Flawed Bean Counter Logic in Investment Banking Technology

From my perspective, many of the bean counters in corporate financial services organizations have a flawed sense of logic. I spent several years consulting for one of the largest investment banks in North America. One of the main problems we heard about on a regular basis what that of missing equipment, especially laptops. Rather than institue a real management policy, the powers that be would task technicians with surveying desks and logging what equipment was present. This was a nice idea, however; there was no provision for missing equipment. These folks believed in working their teams harder, rather than working smarter as a team.

In my experience, this working smarter as a team provision could have been implemented at the purchasing level.

Now, when you think about this carefully, you would expect an investment bank to do everything possible to safeguard their technology investments as well as the data residing on their laptops. In my professional experience this is not the case at all in many environments.

On several occassions, I suggested to senior management that they ought to implement a program known as Computrace. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Computrace, think of it as lo-jack for laptops. The way this product works in quite unique, as you register the serial number for the laptop into a master database. If the laptop comes up missing, it can be tracked regardless of what OS is placed on it, or how many times the hard drive is formatted. Furthermore, this tracking mechanism enables an investigator to trace the laptop back to the thief.

You see, my thinking is quite simple. If someone steals your property, and you have a means of recovering that property, you should use the available means. This is especially true in the case of laptops, as it is very easy to make them walk out of a company that does not institute a proper equipment check in and check out policy. More important the the equipment loss, is the potential data loss and corporate integrity. Financial institutions are expected to be sanctuarys for information and funds. Unfortunately, many of the bean counters who run the IT departments are penny wise and pound foolish. The next time you run into one who does not have a program like computrace to protect their laptops, ask them why not? If they say it's too expensive, ask them what price they place on safeguarding data and the bank's reputation. You just might be surprised at the various answers you get. Especially if you are banking in Canada.