The Computerworld Honors Program
Honoring those who use Information Technology to benefit society
LOCATION:
North Quincy, MA, US

YEAR:
2008

STATUS:
Laureate

CATEGORY:
Finance, Insurance and Real Estate

NOMINATING COMPANY:
CA

ORGANIZATION:
State Street Corporation, Global Infrastructure Services

PROJECT NAME:
Zero Footprint, Maximum Impact



Introductory Overview
As the world's leading investment service provider, State Street delivers customized solutions to asset managers, pension funds, hedge funds, insurance companies, collective funds, mutual funds and nonprofit institutions. State Street maintains operations in 26 countries and spans more than 100 markets. In Europe and Asia-Pacific, State Street is currently growing faster than the market itself. State Street has also globalized its operational model, shifting certain business processes to lower-cost geographic locations, including Eastern Europe, India and China.

These fundamental changes, to “where, when, and how” work actually gets done, have overthrown many assumptions that were once embedded in the IT mindset. For example, data center staff never imagined that the quiet hours once reserved for leisurely batch processes would be filled with the keystrokes of distant users. Application developers did not originally design solutions for wide area access, and network managers did not initially configure inter-organizational security models. Most significantly, people requiring and providing support had never been as separated by language, distance, and time zones.

These were among the challenges facing the State Street Global IT Infrastructure Services team, led by EVP Madge Meyer, as they began stretching, re-shaping, and re-creating their IT infrastructure to meet the demands of unprecedented business growth.

The technical and organizational design they leveraged, now known as “Zero Footprint, Maximum Impact,” provided her team with the capability to deploy comprehensive business technology infrastructure, in order to meet business performance requirements on demand, in a timely and cost-effective manner.

The core of this strategy essentially reduces the IT infrastructure footprint in the local office and instead strongly relies on regional datacenters. Technologies such as wide area network acceleration, remote access optimization, desktop and server/storage virtualization, federated security, and capacity-on-demand, bring the applications to the end-user, whenever and wherever needed. By minimizing the infrastructure deployed to local sites, the team can accelerate implementation and reduce costs. This approach eliminates the often significant issues and expenditures related to space, electricity, HVAC, and data backup, while also reducing environmental impact.

Another strategic benefit is a global support team which can be tightly coupled with local and regional staff to support end users around the clock and around the world. As businesses and staff are acquired or new staffing resources are brought on board, the team leverages ITIL standards and repeatable processes to help bridge those transitions, accelerate learning curves and reduce language and time zone barriers. US-based support staff benefit from this global model as well, finding that it has reduced middle-of-the-night phone calls they had long held to be an unavoidable aspect of their jobs.

Most importantly, this solution allows the IT Infrastructure team to respond rapidly and flexibly to new and ever changing global business growth and acquisition opportunities.
The Importance of Technology
How did the technology you used contribute to this project and why was it important?
The “Zero Footprint, Maximum Impact” strategy relies on several advanced technologies to deliver business, operational, and desktop functionality without the need to physically locate IT infrastructure (including servers, storage, email and backup) at local offices.

The core technology is Wide Area Application Service (WAAS), which uses proprietary algorithms to significantly improve application performance over the network. This allows the network to provide services from dedicated regional datacenters without introducing distance-related performance issues. Export of a file from India to Boston, a key assessment benchmark, demonstrated that this technology reduced execution time from 10 minutes to 8 seconds. As experienced daily by users seamlessly sharing common file services with counterparts over 6,000 miles away, this technology enables business processes to occur in real-time across the globe.

Another key technology is desktop virtualization, which State Street has used to create a standard desktop computer that IT staff can support and maintain from a central location, significantly reducing support cost and complexity. Given the increasing mobility of State Street staff, this standardized desktop remains familiar to employees, and increases their comfort level as well as productivity. Additionally, state-of-the-art remote access technology used in conjunction with federated security provides end-users with seamless global access to their business applications.

Employees find that the desktop they sit at, the applications they use, and the files they access will perform and look the same, whether at home or abroad. This approach also helps to synchronize the user experience of employees working together, while situated separately.

State Street also employs server and storage virtualization, logical partitioning, application stacking and MPLS to provide capacity-on-demand. This design, incorporated into our Global Data Center Strategy, allows the team to provision new offices with minimal lead-time, immediate recovery, and business continuity. These capabilities also minimize downtime due to scheduled maintenance, an increasingly important requirement for operating in a global economy. The centralization of application data and infrastructure utilities within regional datacenters ensures that effective management, security, retention, and other key controls remain in place, despite the customary challenges brought on by significant growth.

These technologies work together to enable the IT Infrastructure team to meet — and even exceed — business expectations by supplying universal technological capabilities to any potential business end-point, in a way that replicates the local office experience for the end-user.

Benefits
Has your project helped those it was designed to help?   Yes

Has your project fundamentally changed how tasks are performed?   Yes

What new advantage or opportunity does your project provide to people?
As recounted in other sections of this Case Study, the Zero Footprint strategy has resulted in a broad spectrum of benefits, including:
• faster time-to-market in response to business opportunities
• seamless end-user and business mobility
• achievement of high service levels for application availability and performance
• effective security, control and business continuity
• consistent, efficient and cost-effective follow-the-sun support
• minimal impact on the environment
• reduced project and technology risk and expense

These benefits are the direct result of a strategy that is able to configure an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution meeting the majority of IT infrastructure requirements for any new business acquisition or expansion in any of State Street’s existing or targeted global locations. The most significant advantage that this capability provides is precisely the one sought by any IT infrastructure team striving to maintain a stable and cost-effective environment in the face of business growth, change, complexity and demand: becoming an enabler to business success, rather than an impediment.


