InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Guy Chiarello, JPMorgan Chase

In a time of excruciating uncertainty in the global banking industry last fall, JPMorgan Chase twice stepped in to make pivotal deals, buying retail bank Washington Mutual and investment bank Bear Stearns. It's not surprising that the integration work involved is among the top of CIO Guy Chiarello's IT priorities. What's surprising is the speed with which Chiarello's team expects to get the job done.

Washington Mutual, a retail banking giant until its sudden collapse last year, brings with it all the IT resources, systems, and back-end processes that supported more than 2,000 branches and 40,000 employees. JPMorgan Chase expects to bring that processing volume onto its own IT systems and to fully integrate it all by year's end. The integration of Bear Stearns, because it's an investment bank, entails entirely different integration challenges.

At the same time, Chiarello has his team constantly pushing for IT infrastructure innovation. JPMorgan Chase has virtualized 30,000 desktops, terabytes of storage, and about 3,000 servers, with plans for 7,000 more. It's moving 175,000 desktops to Microsoft Exchange over 18 months-and that's without adding in the two acquisitions. The goal is to squeeze the "business as usual" part of IT, to drive operating expenses down year over year. To manage the bank's worldwide IT assets-about 25,000 IT employees and a $7 billion budget-Chiarello's managers rely on global architecture and engineering, but they're accountable for regional execution.

Chiarello worked his way up through the ranks of Wall Street IT, and he brings the priorities of someone with hands-on experience: build systems with an emphasis on quality, productivity, and cost-in that order.