Vikram Nafde
EVP & CIO
Webster Bank
I am the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Webster Bank, a leading commercial bank with more than $75 billion in assets. I have over 25 years of experience in financial services technology, where I led large-scale digital transformation, service excellence, strategic planning and delivery, mentorship, and talent development.
I am also a member of the CNBC Technology Executive Council as well as The Wall Street Journal CIO Network, a collective community of leading technology experts from the world’s most influential companies. I am passionate about building values-driven cultures and high-performing teams that leverage innovation and best practices.
Learn more about the New York CIO community here.
Give us a brief overview of the path that led to your current role.
My path to CIO has taken me through all levels and facets of technology and leadership. I started well over 2 decades ago as a developer, spent a bunch of years thereafter leading a team of technologists and then teams of teams, and then moved on to lead enterprise-wide Digital Transformations and Technology M&As and integrations.
What is one of your guiding leadership principles?
One of my guiding leadership principles is lifelong pursuit of learning and unlearning. While many people pursue the former, most leaders struggle with the latter. Cultivating a learn-it-all mindset is absolutely critical to be a successful CIO in today's rapidly evolving technology and business landscape, but it is also important to 'evolve' your leadership style and let-go or unlearn some of the traits from the past that may have served you well, but may not serve the 'future you' all that well.
What is the greatest challenge technology leaders face today, and how are you addressing it?
The role of Chief Information Officer (CIO) is increasingly complex, with numerous challenges that demand strategic focus and innovative solutions. Among these, one of the most significant challenges is balancing innovation with operational excellence and keeping the organization secure.
CIOs are tasked with driving innovation to keep their organizations competitive while ensuring that day-to-day operations run smoothly and keep the organization secure from an increasingly sophisticated threat environment. This dual responsibility can create tension, as resources and attention are often divided between maintaining existing systems and exploring new technologies.
Key Aspects of the Challenge:
- Operational Stability: Ensuring that the IT infrastructure is reliable and efficient
- Innovation Pressure: Continuously adopting new technologies to stay ahead of the competition
- Resource Allocation: Balancing budget and human resources between maintenance and innovation
- Cybersecurity: Protecting the organization against evolving threats while implementing new technologies
- Talent Management: Attracting and retaining skilled IT professionals in a competitive market
For me, there are several strategies to address the challenges:
- Fostering a Culture of Continuous Learning and Innovation
- Embracing Agility and Strategic IT Portfolio Management
- Enhancing Cybersecurity Measures and making it 'enterprise priority' vs just IT priority
- Incorporating effective Resource Management procedures – talent and capital
- Building Strong Relationships and Communication Channels
What is the key to success for someone just starting out as a CIO?
For any new CIO or an executive stepping into a CIO role, there are a few strategies and best practices that can make the transition easier:
- Aligning enterprise and technology goals and roadmaps
- Building strong relationships throughout the enterprise
- Starting with a vision and strategy, but evolving it with feedback
- Fostering an agile, innovative, and purpose-driven culture
- Being part of communities of like minded CIOs to share and learn
How do you measure success as a leader?
Here are some of the key measures of success (not in any particular order):
- Customer satisfaction
- Culture and employee engagement / satisfaction
- Business value delivery – absolute as well as trendline
- Alignment between technology and enterprise strategy
- Agility – the ability to quickly pivot and deliver frequent value in bite-sized chunks
- Safety and risk management – compliance with all internal and external policies and regulations
- Financial discipline
- Operational excellence
What is the value of being a member of the Evanta community?
To me, the Evanta CIO events and programs are for CIOs, by CIOs, or to be more inclusive since titles are different in different companies, by IT execs for IT execs. The NY CIO community is not only the biggest in the country, but also the most engaged, the most thoughtful, the most diverse, and the most collaborative.
As CIOs and senior executives, it is our responsibility to move our profession forward, we can make the most difference as a collective group! We learn from each other, we drive each other, and collectively we advance the technology evolution and the benefits it brings to our organizations as well as all the clients and customers we collectively serve.
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