The Faith: The Business of IT Is Business

Although Antonellis can't measure exactly how much IT governance helped, the fact that it did is with him a matter of faith.

"If we didn't have an IT governance process," says Antonellis, "we wouldn't have an enterprise architecture; we wouldn't have standards; we wouldn't have best-practice procedures. You could very well envision [in the extreme] a group of people saying: 'Let's build it all out'," meaning, in this case, that each Deutsche Bank customer would have had, in effect, his own personalized suite of enterprise IT functions. "The business driver," Antonellis says, "would have been: 'Let's get this business on board and keep the clients happy.'

"And then," Antonellis continues, "you build a whole new silo parallel to the bank's existing silos - which, quite frankly, is what happens in many acquisitions." If the Deutsche Bank acquisition had been handled like that, State Street might even have surpassed its goal of retaining 90 percent of customer revenue - but at what operating cost going forward?

It remains to be seen whether even world-class IT governance will be enough to get State Street back on track. During the company's third-quarter earnings call last October, CEO Ronald Logue announced another round of retrenchments (425 employees this time), which he said would help the company trim $US50 million more from its expenses. The company had spent another $US16 million in that third quarter on merger and integration costs related to Deutsche Bank, and executives had to deny rumours that State Street might soon be the company being acquired, rather than doing the acquiring.

Still, Antonellis continues to look for efficiencies, and he's been asked to roll out his governance model to the operations side of the house.

"I'm not a technologist, I'm a businessperson," Antonellis says. "For too many years, the business cast IT in the role of order-takers and said: 'We make the decisions, and you go execute.'"

Now, that's no longer the case.

"Good IT governance brings IT into the strategy of the company, creates solution sets, and then works to rationalize your processes.

"To me, IT governance is good business process applied to business decisions," says Antonellis.

And there's nothing metaphysical about that.