This article is a continuation of my earlier analyses (Part 1, Part 2 here) where I waded into State Street’s strategy for Technology Infrastructure, IT Capability and Staffing, Information Risk & Security, Stakeholder Requirements, and Project ROI. In this final part of my three part series I will broach the company’s strategy for Data Acquisition, Social Media, Organizational Change Management and Project Strategy. State Street’s cloud implementation and virtualization initiative is a worthy example of business strategy/need influencing the firm’s information technology strategy.

State Street: Strategy for Data Acquisition and Impact on Business Processes:

The nature of State Street’s business as a custodian bank with trillions of dollars under custody management and multiple clients distributed worldwide means that the organization houses and processes a tremendous amount of data (internally generated and externally collected). The sheer volume and complexity of this data presents challenges as the bank looks to file regulatory reports and provide data back to its clients. The company receives an untenable 50,000 faxes a month from its client base (Garber, 2016). According to consulting firm Accenture, “(State Street) was unable to adequately track trades through each step in the trading lifecycle because there were multiple reconciliation systems, some reconciliation work was still being done manually and there was no system of record. To maintain industry leadership and comply with regulations, the company’s IT platform had to advance” (Alter, Daugherty, Harris, & Modruson, 2016).

The bank’s cloud initiative helped facilitate and speed up the burdensome process of transferring data back and forth between its clients. In addition, (as of 2016) a new digital initiative (code named State Street Beacon) will potentially help drive more cost savings. The cloud architecture project was a boon to data analysis capabilities as it enabled clients to access their data in the State Street cloud and subsequently enrich the data from multiple sources to support forecasting (Camhi, 2014). In this case, the bank’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) enabled platform as a service (PaaS) capabilities.

The bank has embarked upon the development of 70 mobile apps and services that support its PaaS strategy. In one case, the bank developed a tablet and mobile accessible app for its client base named State Street Springboard. This application put investment portfolio data in the hands of its client base. Additionally, “Since State Street’s core competency is transaction processing, its Gold Copy app is one of the most important new tools it offers: The app lets a manager follow a single ‘gold’ version of a transaction as it moves through all of the company’s many departments and office locations — say, as it makes it way through trading, accounting, and reporting offices globally” (Hogan, 2012). This capability of the Gold Copy app enables more effective management of counterparty risk as an asset moves through the trading process.

State Street’s new infrastructure and massive data collection provides the bank with new big data capabilities that can better inform business units in the area of risk management. Data insights can potentially fortify stress testing, “What-If” and “Black Swan” scenario modeling. As we’ve seen in the recent 2016 case of Britain’s pending withdrawal from the European Union (i.e. “Brexit”), uncertainty in global financial markets is a certainty.

State Street: Strategy for Social Media/Web Presence:

State Street has traditional Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter social presences but it has also used other social platforms to support various aims such as employee interaction and brand awareness. The bank was named a “Social Business Leader for 2013” by Information Week. As part of a “social IT” strategy (in which technology supports a collaboration initiative), the company held an “Innovation Rally” on its eight internal online forums to gather employee ideas on how best to improve its business. From 12,000 total submitted postings, employees could attempt to build a business case around the best ideas for executive management to implement (Carr, 2013). The company also launched an internal “State Street Collaborate” platform with the aim of crowdsourcing employee knowledge to help people find an appropriate in-house expert regarding diverse work related topics of interest.

Additional social initiatives include a partnership with TED to provide employees the opportunity to give a “Ted Talk” in front of their peers; the aim is to promote knowledge sharing within the organization. The bank also experiments with a presence on the (almost defunct) video sharing platform “Vine” where it can showcase the organization in quick six second sound bites. This approach caters to clients and the future millennial talent base.

