Collaboration for Innovation: How to Bridge the Gap
Everyone admits that collaboration for innovation is good. It’s also rare. And when it works, it’s beautiful.
CIO — Erin Griffin, CIO and vice president of IT at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) and Mitch Davis, CIO of Bowdoin College, met three summers ago at Snowmass, near Aspen, Colo., during a conference on academic computing. They chatted, shared experiences about their respective challenges and traded some ideas. But it didn’t occur to either of them that they could join forces until they met up again in 2005 at the same conference.
They were leaving a session about disaster recovery, reflecting, Griffin remembers, that they were both in similar jams. Disaster recovery solutions from vendors were expensive—especially for small colleges (like LMU and Bowdoin) with limited budgets. Griffin and Davis joked about how easy it would be for people to replicate each other’s data centers if only they were willing to work together. Then came the epiphany.
“We said, What if we actually did it?” Davis recalls. Half a year later, Griffin, who is based in Los Angeles, and Davis, in Brunswick, Maine, began developing a solution that allows them to host each other’s disaster recovery sites. And it has cost a mere fraction of what it would have to hire a vendor.
Samuel Gaer, executive VP and CIO of the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex), faced a different problem. A major competitor was encroaching on Nymex’s market share by offering competing energy futures contracts on a “side by side” system for trading both securities and their options, while Nymex was still executing them manually (brokers screaming out orders in the trading pit) from its trading floor during daytime business hours. Gaer needed to get Nymex’s contracts online in a hurry. Nymex had a system ready (ClearPort) that it had upgraded, but Gaer knew that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), which specializes in financial futures, had a well-established electronic trading platform called Globex. “From a technical standpoint, our system was robust, but CME [and Globex] still had some distinct advantages,” he says. For instance, Globex, which had been around since 1992, had been more heavily tested and as a result was more scalable. So Gaer swallowed hard and called CME COO Phupinder Gill to propose a partnership.
“I essentially said, ‘Why should Nymex reinvent the wheel when we can collaborate?’” Gaer recounts. Working together over the next year, Nymex and CME came to an agreement that enabled Nymex to list its futures contracts on Globex.
