Wells Fargo Competitor

Wells Fargo’s Progress Within Each Stage of Competing on Analytics
Wells Fargo prides itself on being conservative. In their Visions and Values document ‘conservative’ is used when describing their lending and acquisition strategies. In Competing on Analytics, the authors state “The analytical competitors we studied had bet their future success on analytics-based strategies.” Wells Fargo is never going to bet its future on any one thing. Mainly because of this, I would not describe Wells Fargo as an analytical competitor (Stage 5), but rather an analytical company (Stage 4). While there is an Enterprise-wide perspective in place, it has not permeated all levels of management, nor do I get a sense in my day to day experience of a deep
Recent efforts have led to an agreed upon unit of measure for application improvements (requirements as opposed to projects, sub-projects or tickets). Within the past year, we have been able to tie the systems of records for projects, testing and production performance together, but the quality of consistent data is still lacking. We have only been able to create a few localized reports that show cause and effect. For example, 4 or more change requests within a single project will lead to an exponential number of testing defects.
How Wells Fargo Creates Competitive Advantage with Analytics
The two recent examples I could find externally are the increase to the minimum wage at Wells Fargo to between $13.50 and $17 per hour to make the company more competitive as an employer, and the development of an online loan application for small businesses. Wells Fargo does have an Enterprise Data & Analytics group that is focused on data strategy and architecture, data management and solution delivery, data governance and analytics and business intelligence. They are currently focused on centralizing data and consolidating environments within Enterprise Information Technology and their own department. They also work on data mining and risk
I am hoping that this proof of concept will get us the management support we need.
How Wells Fargo Could Compete Internally on Analytics
• Take the time to record and establish baseline performance against which improvement could be measured. Goals set for process improvement appear to be arbitrary (i.e., “25% reduction of testing defects” without first establishing what the average is).
• Educate employees responsible for data entry on how to enter accurate date, why it is important, and what reports the data is used for. Without this, they have no sense of engagement with the information they are responsible for.
• Agree to common, unique identifiers between systems of records. For example, in the project system of record, the release names are simply the quarter the release took place in and so more than one release can have the same name. In the system of record for testing, the release names are unique for each day they fall on. While the two systems are not connected by the release names, having a consistent approach would help confirm the accuracy of the data and metrics. It would also greatly help with clear communications between the project managers, developers and