New St George CIO cuts right-hand man
Newly appointed St George CIO Peter Clare has begun to wield the axe with three redundancies as part of a restructuring of the bank's technology operations.
Clare will take over from retiring CIO John Loebenstein on 2 April. Loebenstein's retirement coincides with the bank combining its IT and operations divisions for "a fully integrated approach to processing and customer service improvements". Clare (below) will head the new division with around 2,000 IT staff.
One employee to be cut in the restructure is the general manager of IT relationships and data warehouse, Gary Carter.
"Peter's sort of looked at the 25 general managers across [the group] and he's just had to make a couple of cuts," Carter said at a vendor roundtable with the media this week.
"I just think it's an opportunity whenever you get a new division and a combined IT and operations division it's just a good time to have a look at what kind of structure you want. I was Peter's [IT] relationships manager so we got on well."
Carter said his role had involved facilitating how the wider St George business related to IT. "John put me in seven years ago to finesse and cultivate the relationship between IT and business. So we were working together."
He confirmed Loebenstein's retirement had been the catalyst for several redundancies.
A St George spokesperson confirmed Carter's redundancy, and said two other non-IT staff were also made redundant as part of changes for the new division. "The initial focus is to ensure the effective integration of Operations and Technology into the one Division." The structure of the new group would remain "as is", said the spokesperson.
Carter will leave the bank at the end of the month and is eyeing positions with business intelligence vendors. Carter has plenty of experience with vendors such as Cognos, Business Objects and Teradata through working with the bank's data warehouses.
"I think the people around the place like Informatica, Cognos, Business Objects; I think I'd really like to get into that sort of area," he said. "For 16 years I've used Cognos tools ... so I'd love to get stuck into some of that."