State Street: Strategy for Organizational Change Management, Project Strategy and Complexity:

As stated earlier in this series, State Street started migrating its new cloud applications to production by selecting those with low volume and low complexity and then gradually ramped up to migrating the more complex applications (McKendrick, 2013). The standardization and virtualization aspects of cloud infrastructure that the bank implemented is conducive to agile development. Standardization and a reusable code approach reduces complexity by limiting development choices, simplifying maintenance and enabling new technology staff to get up to speed on fewer systems. Developers are placed in agile teams with business subject matter experts to provide guidance and to increase stakeholder buy-in. Per Perretta, “We circle the agile approach with additional governance to ensure that the investments are paying off in the appropriate timeframe” (High, 2016).

Another key approach that State Street uses to gauge project complexity is that of predictive analytics. The bank can help its internal business teams better understand the project costs and delivery timetables by analyzing historical data on all of the projects implemented over the years. The predictive analytics model uses inputs such as “…scope, team sizes, capability of the team, the amount of hours each team member spent, and ultimately, how well it delivered on these programs” (Merrett, 2015). As the business teams list their project requirements, the predictive model is created in real time which provides all parties with additional clarity.

Finally, it would be remiss to mention banking and transformation in the same breath without mentioning the requisite layoffs and outsourcing activities. For all the benefits of the bank’s cloud computing initiatives, technology workers who do not fit in with the new paradigm find themselves subjected to domestic and non-domestic outsourcing initiatives. A standardized infrastructure platform leads to fewer distinct systems in the technology ecosystem, an emphasis on code reuse and increased automation. This perfect storm of efficiency gains has lead to roughly 850 IT employees shuffled out of the organization to either IBM, India based Wipro or outright unemployment. Staffing cuts occurred amongst the employees who maintained and monitored mainframes and worked with other non-cloud based infrastructure systems. The bank was interested in shifting fixed costs for variable costs by unloading IT staff who were perceived as not working on innovative cutting edge technologies. The layoffs amount to “21% of State Street’s 4,000 IT employees worldwide” (Tucci, 2011b).

Revisit earlier analyses here:

• More Than You Want to Know About State Street Bank’s Technology Strategy Part 1
• More Than You Want to Know About State Street Bank’s Technology Strategy Part 2

References:

Alter, A., Daugherty, R., Harris, J., & Modruson, F., (2016). A Fresh Start for Enterprise IT. Accenture. Retrieved from https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-outlook-journal-fresh-start-enterprise-it

Camhi, J. (2014). Chris Perretta Builds Non-Stop Change Into State Street’s DNA. Bank Systems & technology. Retrieved from http://www.banktech.com/infrastructure/chris-perretta-builds-non-stop-change-into-state-streets-dna/d/d-id/1317880

Carr, D. (May 30, 2013). State Street: Social Business Leader Of 2013. Retrieved 6/25/16 from http://www.informationweek.com/enterprise/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2013/d/d-id/1110179?

Garber, K. (February 29, 2016). State Street doubles down on digital. SNL Bank and Thrift Daily. Retrieved from Factiva 6/20/16.

High, P. (February 8, 2016). State Street Emphasizes Importance Of Data Analytics And Digital Innovation In New Role. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2016/02/08/state-street-emphasizes-importance-of-data-analytics-and-digital-innovation-in-new-role/#a211b1320481

Hogan, M. (September 3, 2012). State Street’s Trip to the Cloud. Barron’s. Retrieved from Factiva 6/20/16

McKendrick, J. (January 7, 2013). State Street’s Transformation Unfolds, Driven by Cloud Computing. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2013/01/07/state-streets-transformation-unfolds-driven-by-cloud-computing/#408e1acf64cf

Merrett, R. (April 2, 2015). How predictive analytics helped State Street avoid additional IT project costs. CIO. Retrieved from http://www.cio.com.au/article/571826/how-predictive-analytics-helped-state-street-avoid-additional-it-project-costs/

Tucci. L. (July, 20, 2011). State Street tech layoffs: IT transformation’s dark side. Retrieved from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/State-Street-tech-layoffs-IT-transformations-dark-side

This article is a continuation of my earlier analysis (Part 1 here) where I waded into State Street’s strategy for Technology Infrastructure and IT Capability and Staffing. In this second part of my three part series I will broach the company’s strategy for information risk and security, stakeholder requirements and project return on investment. State Street’s cloud implementation and virtualization initiative is a good example of business strategy/need influencing the firm’s information technology strategy.

