CU*Answers recently celebrated the retirement of CIO Jody Karnes, effective September 30th, 2017. Jody, whose retirement was initially announced earlier in 2017, spent the last six months preparing teams for her transition. “In technology circles you all ways respect that some person has to be the person-of-last resort, the person who steps up and solves the problem or makes the final call,” said CEO Randy Karnes. “Jody has been that person at CU*Answers for over 23 years now. And not only did technical peers come to count on her, so did credit unions and cooperative leaders as well.”
Ms. Karnes began her programming career in 1977 for a savings & loan service bureau, and later arrived at CU*Answers—then WESCO—in 1994 as director of technical resources. Since her arrival, the cooperatively-owned CUSO has grown from serving approximately 30 credit unions to over 250.
“I remember celebrating 1 million members for the first time in 2008,” said Ms. Karnes. “Now, there are more than 2 million in our network, with multiple data centers across the country. This success was achieved with an extremely talented group of folks who made coming to work every day fun and exciting for me. I will not miss the 3 a.m. phone calls or the occasional all-night work sessions, but what I will miss is working with our clients and credit union people who sincerely care about the members they serve.”
Jody does not plan on slowing down in retirement, however, having caught the travel bug, and in the spirit of learning, planning on taking up Spanish. Randy added, “My hat is off to someone who set the bar for leadership and responding to responsibility when called upon. It is with great admiration that I bid a fond friend farewell in retirement.”
CU*Answers adds new EVPs to replace CIO on Executive Council
With Jody’s departure, CU*Answers has promoted two team members to the role of executive vice president, joining the Executive Council. Dave Wordhouse has been with CU*Answers for 15 years and has been an integral part of the Network Services team in his role as VP of Network Technologies. Dave’s new role will be Executive Vice President of Technology.
Brian Maurer has been working with CU*Answers for 5 years, growing the programming department as VP of Software Development. His new role will be Executive Vice President of Software Development.
As part of its succession plan, CU*Answers also promoted several other key staff members: Chris Shelton (13 years) to Vice President of Network Infrastructure, Matt Sawtell (15 years) to Vice President of Managed Technology Services, Don Laffitte to Assistant Vice President of Web Technologies, Bob Colburn to Assistant Vice President of Core Technologies, and Lorie Morse to Assistant Vice President of Integration Technologies.
“CU*Answers prides itself on its People Development Life Cycle—our best practice approach to team leader succession and personnel changes,” said Randy. “While we’ve been extremely fortunate to have had team members like Jody contribute to our growth, what really makes a firm successful is the not the people, but the system it has in place to find, nurture, and replace those people. We’ve put a lot of thought into that, and it’s shown in the way our teams have not missed a beat as leadership chairs have changed.”