UBS CTO Out After 10 Weeks As IT Becomes 'Pooled Service'

UBS CTO and head of IT Peter Sany is leaving the company after about 10 weeks on the job and all you CIOs out there please take note: UBS's CEO said ongoing cost cuts include "pooling services such as information technology." Is that how your company views you and your IT operation: just another commodity service, like HR and facilities, waiting to be pooled?A news story from Dow Jones said, "Under new Chief Executive Oswald Gruebel, UBS is in the process of cutting costs by pooling services such as information technology. A spokesman declined to comment on a possible link between" those efforts and the departure of Sany, whose position at UBS took effect April 1.

Sany, who had been Group CIO at Deutsche Telekom before accepting the UBS position in January, was a member of the group managing board at UBS, which the Dow Jones story said was "the second tier of bank executives below the highest management level."

Yet in spite of Sany's position on that managing board, the comment attributed to CEO Gruebel about how UBS viewed IT as just another commodity service to be pooled says a great deal about the need for CIOs in every company to not just talk about but prove the business value of their organizations. In a recent column, we noted that particularly in this lousy economy, CIOs - like every other part of the business - are under constant evaluation and scrutiny and have to find new and more-relevant ways to artculate the value the IT organization is generating in controlling costs, conserving cash, helping to drive revenue, and enhancing engagement with customers.

Because if they don't, a likely outcome is that the IT organization will get branded as a tactical cost center, putting it front and center among those pooled services on the outer fringes of the organization.