How Evolving Business Strategies Are Changing the Nasdaq CIO’s Role
At Nasdaq OMX, changing business strategies means the CIO is responsible not only for operational efficiency, but also for turning a profit. This makes the company an ideal laboratory in which to observe the evolution of the CIO role.
CIO — On the average business day last year, $14.4 trillion worth of trades pulsed through Nasdaq OMX (NDAQ) markets globally. The company matches buyers and sellers using technology so fast that trades are time-stamped to the nanosecond. And it wouldn’t take much longer than that for the world to find out if that technology ever failed.
Big as it is, however, Nasdaq OMX is fighting new competition in financial markets that makes managing trades less profitable every year. Mindful of creating new sales and profit streams, the exchange is trying to build a business by selling software, IT and advisory services to other financial organizations around the world.
These conditions make the world’s biggest exchange perhaps the world’s best laboratory in which to observe the CIO of the future: an executive who can manage the relentless pressure to perfect IT operations and who also has a killer instinct for making money.
In this laboratory, Executive Vice President and CIO Anna Ewing is under the microscope. She doesn’t sit still much, though, shuttling frequently between Nasdaq OMX’s New York headquarters, its Shelton, Conn., data center and the cities around the world where she helps to sell the exchange’s IT products and services. Ewing reports to CEO Bob Greifeld, and as the top technology leader of one of the most powerful organizations in the world, she also ranks as one of the highest-paid CIOs among the Fortune 1000. She earned $2.8 million in 2008, the latest year for which data is available.
Other top CIOs are paid more and have less at stake. Nasdaq OMX is a critical part of the United States’ economic infrastructure. In less than 10 years, it has weathered the 9/11 terrorist attacks, gone public and changed business models. It has digested acquisitions designed to make it compete more effectively with other trading venues. And it launched a for-profit IT venture, called Market Technology. At each turn, Nasdaq’s CIO had to adapt to the turmoil while forging new paths.
Ewing, who became CIO in 2005, runs Market Technology, making her one of the few CIOs with direct responsibility for turning a profit. However, she says, incorporating profit-and-loss thinking into IT leadership is the way forward for all CIOs. “CIOs are more attuned to P&L now,” she says. “We’re having to be more engaged in growing the business and not so operational.”
