He inspires negative confidence in anything he says. It’s probably because he truly is clueless. You can see it in his decision making and declaration of wins for things which have truly been disasters (TG and ASC)
Allstate IT is a MESS right now
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Zulfi did this at Caremark and destroyed that company. They’re still trying to recover. Best of luck I got let go last year
Suren isn't even part of IT anymore.
Suren's designated hit man to finish the job of offshoring all the IT work to cheap labor who don't mind being worked around the clock.
Like the rest of senior management, he doesn't have a clue about the day to day reality of delivery nor does he want one. He's actually shocked to be told that he didn't just snap his fingers and we've moved to the product centric model he and the other 'leaders' keep yammering about. If it were that easy, it'd have been done years ago.
But he doesn't care. Because once all the IT functions are offshored to India, he'll have a work force that won't ask hard questions or push back. They'll tell him exactly what he wants to hear, all the time. The company won't be any different, nor will the reality of moving products to market, but he'll never know that. Of course, the company will continue to fail to keep up, have huge amounts of tech debt and burn people out. But as long as Tom and Suren and Zulfi and Kamal, not to mention the layers of middle management yes men and strap hangers beneath them keep getting their big bonus checks, they won't care. When they finally run the company into the ground, they can parachute out.
You know what should be our super power? Making good decisions. Sub par things delivered quickly does not win the day.
Your spot on but it's a combination of factors. Zulfie etc. at the top don't want to hear "no". The people below him are just building their own little power groups. It's all buzzwords and vague ideas that give no direction. There is no "leadership".
"You have the power over your applications" Zulfie says. But what he means is "you're the ones to blame when this all inevitably falls apart". I don't see what he's implementing as being customer focused. Speed is our super power? The customer doesn't want to be field testing our products. If we push incomplete products to market that don't work or have supporting tools that don't do what our customers want or need then they'll take their business elsewhere. And it's not Zulfie and his cronies who will take the blame.
100% spot on. Our technology area has a culture of hiding problems from leaders. This leads to an issue of the leaders having absolutely zero clue about what actually happens on a day to day basis. On top of that, they seem more interested in building power and influence than they do delivering products. It’s shameful and a huge part of why Allstate has turned into such a dumpster fire.