

Beran also has overseen the technology group as it has moved to a more virtualized environment, with assists from IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) and BladeLogic (acquired by Houston-based BMC Software in April 2008). All new projects have been placed on a virtualized environment, according to Beran, and the company is in the process of moving older systems and applications to virtualized environments as well.

He calls the shift an "extremely important" part of providing speed improvements and cost benefits to the business. At first, business users were wary of virtualization because it represented a change from the standalone environments of the past. "Now we're able to do it quicker and deliver it less expensively, so they are now actually asking to be placed in virtual environments," Beran says.

And Beran constantly seeks to cultivate better relationships with the business side of Comerica. Tight IT-business alignment is an important part of his IT philosophy, he says, and he spends a lot of time discussing corporate strategy with his IT team. As he also has accountability in the company for operations, excluding those at the branch level, he is uniquely positioned to bridge the IT-business gap. "One of the biggest challenges I have is to translate technology into business applications for my business partners," Beran says.

It's one thing when the business asks for a new capability or product, he notes. It's another when the topic turns to infrastructure improvements, network replacements or server virtualization. "We're talking about tools then," Beran says. "What's tough for me is to take a technology and interpret why it has value to the business."