• silicon.com
• Management
• CIO Insights

By Julian Goldsmith, 2 December 2008 14:23

COMMENT

What has been the response from your customers?
Some of our larger clients were proportionately more concerned about our small size but all of them have benefited from being able to get at information independently of us.

Fund management businesses have a bad reputation for hoarding information and spinning the data to suit their own ends.

Our SharePoint system allows clients to query the performance numbers on any period they like. Often fund managers pick periods that flatter them. Our clients can do their own numbers.

Because SharePoint is effectively our work tool, they can see presentations being worked up from first draft all the way to presentation standard. They can just log into the system the same as us. That gives them the feeling that though we may make mistakes, we are confident enough to show everything to the client which should reassure them that we don't feel we've got anything to hide.

Our business is all about credibility. If they feel they are getting the complete truth from us from a data perspective, they are much more prepared to give us the time of day.

How has your IT strategy helped you comply with regulation now and set you up to cope with future regulation?
We started with this cloud computing strategy back in 2002, so it was something the FSA had not seen before, but to their credit, they approached it from first principles and they understood the robustness of it.

It's less about the ASP strategy and more about the fact we started in the 21st century, about what we've done from the very first trade, in terms of an audit trail: everything we've ever done is in an SQL database.

That enables us to meet today's compliance challenge but you never know what's going to come along in terms of regulatory obligations.

Everything we've ever done is held in the lowest level of granularity on our systems, so we can respond to the FSA's regulatory changes in the future.

MiFID is a classic example of something that has come in and made an increase in reporting requirement. It's just another SQL query rather than something that one has to scan microfilms or search through a pile of paper that records the process to comply with.

How much in-house development have you done?
We've certainly configured some applications, quite strongly. For instance, our SharePoint looks nothing like what comes out of the box but I don't know whether that would be what you would call development.

We have a very strong view that we must not ask applications to do something they are not designed to do, otherwise they'll fall over.

The way we run our systems, there are no kinks. We do have a couple of support organisations on retainer but we don't have any support contracts.

What's your background and how have your experiences come in handy here?
I spent 10 years in the army, mostly as an air-mobile soldier in the late 1980s. As a soldier I was involved part of the time with military communications or Signals, as it's rather anachronistically called.

As a soldier I learnt two important things that I brought to this world of IT. The first one is the military understands information as a separate concept from the technology that might be used to convey or manage it. My experience of the City is when people talk about IT, they mean technology and very few people have a strategic grasp of the information, which as far as I'm concerned is bizarre. In fund management, information flows round the business like blood round the body but the people who understand that flow can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The other point was the military have a philosophy called 'mission command' which surprises non-military people because often there is relatively little planning in military operations but they have a very clear idea exactly what they are trying to do at the end of the operation. It's about defining the aims but leaving the means flexible. For me that's the same here. In fund management, there is far too much concentration on the process and the project superstructure strangles the life out of solving the problem.

The result is you have much more expensive projects than you need. They don't achieve what they are trying to do because everyone is thinking about Gantt charts and key deliverables. It's a nonsense as far as I'm concerned.