Bank of New York Mellon’s Peter Johnson on Staying Alert to Customers’ Changing Needs

Windows in Financial Services speaks with Peter Johnson, senior vice president of Enterprise Architecture and Web Services at The Bank of New York Mellon to get his perspective on balancing the challenges of the current downturn with increasing demands from sophisticated customers.

WFS: How do you strike that balance between cost cutting and meeting the increasing demands of customers?

PJ: In these challenging times, it is more important than ever to be truly customer aware. Our original prioritization assumptions (from just 3-6 months ago) may no longer be valid. For example, many clients may be interested in products that help them better manage their capital – or better manage risk in their portfolios. We must rebalance our technology investment portfolio based on a deep understanding of our shifting client needs.

WFS: How do you promote innovation in a cost-cutting environment? 

PJ: Challenging times present opportunities – and necessity truly is the mother of invention. We are totally open about our challenges/opportunities with all of our employees, communicating frequently through town hall meetings, publications and various collaboration forums. We then engage innovation through an aggressive goal-setting and planning process that starts at the top of the house and spreads to all employees. This has led to creative thinking and a plethora of innovative cost-cutting and revenue-generating ideas. 

WFS: Tell us about some of the work you are doing with Microsoft.

PJ: We engage with Microsoft along several fronts, including optimization of investment in office automation technology, finding ways to better manage risk in user-defined technologies (such as spreadsheets and small Access databases) that need to move into the data center, understanding strategies for optimizing our SQL Server footprint, and investigating next generation user-interface technologies in development at Microsoft Research.

WFS: What goals have you set for your team the next 12-18 months? How has the crisis changed your priorities?

PJ: We are intensely focused on a handful of very critical Enterprise Architecture goals, including simplification and standardization of our technology stack, improving time-to-market through reuse of standard solution reference architectures, promotion of a technology career path that attracts and retains top talent, and best leverage of global talent within the company, through collaboration mechanisms and techniques. 

WFS: What would you say are some of the lessons learned?

PJ: Most importantly, it is not possible to over-communicate. Frank, honest communication with our workforce builds teamwork and makes us much stronger. Furthermore, diversity (geographic, cultural, etc.) is a huge strength that we can build on as a global entity. New ideas come from this diversity and make us more competitive.

WFS: Do you see any opportunities arising out of this environment? 

PJ: Absolutely. Across all our businesses, the ‘rush to quality’ attracts new clients to us (as one of the few rock-solid financial organizations left on Wall Street). Also, the need to more aggressively manage costs has served to break down traditional status quo thinking. This is leading us to the creation of more efficient corporate utilities – not just in technology, but also in business operations. Fundamentally, we have very strong expertise in risk management throughout our corporation. This expertise is highly valued in today’s volatile marketplace. 

WFS: Finally, let’s go to where you would like to be in five years. What does the customer experience look like both on the Web site and across other channels? 

PJ: Every year, we refresh an annual technology scan that systemically assesses the impact of emerging technologies. We’re presently tracking two trends that we think will have a dramatic impact on client experiences in the next five years: pervasive computing, and Web 2.0 technologies, particularly in rich user interfaces. On the pervasive computing front, there will be dramatic capacity/speed advances in wireless networks of all types. Bandwidth improvements will enable all kinds of mobile (and other) application interfaces, even as innovation continues with touch-screen and haptic-enabled devices. Much has been written about the evolution/revolution of social computing on how clients and suppliers collaborate around service. Clearly, common mechanisms (wikis, blogs, discussion forums, etc.) are already starting to make their way into our client-facing portals. However, more recently, our focus has also turned to advances in Rich Interface Technologies (e.g. Ajax, Flex, Silverlight). We believe this will herald in a whole new class of highly visual, interactive interfaces. To address this, we’re simultaneously designing business architectures to leverage these advances while also developing the technical underpinnings (reference architectures) to deliver them effectively.