State Street: Strategy for Information Risk & Security:

State Street has acquired a substantial client base and houses sensitive financial data that is subjected to regulatory scrutiny. Given the sensitive nature of its data and operations, the cloud infrastructure that the bank chose to implement was that of a virtualized private cloud. Former Chief Innovation Officer Madge Meyer stated, “We’re totally virtualized, our network is a virtual private IP network. Our servers are 72 percent virtualized and our storage is all virtualized for structured/unstructured data” (Burger, 2011). For State Street, a private cloud offers the benefits of a public cloud with the added benefit of being owned and operated by the bank (i.e. exclusive dedication). While no architecture is 100% secure, the risk of an information breach is mitigated as the controlling organization’s data can be completely isolated from the data of another organization.

Additionally, the cloud implementation and virtualization initiative gave rise to shared services that are centrally managed but enforced across the enterprise. This single security framework can be applied across all of the application touch points precluding the need for multiple security frameworks across disparate systems.

State Street: Strategy for Stakeholder Requirements, Testing & Training/Support:

The architecture group within State Street works together with the business to tie together strategic objectives. The idea to embrace cloud implementation (and the additional data functionality it enabled for the bank’s clients) emanated in the architecture group. Thus, the business and the board of directors were key stakeholders in the initiative. The board of directors has a special dedicated technology committee that receives “a complete rundown of the technology strategy and the work that we (IT group) are doing in terms of digitizing the business” (High, 2016). According to Perretta, “They (architecture group) created a proof of concept with an eye toward: Here are the capabilities that our entire organization is going to need, here are the technologies that we can deploy, and here’s how to make them operational” (Camhi, 2014).

State Street started migrating its new cloud applications to production by selecting those with low volume and low complexity and then gradually ramped up to migrating the more complex applications (McKendrick, 2013). Dual pilots of the cloud architecture were conducted using roughly 100 machines. Once favorable results were achieved, a larger pilot consisting of 500 machines was stood up. Approximately 120 use cases were tested in the pilot in order to let the development team understand the failure points of the system (Tucci, 2011a).

The standardization and virtualization aspects of the cloud infrastructure the bank implemented was conducive to agile development. Virtual machines on the cloud allowed development teams to spin up multiple server instances as opposed to physically installing a new box in the legacy non-virtualized environment. Contention between teams waiting for server use is virtually eliminated. “When adding cloud computing to agile development, builds are faster and less painful, which encourages experimentation” (Kannan, 2012). The relative ease at which development and testing servers can be instantiated promotes “spur of the moment” experimental builds that could yield additional innovative features and capabilities.

State Street: Project ROI and Key Success Measures:

Prior to State Street’s cloud infrastructure upgrade initiatives, potential operating cost savings were projected to be $575 million to $625 million by the end of 2014; which State Street is on track to achieve. “The bank had pretax run-rate expense savings from the initiative of $86 million in 2011, $112 million in 2012, and $220 million in 2013” (Camhi, 2014).

When the IT group makes a budget request for substantial investments, they must lay out the potential benefits to the business. Some of the benefits are timely payback, regulatory compliance, data quality improvement and faster development cycle times (providing features and functionality with re-use and less coding). The ultimate aim is to connect the IT strategy to business results in a way that yields advantage for the organization.

In 2011, State Street published a matrix on the advantages of cloud computing vs. traditional IT. The following figure provides insight into State Street’s IT and business unit considerations with respect to making an investment in a fixed or variable cost infrastructure (Pryor, 2011).

