September 2009

Almost exactly one year after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the sale of Merrill Lynch and the subsequent fallout to the global financial services market, the industry is still figuring out how to move forward and make lemonade from the lemons it has been given.

Against this backdrop, about two dozen Boston-area CIOs —from Fidelity Investments, State Street and other leading financial firms — met on September 9 to discuss their leaner, and in some cases meaner, IT operations.

Bruce Rogow, former Gartner Research Fellow who speaks regularly with CIOs as Principal of Vivaldi Advisory Service and Odyssey program, noted that in the new environment IT can no longer determine what users and customers want. IT must respond to the business and the marketplace even if “you may have to throw out [some projects] and start again,” he said.

Rogow sees new opportunities arising and he offered a call to action, too. Most businesses will emerge from the recession as changed companies and their former models will no longer serve them. It’s a chance to “redesign the business with IT as the hub,” he said. IT will increasingly get “out of the device business” to offer “alternative delivery vehicles” such as services over the public infrastructure, mobile apps, “extreme virtualization” and cloud computing to meet demand-side expectations.

Picking up on this theme, State Street EVP and CIO Christopher Perretta said that CIOs can actually “take advantage of the turbulence” to create new products and services. He welcomes the challenge and encouraged his peers to seek untraditional and “dial-moving types of innovation” that allow IT to differentiate the business from competitors.

At his company, Perretta is exploring a “virtual PC environment” where IT doesn’t provide every piece of client hardware — whether it’s an iPhone or a PC. Instead, users can access a virtual image of their desktop on a cloud service secured and supported by IT. It’s a way of shifting limited resources while still providing basic services, he said.

It’s wise to make the most of what you have –especially considering the alternatives. Therefore, CIOs may want to roll up their sleeves and make some lemonade!

[You can download the slides from this event on our Event page here]