When she joined the New York City investment bank Chase Capital Partners in November 1999, Marcia Bateson only had to glance at her assistant’s desk blotter to see that her new employer needed to fix some important business processes. There, yellow sticky notes stood as records for dozens of big-dollar investments the company made daily via wire transfer.

Other spots around the office also screamed for improvement. At the end of the month, Bateson watched accountants gather by a Bloomberg terminal to jot down financial and market news they needed, which was then entered into Excel spreadsheets. Twice a year, the staff would mail Lotus Notes-loaded laptops to colleagues in offices around the world so that they could review and update information for the company’s investment portfolio.

The sticky notes. The jottings. The laptop mailings. They all spoke of a frightening potential for record-keeping errors at a company handling billions of dollars in investments. Bateson, chief administrative officer and CFO at what is now J.P. Morgan Partners after the January merger of Chase Manhattan with J.P. Morgan & Co., realized the need for automated systems. That led to Project SAIL, a multimillion-dollar ongoing effort to reshape J.P. Morgan Partners’ technology infrastructure and accounting systems and to enable automated tracking and reporting of its global investments portfolio.

A year and a half later, Project SAIL has come a long way and remains on course. Segments completed on time include:

• Electronic tracking of wire transfers and direct feeds of stock updates from the Bloomberg wire into J.P. Morgan Partners’ database about public companies.
• A secure worldwide extranet for reviewing and updating information on portfolio companies (see "Your Laptop Is Not in the Mail," Page 104).
• A database for searching the pipeline of pending deals by industry, region and investment professional.

Because the project alters every worker’s job, effective management takes some cheerleading, says Bateson. "We’re changing every aspect of every person’s day. So we’ve had to be messiahlike and think about changing the world. We’ve needed everyone’s hearts and minds, not just bodies, pulling data."