Mellon Financial Corp. Strives to Bring Information Together By Aligning Business and IT
Mellon Financial Corp. One Mellon Center Pittsburgh, PA 15258-0001
SIZE OF FIRM:
$4.2 trillion in assets under management, administration or custody, including $738 billion under management.
PREVIOUS POSITIONS:
Mellon: head of a newly formed software engineering group, head of technology delivery, and executive vice president. Citicorp, director of technology for the Worldwide Securities Services division; also held technology-related positions with Seagrams U.K., Singers U.K., the Rank Organization and Lombard North Central.
WHO WAS YOUR MENTOR?
Mary Cirillo at Citibank. She's very tough, but as pleasant as they come. She taught me that leadership is about leading people.
LAST GOOD BOOK READ:
"A Short History of Nearly Everything," by Bill Bryson.
Top 3 Current Projects
Relocating Data Centers
Objective:
Improve disaster recovery. We run a data processing environment with two data centers -- one is in production and one development, and both work in a continuous mode. Unfortunately, both are within Pittsburgh city limits and, post-9/11, we take a different look at disaster risk, so we're moving one of these data centers 40 miles away for business continuity.
Restructuring Technology Team
Objective:
Better align IT to business needs. Historically, we've been organized by technology silos. The downside is that as a business tries to interact with the infrastructure organization, it has to navigate the multiple technologies. We're restructuring into four units: 1) solutions design; 2) deploy and build; 3) processing and production management; and 4) on-service and service contact.
Private Wealth Management Sales and Portfolio- Management Capabilities
Objective:
Bring all the information together for the portfolio manager and the sales team across the enterprise. We've been rolling out a sales and portfolio-management capability to the organization in phases over the past couple of years. Onyx is the base, but there's a lot of customization.
2007 Initiatives
Technology for the Professional
We all use BlackBerry devices, instant messaging, collaboration tools, etc. But it tends to be ad hoc. How do you get it to be seamless and intuitive to use? With a lot of these technologies, there's a learning curve.
Front-Office Asset-Management Technology
In the asset-management space, we use technology a lot in the back office but not in the front office, with the exception of algorithms. We're looking in a couple of spaces where we think technology can help in the alpha generation with asset managers. One is "deep computing" -- data mining on steroids. Another is parallel and grid computing. That's looking very feasible.
Security and Authorization
We're implementing roles-based access control. You essentially classify individuals within their defined roles, then provide them with all the access requirements they need within those roles. It sounds easy, but there's a lot of administration around it.
Vitals
IT Budget:
More than $500 million.
Key Technology Management:
- Chris O'Brien, Chief of Staff, Cross Border Office,
- Mike Keslar, Technology Delivery ,
- Dave Rosenberg, Project Management Office,
- Peter Beacham, Asset Servicing Operations,
- John Duarte, Asset Management Operations,
- Ann Turnbull, Corporate Technology Services,
- Bill Stanley, Corporate Production Services,
- Pete Johnson, Technology Strategy,
- Paul Smocer, Information Security,
- Tim McManus, Access Control Services
Size of Technology Team:
2,800 employees worldwide.
Percent of IT Projects Outsourced:
30 percent of applications projects.
Key Technology Partners:
IBM and Cisco for infrastructure, and Infosys and Cognizant for applications.
Success Metrics:
The first and most important success criterion is, Are we going to deliver on the business need? Has it solved the business problem?
Technologies such as handheld devices and digitization -- going from analog to digital -- are really taking hold. More of the input coming into us on a transaction level and informal level either has been digitized or it can be. As soon as you digitize it, you can actually manage it in a computing environment.
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