Tasked to take over back-office systems, a CTO moves modernization beyond technology and instead changes key processes to improve business capability Keeping up with Hari Gopalkrishnan isn’t easy — the CTO of Lehman Brothers constantly looks for ways to move technology forward. And this drive most recently brought him to grid computing. This new role opened up a smorgasbord of opportunity for bringing high-capacity computing to Lehman. And so Gopalkrishnan spearheaded global adoption of a grid computing and distributed caching framework. This effort included development of high-performance messaging, service orientation (by swapping out the mainframe with standard interfaces), and rich dashboards. “This allows us to get real visibility around our metrics and our data, to look at our trade lifecycle and where we can improve our productivity,” Gopalkrishnan says. His team also put in a governance framework. “We started some really interesting stuff that we need to make progress and put some focus around.” So far, Gopalkrishnan’s move away from batch-centric reporting where risk analytics could be run only once a night to real-time business intelligence means Lehman can respond to market fluctuations quickly. The company also can get more out of its hardware investments and scale IT with less cost. Breaking ground isn’t anything new to Gopalkrishnan. A few years ago, he built a portal for both external and internal audiences at Lehman. “Along the way, we built some single-sign-on VPN technology because it didn’t exist in those days and subsequently commercialized it by selling it to Citrix,” he says. Ironically, Gopalkrishnan’s drive toward innovation is inspired by a promise to his wife and two children: find a work-life balance. Because the old architecture forced him and others to waste time searching for work-arounds, he says, “the notion that we could not deliver legacy apps over the Internet was both a personal problem and a professional problem for me.” Careers