Despite shrinking IT budgets, now is not the time to stop thinking strategically about technology.

Turn on your TV or pick up a newspaper and the headlines regarding the mortgage industry continue to paint a bleak picture: "Mortgage Market Crisis," "Home Prices Continue to Drop," "Billions in Losses," "Foreclosures Mount," etc. The current mortgage market has caused many lenders to focus solely on cost reductions, and one of the first areas to be cut is typically IT spending. Forrester Research Inc. has lowered its IT spending forecast twice within the last year. The report predicts that IT spending will still grow by 2.8% which is down from their original prediction of 8%. These reductions are important and often necessary, but so too is having the vision to strategically invest in important technology initiatives.

Forward-thinking lenders understand the cyclical nature of the mortgage business and capitalize on the opportunities that a changing mortgage market presents. These opportunities include the ability to revamp their technology infrastructure, rethink their approach to mortgages and align IT initiatives with business requirements; thus gaining the greatest efficiencies enterprise wide.

Embracing new technology initiatives is a clear directive at Thornburg Mortgage. Thornburg Mortgage understands that, despite the current market conditions, it is a great time to invest in technology initiatives. The company believes that a strong alignment between technical resources and business objectives is critical for its success. Further, the current downturn has created an environment in which the business users have more time available to assist with Thornburg Mortgage's IT initiatives. This has provided the company with increased access to its business users, which will ultimately enable Thornburg Mortgage to successfully accomplish its primary business goals.

Thornburg Mortgage always works to maintain an environment where business needs drive IT initiatives. This is precisely why the company developed its "Fresh Start" Program - to enable business users to outline what they need from the company's technology solutions in order to accomplish their specific business objectives. "Fresh Start" began with taking an inventory and review of Thornburg Mortgage's current IT solutions, prioritizing which systems posed the greatest opportunities for enhancement and which solutions had the greatest impact on the company's mortgage operations.

During this exercise, Thornburg Mortgage business users quickly identified Enterprise Lending Solution (ELS) as one of the foundational systems that offered significant opportunities for improvement, and one which has significant impact on the company's business. For its ELS, Thornburg Mortgage partners with Mortgage Cadence and their Orchestrator platform.

A major differentiator of Mortgage Cadence's comprehensive solution is having one centralized location for maintaining rules, security, products, and workflow. This eliminates problems of synchronizing multiple systems, thus reducing the time required to add products, change processes, and adapt to changing market conditions. This initiative will ultimately provide the ability to quickly and easily access data required by Thornburg Mortgage business users. Mortgage Cadence Orchestrator offers sophisticated data driven workflow automation (powered by the ACE™ Rules Engine) including auto-resolution capabilities that greatly improve efficiencies and deliver a significant increase in productivity and customer service.

Through this Fresh Start Program, Thornburg Mortgage used Business Process Modeling techniques to map its new and improved vision for the mortgage operations. The company quickly identified many manual processes that could be fully automated within Mortgage Cadence Orchestrator, thus eliminating gaps existing in many of the company's processes. One such area was in creating process flows that were automated to move the loan through its specific operations once a task was completed. The company's business users needed the flexibility to drive workflows based on the data still needed to close the loan. This eliminated the manual bottlenecks that could potentially slow our process down. Thornburg Mortgage's new automation is creating a much more streamlined and efficient process that will significantly improve the quality of each loan file and its underlying data.

By empowering Thornburg Mortgage business users and encouraging collaboration with the company's IT resources, Thornburg Mortgage began to not only look for ways to automate its current process but more importantly how it could improve the way it does mortgages. What should Thornburg Mortgage's workflow look like? What are the capabilities of its current solutions? How can the company maximize those solutions? What were those systems not meant to do? What other systems can Thornburg Mortgage automate? What can the company do to improve the quality of our loans?

Once Thornburg Mortgage identified areas within its technology infrastructure that could be automated, the company's teams began focusing on one of the most important aspects of its technology initiatives--the customers, which include correspondents, brokers, business partners and borrowers.

The Fresh Start Program team also recognized that enhancing web portal technologies would truly take the company's superior service to the next level by making a very good customer experience great. To accomplish this, Thornburg Mortgage recognized the strategic advantage that Mortgage Cadence offered, through the web portal technologies which are already fully integrated into Orchestrator.

By combining these web portal technologies with Thornburg Mortgage's new and improved workflow automation, the company can break free of the limitations imposed by traditional lending processes to truly improve its customer's experience. The powerful combination of ELS and web portal technologies will have a profound impact on Thornburg Mortgage's customers. Thornburg Mortgage will provide quicker decisions, on-line status, and pipeline information in real time--all while improving the overall quality of data. This significantly improves the securitization process in the company's business.

These technology initiatives have allowed Thornburg Mortgage to enhance its lending process so that it can quickly adapt to changing market conditions, fully utilize its technology platforms, and increase its ability to provide information on demand. Thornburg Mortgage is continually looking for ways to make it easier for its correspondents, brokers, business partners and borrowers.

Thornburg Mortgage has learned, through its Fresh Start Program, the value of having business users drive IT initiatives in a collaborative environment. Fresh Start, which started out looking for a way to enhance our current ELS, has evolved into eight other technology initiatives within this program. Thornburg Mortgage found that investing in technology initiatives during a down market provided great access to the business users and more importantly, to the success of the company's business initiatives.

Robert Moore is the Vice President of Enterprise Business Development with Thornburg Mortgage, a leading single-family residential mortgage lender focused principally on the jumbo and super-jumbo segment of the prime, adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) market. Robert joined Thornburg Mortgage in 2007 with over 23 years experience in the mortgage industry and 30 years experience as an IT professional. Prior to joining Thornburg Mortgage, Robert held several senior management positions with various mortgage and IT companies including 3t Systems, Axis Mortgage & Investments, Pinnacle Information Systems and Wesav Mortgage.

At Thornburg Mortgage, Robert currently specializes in enterprise business development, including business analysis and process, application management, data governance and architecture and IT governance. He is also a member of the Business Intelligence, IT Governance and Mortgage Cadence Advisory groups. Mr. Moore's proven leadership in strategic planning, implementation and project management coupled with his hands-on experience across a wide variety of technology environments have positioned him as a leading strategist among today's mortgage technology specialists.