If you want to work for a top company that rewards entrepreneurship and innovation in IT, be prepared to learn all you can about the retail mortgage business. For the past three years, Computerworld has honored Quicken Loans, the largest online retail mortgage lender in the U.S, with the top spot on the 100 Best Companies to Work in Information Technology list. Meanwhile, Fortune Magazine, for the past four years, has ranked Quicken Loans in the top 20 on the 100 Best Companies to Work for in America list.
Recently, enterpriseleadership.org sat down with Frank Laura, the chief information officer, to learn how a unique corporate culture has shaped an outstanding IT organization, and what it takes to work in IT at Quicken Loans.
EL: Apparently, you have a team-oriented structure for IT? Can you elaborate on it?
FL: First of all, I report to Bill Emerson, the CEO, and have a number of IT directors reporting to me. That top layer is the extent of the traditional structure. The rest of our structure evolves around our culture, so we can be more creative and innovative. We assemble teams for specific projects. A project team might not report directly to an IT leader but to a team leader or team captain. A project team could also have one or two sub teams, headed by a team leader who acts as a mentor for one or more individuals.
Our teams often include people from outside of IT. For example, a team to redesign our Web site could include an IT director, staff IT professionals, and representatives from marketing. We've had other teams comprised of IT staff members and people from mortgage banking.
Some teams create their own name and identify. For example, the Jedi Council is a team of software engineers who happen to like Star Wars.
EL: You received the number one spot in Computerworld's best place to work in IT three years in a row? What have you been doing to earn this spot?
FL: People always ask what's so special about us. IT has a great team. Our culture has a great deal of affect in what makes us so special. Overall, we encourage the IT folks to be very innovative by getting close to the business. We ask our team members to pick the brains of our business leaders, and then to generate ideas that can have a positive affect on the business. Our employees have the freedom to take a risk and to act on their ideas.
EL: What kinds of problems have IT people solved on their own?
FL: For example, we had some backend challenges. We receive 1,000 of faxes each day and send out many more than that. Our fax application didn't work well with our internal application. One IT member who has a programming background and who supported these legacy systems decided to correct the problem. One weekend, he built an application to do what we needed. Today, we're using his application in our enterprise.
EL: How does an IT employee balance going the extra mile and still doing their day-to-day assignments?
FL: Our IT staff finds enjoyment in using their work downtime or personal free time to work on things that need to be fixed. They see the task as a challenge and the chance to get ownership with the company and the team. I don't pressure anyone to spend their free time working on these types of projects. They take it upon themselves because they feel more empowered to make a difference.
EL: Does it take a special-sort of person to work in IT at Quicken Loans?
FL: We've interviewed many folks over the years. We always explain the importance of our culture. We look for people who are passionate about what they do and who like working in a collaborative environment. If you're to work here, you need to have enough courage to speak your mind and to receive feedback. Many folks, however, need a formal organizational structure and specific tasks assigned to them.
EL: If I'm a new IT person, how do I get absorbed in the Quicken culture?
FL: You spend your first three days in an orientation to the culture. You meet with a variety of executives, including Bill Emerson, the CEO; Patrick McInnis Guiness, the president; and Dan Gilbert, the founder and chairman of the board. For example, Gilbert really drives home our business. He tells why it's important to embrace the culture, and not to be afraid to identify an issue.
He gives everyone his cell phone number to call if you see something that's not right. For example, while riding on the freeway one Saturday night, a new banker noticed that a letter was out on the Quicken sign on our building. He immediately called Gilbert. In fact, that night Gilbert got many phone calls about the sign. The sign got fixed the next morning. Even small things like this matter to Quicken employees.
EL: How do you reward people who've taken a risk?
FL: We try to develop the reward to each individual. If someone has a family with young children, we might send them to Disneyland. We do offer cash bonuses. We also reward people with royal-treatment trips to see Dan Gilbert's basketball team, the Cleveland Cavaliers. We have a formal awards program, called the Gilbert Awards, which is on par with the Academy Awards, including well-known performers.
EL: When you interview IT people, how do you evaluate their passion and desire to extend themselves to solve problems?
FL: You can usually tell by their body language, the words they select, and their enthusiasm. A really passionate person can't stop talking about what they do. The signs are pretty obvious.
EL: Given your matrix structure, how do you review IT professionals?
FL: We still do an annual merit review for everyone. All employees do a self-assessment, giving their performance perspective for the past year. They look at everything from past accolades to things they need to improve. The team leader might ask for additional feedback from other people who've worked with the employee during the past year.
EL: What kind of an IT governance model do you have?
FL: Because we're in a highly regulated industry, we have to follow the guidelines and the rules laid out for us. We work with our security, compliance, and legal teams to make sure our IT infrastructure, our processes, and our programs conform to our compliance concerns. It's not our goal to go overboard and create a lot of a bureaucracy.
Certain team members meet weekly depending on where they live in. If it's a highly regulated project, then people will meet with legal every day to talk about the project and to make sure the guidelines are meet according to the way they are laid out.
IT also gets examined by auditors from all of the states where we do business. They make sure our IT processes are up to snuff. Do we have access to all of the data we need? What are our source code retention policies? Our security teams work very closely with us to make sure we're meeting the gold standard.
EL: What types of best IT practices do you have in place?
FL: We don't use formal best practices such as Six Sigma and CMMI. Our process improvement, which has the nickname the mousetrap team, makes sure we provide our customers with faster, simpler, and more accurate customer service. This team digs deep in to every aspect of what our business, ranging from IT to mortgage banking. They use a common sense approach to best practices and process improvement.
EL: You've developed a lot of technology to change your industry. What are some of the things that make you stand out from the crowd?
FL: We're really a technology company, creating some unique mortgage industry applications. We're a build versus buy kind of shop. We're constantly investing in automating the mortgage process so we can write loans faster. By building our applications we can own our destiny. Buying applications doesn't provide an organization with a completive advantage. Everyone has access to the same application. We rely heavily on our knowledge of the business to customize things extensively. That's unique in the mortgage industry.
We're best known for the work we've down with e-signatures. In fact, we pioneered the concept.
We're piloting security mechanisms that would protect the confidentiality of clients' data.
EL: . Everyone talks about aligning IT with the needs of the business. How do you accomplish this?
FL: We tell IT people to learn all they can about the business. They have the freedom to chat with a banker or shadow an operations business, or someone in our capital markets group. They can learn a lot from the people who are using the tools they build. You can then start to ask key questions, such as why does this process take so long? Once you understand both the business and the technology, you can solve many problems important to the business.
EL: What advice would you give to CIOs who want to Quicken their IT organization?
FL: Our culture can scale. A lot of people focus too much on things that don't matter to the business. Yes, you need organizational charts and spreadsheets. However, you can spent a lot of time working and reworking them. On the other hand, you should encourage people to get as close as possible to the business and to empower them to bring about change.We tend to be on the lookout for anything that looks like a corporate silo. If we see signs of one, we get rid of it immediately.
Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.
