Top 3 Current Projects

Business Alignment

Objective:

Ensure the right organizational alignment between technology and the business. Barclays has gone through unprecedented growth over the past few years, and accordingly, technology has had to keep pace. Historically, we've had more of a support service culture and that has served the business well. We are now at a point where the complexity of the business, on a product, time zone and organizational level, warrants a different model. A key part of my hire, because of my background in business and technology, is to make IT a partner with the business -- and run IT as a business -- to sustain and facilitate growth.

Innovation

Objective:

Foster innovation. There is a huge push to get the technology group to be part of the business and think through innovation. We've set up various technical innovation groups on the applications and engineering infrastructure side. The takeaway is it's not just about technology. It's thinking culturally about the way we work everyday and finding ways to innovate -- not just in technology areas, but around process, sourcing and organizational governance.

Next-Generation Portfolio Management Applications

Objective:

We embarked last year on a next-generation infrastructure and application suite using service-oriented architecture to simplify our legacy environment. We're building a suite of next-generation applications around portfolio management, and middle-office and post-trade processing.

Start Date:

The latter part of 2005.

Expected Completion:

There will be deliverables through 2008.

Architecture Blueprint

Objective:

To create standards around the technologies that we use and make sure they're aligned with business needs. The emphasis is on reuse and leveraging components quickly to serve new businesses.

Hiring Push

Objective:

There's an ongoing push to step up how we recruit for technology positions to get the right domain knowledge and breadth into the organization.

2007 Initiatives

SOA and Systems Development

Continue to deliver a service-oriented architecture and related services and applications. Continually roll out products for various businesses, including portfolio systems, cross-asset platforms, order management systems and other business deliverables that add value to the business.

Vitals

Size of Technology Team:

550 employees.

Percent of IT Projects Outsourced:

A small percentage of projects is outsourced today.

Key Technology Partners:

N/A

Success Metrics:

Managing actual versus budgeted costs, tracking on-time delivery and striving for zero tolerance of downtime. We look at our overall effectiveness in terms of IT's value-add in facilitating business growth.

Would your firm consider partnering with other IM firms? I don't see us partnering in terms of constructing applications, but clearly we're very collaborative in terms of open information and best practices.