The Challenge

The Investment Bank has grown extraordinarily fast as a company in the last four years, and the IT function had to change processes, scale of operation, attitudes about goals of the function, etc amid this huge growth spurt.  In the growth, the ‘front office' relied upon having access to leading edge technology and systems.  IT also had to rescale their platforms to cope with exponential volumes of trading in front office.  Our challenge was:

The Solution

We worked with the global IT function to help it shift its ways of working, so that it both created a stronger customer service focus as well as growing a ‘mature' IT function from a small and maverick team a few years before. We helped the senior teams find ways of being robust and challenging with each other rather than being siloed and competitive.  The current management splits, between UK, US and Asia Pacific are being addressed and work is being done that helps them confront some of the ‘undiscussable' elements of their current activity, such as the UK-centric focus of the senior leadership, the western ‘macho' style of management, the male / female imbalance at senior level, and the tension between task delivery and development of their staff and business offerings.

The Outcomes

Our work with the senior teams across the three elements of the IT function has really enabled them to move from siloed operations to integrated business activities.  It got them to restructure their teams so that there was a sharper ‘connection' between the key aspects of the functions and a clearer strategic focus where, in the past, leaders had become sucked into operational problem solving at the expense of a broader set of business priorities.