My first contact with the power of COINs at Union
Bank of Switzerland had come with the development of the UBS Intranet.
I was a software manager and had started my own “skunk works”
to create the “Bank Wide Web” for information sharing within
the bank. At first, my boss frowned upon the idea of using an “academic”
system – in this case the World Wide Web, which was not nearly as
ubiquitous as it is today – for productive business-critical applications,
and wanted me to use a commercially available document management system.
But I hired a summer intern from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
who built a prototype and made an evaluation comparing the two systems
that clearly pointed out the advantages of the Web.
Still, my boss was reluctant. What finally turned him around was a symposium
he attended of IT industry analyst Gartner Group. Gartner strongly recommended
using the Web for information sharing. My case was supported by the fact
that by then the U.S. arm of our company had already started to deploy
the Web internally. Suddenly, I was getting complaints for being too hesitant
in rolling out the Web! After about six months, the Bank Wide Web was
officially approved and first converted into a project team, and later
into an official business unit.
As is typical with COINs, the lifecycle began with an informal group of
people sharing the same goal and vision. The hosting organization only
acknowledged the value of its COIN after external recognition. Once the
organization hosting the COIN recognizes its value, the COIN was converted
into a sanctioned organizational form.
As the team was working on the Bank Wide Web, we would also go out to
lunch together or engage in other joint social activities. When we were
having lunch or drinks in a restaurant, we would talk frequently about
the latest technical developments of the Web and of Java, furthering our
knowledge and learning from each other. This built up a high level of
mutual trust, so that we would discuss more personal matters such as external
job opportunities of interest to a team member.
Because of our excitement, we acted as ambassadors, seeking to persuade
the rest of the bank to start using the Web. Because we were convinced
of our cause, we acted as efficient communicators. Rather than trying
to reach as many people as possible, we tried to reach the right people,
knowing that the quality of interactions is more important than the quantity
of contacts made – after all, networking is not an end to a means,
but a means to an end. Just getting to know other people for the sake
of knowing more people is not much help in disseminating new ideas and
might even be counterproductive. Not every innovator is a natural salesman
who can easily approach strangers, turning them into close friends in
the course of a conversation. Not all members of a COIN are born communicators,
but in an effective COIN all members become missionaries. The rapid distribution
of the new idea is a consequence of the power of the communal vision that
cyberteam members radiate and transmit to their environment. If people
are fully convinced of the merit of the new idea, they act as communicators
and ambassadors for their COIN.
An even deeper lesson into the workings of COINs came later at Union Bank
of Switzerland, with the development of the Interoperability Service Interface
(ISI). The bank’s goal was to change the IT system to be able to
store all banking transactions in non-condensed, so-called “atomic”
format over a period of five years. Previously, data had been compressed
to show only the last few transactions and the current balance. On a more
technical level, in the current IT system, data was accessed directly
on the record level, meaning that the specific format and location of
the data needed to be known to the application programmer. This not only
required that the data access routines be rewritten for each new program,
but far worse – if the data format changed, all the computer programs
accessing the data had to be changed, too.
When I joined UBS, my predecessor had already begun to look at a promising
new technology called CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture).
But this technology was then still considered to be too immature and risky
for use in a high-security environment such as the transaction backbone
of a large bank. When I took over the project, my predecessor as project
leader convinced me of the advantages of the CORBA concept over more conventional
approaches that UBS was pursuing at that time. So, we embarked on an internal
marketing campaign, trying to convince senior management of CORBA’s
advantages. In different senior management meetings, I introduced the
concept to my direct boss, his boss, and his peers. I also asked a colleague
to build a proof-of-concept prototype. In a few weeks, he built a prototype
compiler for the system we were proposing. This was something quite unconventional
for a bank, as banks usually are fine to build their own transaction processing
systems, but do not want to develop in-house tools for building transaction-processing
systems. It was as if in building a house we didn’t just dig a hole
and put up concrete and brick walls, but first built the excavator to
excavate the construction site and then concrete mixer to mix our concrete.
But as there was no excavator and concrete mixer available for CORBA at
UBS, we had no choice but to build our own. As the first prototype worked
quite well, I was allowed to hire a small team of contractors, soon to
be reinforced with internal IT staff, to build a production system of
our excavator and concrete mixer for CORBA.
Over the course of two years we successfully introduced Interoperability
Service Interface (ISI) as a homegrown version of CORBA at UBS. ISI has
been well accepted at UBS, and it has even been marketed outside of UBS
to other financial institutions as a commercial product.
Through the ISI project, we learned the valuable lesson that COINs drive
collaborative creativity. The main reason for the success of ISI was the
availability of a large pool of potential members of COINs all sharing
the creator’s genes at UBS. There was a culture of openness towards
new ideas. And this culture was not just internally known, but UBS had
a built an external reputation as a successful adopter of leading-edge
technologies. The IT department of UBS at that time even had its own applied
IT research lab, where a University of Zurich professor on leave, together
with a dozen researchers, was studying the applicability of groundbreaking
computer science research results to the banking environment. Later, this
professor actually moved into mainstream software application development
at the bank, becoming a senior vice president and the head of the overall
software application development department. This meant that we were able
to build on a large pool of talented, motivated, and creative software
engineers to recruit members for our “grassroots” project.
UBS’s reputation as a successful adaptor of “cool” new
technologies had brought together enough people sharing the “creator’s
genes”: the willingness to take risks and invest working time and
personal reputation into a new task outside of conventional territory.
We were forming a COIN, a team of people totally committed to the ISI
concept. Our goal was to make ISI the main “glue” that would
link together the distributed applications of UBS. We were also lucky
in that timing and technology were right: The CORBA technology at the
core of ISI was about to leave the “hype” stadium and to become
really useful in a high-security production environment. There were now
enough parts vendors of “nuts and bolts” for UBS to comfortably
build its own concrete mixer and excavator! |