If possible, include an example of how the project has benefited a specific individual, enterprise or organization. Please include personal quotes from individuals who have directly benefited from your work.
Our new offices in India and Poland are both examples of strategic business initiatives that leveraged the Zero Footprint model.

James MacNevin, Senior Managing Director for SSgA in India explains, "When SSgA decided to commence operations in Bangalore, we wanted to provide an environment where employees could excel and contribute, and a work space where they felt comfortable and valued. The result has exceeded these aspirations, and the response from our employees and the local market has been universal praise. The innovative solution that our infrastructure group put together was key to this success."

Poland is also in a state of rapid transformation and growth. In just a few months time, State Street hired a highly skilled and enthusiastic workforce of several hundred. As word of the successful launch of the Krakow office reached employees of Polish descent working in other State Street locations, several sought out and found internal job opportunities there, returning with their families to their native country. The influx of an experienced State Street workforce even further accelerated the expansion of State Street’s presence in Poland.

The Zero Footprint strategy allowed State Street to quickly provision these new operations and employees, fueling both the expansion and the globalization of our business operations.


Originality
Is it the first, the only, the best or the most effective application of its kind?   All of the above

What are the exceptional aspects of your project?
Many elements of the Zero Footprint solution, such as Wide Area Application Service (WAAS), are relatively new technologies. We are not aware of any another organization that has yet leveraged and packaged these IT infrastructure components into the strategic enabler of business growth that we use at State Street.

The most exceptional technical aspect of this solution is a capability that allows State Street to deliver local-office performance and experience to individual and regional user communities located thousands of miles away from the systems, applications, and IT support teams that they rely upon.

The most exceptional organizational aspect of this solution is an infrastructure support model that has successfully synchronized processes, tools, and resources across a global landscape, and is reliably delivering around-the-clock, around-the-world support while continually integrating new locations, business lines, and end-user communities.

The most exceptional business service delivery aspect of this initiative is its ability to overcome the fundamental paradox of IT infrastructure that commonly pits business growth against technology performance, business change against technology reliability, and business vision against technology constraints. The truly exceptional aspect of this solution is that the team can – and does – refer to their routinely consistent achievement of tight project deadlines and ambitious business targets and deliverables with the phrase: “just another day!”


Difficulty
What were the most important obstacles that had to be overcome in order for your work to be successful? Technical problems? Resources? Expertise? Organizational problems?
The most important obstacles that had to be overcome dealt with the transition from a geographically distributed technology and support infrastructure to a globally integrated one. Although the evolution still continues, many of these challenges were addressed through the course of this initiative.

Of these challenges, the most obvious were technical and process related. Technology issues were actually the least complicated, however, being well-defined and commonly understood, with clear success criteria and limited options to select from. Process issues were slightly murkier, although the use of ITIL industry standards significantly simplified discussions and solution design.

The challenges that were far more difficult to predict, identify, and resolve, however, were those introduced by the nature of globalization itself; operating across diverse time zones, languages, and cultural communities. These challenges showed quick contempt for project management and communication techniques that had performed effectively under local conditions. Time and effort estimates, for example, were decimated by the delays of coordinating across time zones. Language, knowledge, and cultural differences impeded both requirements and issues management. More important than anything, however, was the need to develop trust and relationship across different teams.

Often the most innovative projects encounter the greatest resistance when they are originally proposed. If you had to fight for approval or funding, please provide a summary of the objections you faced and how you overcame them.
The business case was so compelling that there was little resistance for approval, and business uncertainty about technology performance was quickly addressed by a successful proof-of-concept. The only “buy-in” challenge came from the toughest critics– those responsible for solution design and support. No business case is enough to convince subject matter experts to redesign how their services are delivered. In this case, however, the technology, and the opportunity to collaborate with an expanded, global talent pool were both compelling. The India off-shoring support component also encountered initial resistance. Employees had two concerns: “How will this impact my role?” and “Will this approach do the job?” This resistance was quickly overcome, however, when employees began to experience the direct work/life benefits, and also developed trust and working relationships with the offshore staff. Employees not only accept the model now, they are advocates of it!

Success
Has your project achieved or exceeded its goals?   Exceeded

Is it fully operational?   Yes

How do you see your project's innovation benefiting other applications, organizations, or global communities?
The “Zero Footprint, Maximum Impact” solution has been successfully deployed in new offices across all of State Street’s global regions. Today, Madge Meyer’s team can reflect back on an 18 month period in which they leveraged this solution to establish seven new office buildings across three continents and to provide services to more than 5,000 staff members.

The success of this solution has already begun impacting areas of the organization outside of the targeted scope. The dramatic performance improvement offered by network acceleration technology, for example, has led it to become an integral component of our network strategy, allowing State Street to deploy configurations that would otherwise have been too complex or expensive. The global support model is also being leveraged elsewhere, with particular emphasis on the “lessons learned” for successful off-shoring and globalization. In response to a request from State Street’s CIO, the team is currently developing an analysis and recommendation to identify existing State Street locations and business areas that could derive cost/benefit from a retrofitted implementation of the Zero Footprint solution.

Although understandably gratified by the positive response, the team responsible for designing and implementing this solution believes that their collective effort can also serve as an example to other organizations seeking to solve similar problems. Like Roger Bannister breaking the “4-minute mile” over half a century ago, the most significant achievement in this case was simply changing expectations about what is possible.


How quickly has your targeted audience of users embraced your innovation? Or, how rapidly do you predict they will?
The “Zero Footprint, Maximum Impact” solution directly and uniquely achieves business and technical requirements in a way that minimizes cost, risk, and lead-time, while delivering necessary levels of performance and reliability. For that reason, State Street end-users, business areas, senior management, and IT support staff have quickly embraced it.
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