The Root Causes of Technology Failures

It seems that the mortgage industry has a love/hate relationship with technology. Mortgage professionals are quick to tout the benefits of technology, but when it comes to brass tacks, they are wary of implementing new technologies, mainly because these projects don’t have a successful track record. As a result, new technology has been slowly adopted in the form of spot solutions within the mortgage process, these implementations are often executed ineffectively. Thus, many technology projects fail during execution or shortly after. But why?

In general, implementation failures can be attributed to one of the following:

• Poor or incomplete specification of requirements
• Assumptions by technologists on the meaning of the requirements

Creating a concrete definition of the requirements for a tech implementation project and monitoring that project based on those defined requirements is imperative. Try building a house with no blueprints and only half the necessary materials. It’s not going to turn out well.

After determining concrete requirements, many projects are handed off to the IT department; it’s an IT project after all, right? This is where these kinds of projects can really go off the rails.

Oftentimes, the IT department wasn’t involved in the decision-making process, providing them with little to no insight into the strategy behind the implementation. Without this critical information, IT has little choice but to define a successful implementation as “software up-and-running” versus “effectiveness at achieving the technology’s intended purpose.” It’s then only a matter of time until the project becomes dismissed because it couldn’t perform, when in reality, it never had a chance to succeed in the first place.

So how can you avoid the all-too-common technology disaster? We’ve broken it down into 10 key principles that will ensure that your business can adopt technology without daily chaos. These principles and the path to mastering technology within your business can be found in our white paper, Why Technology is So Difficult, available for download here.

Arbor Bank Breezing Through Closings

The Omaha World-Herald released an article this week featuring Arbor Bank’s recent mortgage closings with Pavaso. The World-Herald highlights Dale and Darla Langendorfer, seasoned homebuyers, who completed the signing of their mortgage documents digitally, without leafing through paper or even touching a pen. In under three minutes, the Langendorfer’s signatures and initials were placed 48 times across a 75-page stack of documents using Pavaso’s platform technology. Can it get any easier than this?

Arbor Bank is using Pavaso’s Digital Close Enterprise^SM to deliver all closing documents to consumers and fully complete their closings online. There’s no doubt that homebuyers like the Langendorfer’s much prefer this method to the traditional paper closing process. We’re so happy to see Arbor Bank offering their customers the ease and simplicity of a digital closing. The World-Herald also mentions that Arbor Bank is the only Lender in the metro-area to offer this technology, clearly positioning Arbor Bank as the go-to Lender for homebuyers. Great job, Arbor Bank! We look forward to sharing in many more future successes!

You can read the full article from the Omaha World-Herald here.