	Traditional IT	Cloud Computing
Cash Flow	Hardware / software purchased upfront	Costs incurred on a pay-as-you-go basis
Risk	Entire risk taken upfront with uncertain return	Financial risk is taken incrementally and matched to return
Income Statement Impact	Maintenance and depreciated capital expense	Maintenance costs only
Balance Sheet Impact	Hardware / software carried as a long-term asset	Cost incurred on a pay-as-you-go basis

From a funding perspective, State Street employs the chargeback funding method for its private cloud initiative. Architectural capabilities empower end-users to automatically provision virtualized servers for usage. There are policies in place that determine how long a virtual server may remain instantiated and how much load balancing is performed across the infrastructure. Server usage is monitored, measured and chargeback is calculated based upon end-user processing time. Subsequently, the usage is billed back to the end-user’s respective business unit. “In short, it puts a management layer of software over the virtualized servers and operates them in a highly automated, low touch, fashion” (Babcock, 2011).

Don’t miss part 3 of the analysis:
More Than You Want to Know About State Street Bank’s Technology Strategy Part 3

References:

Babcock, C. (November 9, 2011). 6 big questions for private cloud projects. Information Week. Retrieved from Factiva.

Burger, K. (October, 1, 2011). Riding The Innovation Wave; Technology innovation has been key to State Street Corp.’s success, according to chief innovation officer Madge Meyer — and she’s been willing to take some risks to prove it. Bank Systems + Technology. Retrieved from Factiva

Camhi, J. (2014). Chris Perretta Builds Non-Stop Change Into State Street’s DNA. Bank Systems & technology. Retrieved from http://www.banktech.com/infrastructure/chris-perretta-builds-non-stop-change-into-state-streets-dna/d/d-id/1317880

High, P. (February 8, 2016). State Street Emphasizes Importance Of Data Analytics And Digital Innovation In New Role. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2016/02/08/state-street-emphasizes-importance-of-data-analytics-and-digital-innovation-in-new-role/#a211b1320481

Kannan, N. (August 20, 2012). 6 Ways the Cloud Enhances Agile Software Development. CIO. Retrieved from http://www.cio.com/article/2393022/enterprise-architecture/6-ways-the-cloud-enhances-agile-software-development.html

McKendrick, J. (January 7, 2013). State Street’s Transformation Unfolds, Driven by Cloud Computing. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2013/01/07/state-streets-transformation-unfolds-driven-by-cloud-computing/#408e1acf64cf

Tucci. L. (July, 2011a). In search of speed, State Street’s CIO builds a private cloud. Retrieved from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/podcast/In-search-of-speed-State-Streets-CIO-builds-a-private-cloud

Introduction:

In November of 2010, Investment Management firm State Street Bank publicly announced an overall transformation of its technology infrastructure. State Street is a massively sized transaction services provider to both mutual and pension fund managers. The custodian bank holds $23 trillion in investor accounts in 29 countries around the world. In an organization with a massive store of data (most of it subjected to regulatory oversight), enterprise wide data conformity and accessibility is a challenge.

In a case of business strategy/need influencing information technology strategy, State Street’s COO in 2009 (Jay Hooley) wanted to help an institutional client calculate its exposure to a particular market. The information request was highly urgent given the financial consequences of late reactions during the great recession. “Getting the numbers turned into a painful exercise as State Street’s middle- and front-office staffers reconciled disparate data sets housed in different client systems and in nine of State Street’s 29 global locations” (Fest 2013). This failure to deliver for the client in an instantaneous manner spurred Hooley to call upon his information technology leadership to present a strategy to address this business need. The result of the IT leadership planning effort was the idea to move the bank’s diverse legacy infrastructure to a more standardized and nimble cloud computing architecture.

State Street: Strategy for Technology Infrastructure:

Former State Street CIO Chris Perretta, who as of 2016 holds a similar position at MUFG America’s Holdings Corporation, spent a considerable amount of time evangelizing the benefits of cloud computing to both the business and the bank’s board members. In its early stages, the technology vision resulting from the COO’s planning request was to position an updated infrastructure as a competitive advantage for the business in terms of cost savings, automation, and future development efficiency. Furthermore, the updated infrastructure could be an enabler of new product revenue streams. It should be noted that a shift to the cloud for a financial organization the size of State Street was unusual. “Too Big to Fail” sized banks are not typically known for their innovative technology development. Derisively, the bank has been known as “Staid Street” for its conservative manner. Within financial services, innovation is usually the domain of smaller, nimbler “fintech” startups looking for scalability and speed to market.

