CIO Bill Morgan reports to you. Why do you think that's important as opposed to him reporting to somebody else? The CEO of a business has to do two things: He has to have adequate information to run the business and has to be sure that he does not have too many direct reports. With too many of those, you are limiting your capacity to manage. You have too much information coming at you, too many people that you have to interact with on a regular basis. [But] this is a business that's conducted from 9:30am to 4 pm, and frequently there are disruptions in the process that are critical to the whole market structure of the United States. If we can't conduct business, under the law, I'm required to call a meeting of a committee that makes the determination as to whether or not to send the order flow to another exchange. So I need to have direct contact with Bill 24/7.

How do you communicate so regularly? One is by e-mail, and we are all tethered with BlackBerrys, which operate across the world. The other is telephone, whether it's by cell or landline. When I have gone on Outward Bound trips, which I try to do every year, Bill can reach me via satellite phone. Interestingly, we actually don't see each other in person that much. My main office is in Philadelphia, but I'm not there more than two or three days a week. I spend a lot of time talking to the customer base, the regulators, lawyers, accountants and bankers.

Overall, what would you say are the biggest lessons you've learned about working with IT? The biggest lesson is never to under fund it because it's much harder to catch up. Number two is do not rely on anything you build to be a long-term solution, because the world will change and there are forces that will make you change your strategies and your technologies to comply on a moment's notice. The third lesson is what makes the other two lessons so important: The world is changing at speeds much greater than anybody could ever have anticipated, and therefore, you can never rest on your laurels. The expression that people frequently use is, If only I could get there, but "there" just keeps moving, so you need to be prepared.

If you could change one thing about IT at the exchange, what would it be? I would want to have triple redundancy instead of double redundancy. I'm always amazed when you have a problem with something that's so off the wall there's no way to anticipate it, and as soon as you go out and fix it, something else goes wrong. That's just the way systems are. This is one reason we decided to make the investment to build the standalone technology centre - to have backups to our backups. You can't build in enough safeguards in our kind of business. All you can do is prepare for problems and be flexible enough to solve them quickly and continue moving forward.