How Agile Development and Virtual Teams Help the Fed Set the Economy's Course
Meredith Black, SVP of the Dallas Fed, tells how agile development and virtual teams enable the Fed to respond more quickly to changes in the economy
Thu, August 27, 2009
CIO —
Charlie Feld: The Federal Reserve System has been traditionally decentralized. Has IT been able to gain any synergies?
Meredith Black: We are 12 independent legal entities with our own IT priorities. Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Fed, saw an opportunity to improve efficiency and save money and set about changing the IT governance model with his peers. They created the position of system CIO, [held by] Lon Zanetta, to create a larger view and coax the 12 CIOs to cooperate wherever possible.
Charlie Feld: How did that new model help you respond to the economic crisis?
Meredith Black: As it happened, there were many business systems that were reaching end of life. They needed to be redeveloped, replatformed and rationalized. So we already had a joint modernization plan. Now we had a new call to action as a result of the economy. By happenstance, among the first systems reworked with our new methodologies were for our Discount Window operations (which provide banks with short-term loans). That has paid off in spades for us.
Read more of Charlie Feld's Columns: How the United Kingdom Delivers Customer-Centric Government Services and J.C. Penney's Recession Investment Strategy.
We have had new programs to help inject more liquidity into the economy in a variety of new ways during this crisis. One might be announced on Thursday that had to be made available on Monday morning to financial institutions. It was only because we had the agile development methods and modern technologies that we could deploy the necessary capability. I'm not going to tell you it was easy, but we were able to pull it off month after month, so that as policy makers were developing new policies, they could count on IT backing them up. There is no question that had we not begun to change our IT model and culture several years ago, we would not have been able to act as boldly and rapidly as we needed to.
We have also naturally evolved in such a way that different banks are specializing in certain technologies or fields. This has helped us build more depth than we could have if we all invested in everything. For example, in Dallas we are predominately a J2EE shop while others focus on .Net or ColdFusion or specialize in a field such as automated testing. So I know that when I get to a certain stage in development, I can turn to New York for penetration testing or to San Francisco for usability testing and I don't have to invest in those skills myself.
