The Execution: Dismantling a $US1.5 Billion Giant

Nobody saw more decisions pass go than Sharon Donovan Hart. As State Street's executive vice president of business project services, Donovan Hart was in charge of the integration project management office, and, as such, was the top liaison between the businesspeople and the technologists. Those 900 apps that State Street had to ferret through? She looked at them all. The conversion of 11,000 portfolios? She was there, helping decide which clients would be brought onto State Street's platforms and when. Yet when she describes her approach, she speaks less of governance and more about how a clear strategy, provided by the executive team, helped her group make decisions.

"When we go into Deutsche, there are certain things that are not on the table for a decision - we just want to do those," says Donovan Hart, one of Antonellis's six direct reports and a 20-year State Street veteran. These were the criteria that she received from the IT Council, based on the objectives established by the Executive Steering Group:

• Anything that relates to us having to scale State Street's existing systems, we'll put IT resources against that.

• Anything that relates to our ability to convert these portfolios, that's a priority.

• Any project that relates to retiring a system because of the costs associated with it, that's a priority.

Everything else - a particular feature requested by a client, for instance, or a change that might make pensions run more smoothly - was open for discussion.

The tricky part was that there wasn't necessarily anything wrong with any of Deutsche Bank's applications. This was where governance was critical. For example, Deutsche Bank had a sparkling-new compliance application, but it had been rolled out to only six clients. Should it be adopted broadly, supported on a limited basis or simply yanked?

"The decision that people had to make was: OK, this application is brand new, but they only have six clients on it, and we have our own compliance systems," Antonellis explains. "Yes, that Deutsche Bank application may have the functionality, but it would take time and money not only to convert the Deutsche Bank clients to it, but then to convert our own client base. We had to decide."

Based on the parameters that had been set by the executive groups - the cost-cutting mantra - the integration project management office decided to retire Deutsche Bank's compliance application. The alternative, while it might have seemed logical, would have resulted in redundancies.

"If we didn't have clear focus," Donovan Hart says, "we could have been spending a lot of time building out product feature sets - because that would have been the natural pull from the business side - and lost sight of the need to convert and retire systems."

In the end, of the 80 major systems that were part of the Deutsche Bank acquisition, State Street brought over only three (and is still deciding on a fourth) - a feat that was possible only because dismantling the $US1.5 billion giant had been defined as a strategic goal.