From an infrastructure perspective, State Street embarked upon migrating from disparate legacy data centers running proprietary Unix servers to a standardized cloud architecture based upon commoditized x86 servers running Linux. The initial cloud service was built from a Massachusetts based disaster recovery center and the bank currently has six major data centers in the U.S., Europe and Asia along with three backup facilities (Brodkin, 2011). In addition to the rollout of virtualization capabilities and distributed database functionality, Perretta states, “New tools for provisioning, change control, load balancing, a common security framework and various types of instrumentation to enable multi-tenant infrastructures are all part of the mix” (Brodkin, 2011).

Traditionally State Street has relied upon the “build rather than buy” approach as it builds customized software (development traditionally accounting for ~20%-25% of annual IT budget) to meet its needs (CMP TechWeb, 2012). The standardized cloud platform now enables developers to reuse code for future development which can shorten project timeframes.

State Street: Strategy for IT Capability & Staffing:

State Street’s IT organizational structure can be characterized as federalism. With the federalist approach, the organization gains the benefit of having centralized leadership and vision at the “top of the house”, yet allows decentralized co-located IT groups to remain responsive to their respective divisions. As described by former CIO Perretta, “We line up delivery capacity with each unit, and each CIO is responsible for delivering business services to that unit” (MacSweeney, 2009). For example, The CIO has a direct report on the ground in China where the company operates a subsidiary (State Street Technology Zhejiang Co). Furthermore, the bank is tolerant of “skunk works” style projects that organically develop in different IT divisions throughout the enterprise (MacSweeny, 2009).

On the centralized side of the federalist equation, the bank operates a shared services group that is responsible for technical necessities distributed throughout the enterprise (i.e. security, information and communications). This federalized approach makes sense for a sprawling organization that is comprised of disparate business operations across its custodian bank, investment management, investment research and global divisions.

With the introduction of the cloud infrastructure at State Street, the technology staffing vision is to acquire individuals with architectural knowledge who can think “big picture” yet are able to wallow in the details as necessary. The bank employs a chief architect whose aim is to drive technology innovation that leads to strategies that will impact the business in an advantageous manner. Perretta states, “We don’t use him to manage projects; we use him to come up with the ideas that make sense for our business community. Now he does those pilots, and then we industrialize them for the rest of the organization” (Tucci, 2011).

To be continued in Part 2 and Part 3 where I address additional areas such as:

• Strategy for Information Risk & Security
• Strategy for Stakeholder Requirements, Testing & Training/Support
• Project ROI and Key Success Measures
• Strategy for Data Acquisition and Impact on Business Processes
• Strategy for Social Media/Web Presence
• Strategy for Organizational Change Management, Project Strategy and Complexity

References:

Brodken, J. (April, 14, 2011). State Street modernizing with cloud, Linux technologies; Virtualization, open source drive cloud project at State Street. Network World Fusion. Retrieved from Factiva 6/19/2016

CMP TechWeb. (June, 25, 2012). State Street Private Cloud: $600 Million Savings Goal. Retrieved from Factiva 6/19/2016

Fest, G. (January 1, 2013). State Street’s Dig (Data); Championed by CEO Jay Hooley, boston-based state street is remapping a huge technology infrastructure to reap the benefits of the cloud and big data. American Banker Magazine. Vol.123, No.1. Retrieved from Factiva

MacSweeney, G. (August, 1, 2009). Serious Innovation; CIO Christopher Perretta supports all of State Street’s IT needs by mixing new technologies and rapid development and even encouraging ‘skunk works’ experimentation when appropriate. Wall Street & Technology. Retrieved from Factiva

Tucci. L. (July, 2011). In search of speed, State Street’s CIO builds a private cloud. Retrieved from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/podcast/In-search-of-speed-State-Streets-CIO-builds-a-private-cloud

Photo courtesy of DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF