Chase Manhattan Bank Closes IT Infrastructure Gaps

The Client

Formerly known as Chase Manhattan Bank, JP Morgan Chase & Co., serves over 32 million customers worldwide. The bank combines commercial and investment banking, offers information and transaction processing services, and operates a US- based retail banking family of branch offices. The organization also has established relationships with 80% of Business Week’s top 1,000 companies.

The Challenge

Chase was aware that its large IT infrastructure group suffered from gaps in service delivery, difficulty in fulfilling basic needs and other functional challenges. The bank’s rapid growth (primarily through mergers and acquisitions) in the 1990s left the company with a sprawling IT infrastructure organization staffed by individuals from a variety of different acquired organizations and comprised of many different legacy systems and policies.

In an effort to identify the precise nature of its IT infrastructure difficulties and the best solutions, Chase brought in a large, well-known consulting firm to produce and implement strategy guidelines. Before that firm completed the engagement, however, the bank no longer had confidence in its ability to assist with the execution of any plan. At this point, a former Chase executive with a long history of satisfaction with BearingPoint’s quality of work returned to the bank and decided to bring us in to provide real world assistance in helping solve the bank’s IT infrastructure challenges. Chase also believed that BearingPoint would have the ability to help maximize its relationship with Cisco Systems, in view of our alliance with the well-known networking vendor.

The Solution

To create a strong strategy for Chase to use in addressing its IT infrastructure function concerns, the BearingPoint engagement team worked through a series of concurrent steps.

Leveraging the strong relationship with Cisco to provide expertise on the physical equipment involved, the engagement team’s first order of business was to outline reference architectures for the various IT infrastructure service locations (everything from automatic teller machine locations to corporate office networks). During a series of approximately 20 workshops with representatives from the client’s business and technology staff, the team created reference architectures by categorizing, profiling, and determining interconnections between and among each site. Each reference design also outlines the needs of the internal business users who rely on the services offered by each connection at each site. Examples of areas for which reference architectures were provided include: branch networks, web-hosting centers, server farms, metropolitan distributed networks, corporate headquarters, etc.

While the workshops were being conducted, the engagement team also organized and produced a "road show" to visit and/or interview key stakeholders around the world. Ultimately, over 50 high level executives were interviewed regarding their experiences dealing with the bank’s IT service and infrastructure.

• Interviews with high-level business personnel covered issues ranging from interoperability between units or divisions, time issues relating to availability of information in a global environment and other major concerns
• Major IT infrastructure executives were also interviewed during the road show to provide the engagement team with greater detail concerning vendor relationships, the nature of perceptions of and interactions with IT infrastructure constituent groups, budgetary worries, etc.
• For both series of interviews, the engagement team sent an advance questionnaire to focus thought on the issues to be covered and prepare the source for the depth and breadth of the lines of questioning

Once the reference architectures and road show interviews were complete, the engagement team used the results to create a "road map" that would lead the bank to implementing improved IT infrastructure service delivery and processes. The road map included a detailed implementation and rollout cost model and considered the potential impact of changes on the bank’s financial, logistics, personnel, and vendor spheres to maximize the value of the $120+ million investment being made in the project over the next two years.

The Benefits

The engagement team’s plan outlined recommended goals, strategies and methods to help the bank achieve the improved IT infrastructure function it was seeking. The client approved the plan and asked our team to extend the engagement to implement the ideas being recommended. As plans were being finalized to proceed with the implementation portion of the project, Chase announced the JP Morgan acquisition, which suspended all major alignment and integration projects. Nonetheless, BearingPoint was still retained on a smaller scale to proceed with assisting Chase on a key component of the recommended architecture, IP multicast, which enables multi-branch audio/video communications over its Cisco-based IP infrastructure. For the past 9 months, BearingPoint has been assisting the bank with developing test guidelines and planning an IP multicast trial allowing for the introduction of this highly demanded capability within the bank.

With the creation of a comprehensive IT infrastructure function and service improvement strategy document, the BearingPoint team has positioned the project’s sponsors to re-start the project and achieve results quickly once they are ready to resume work following merger completion.