Experience that counts

Don Buskard didn’t toil away in the wiring closet before stepping out to climb the technology ranks. The senior vice president and CTO in the IT group of AXA Financial Services in New York spent 10 years on the business side of the financial services first. “It’s a good base to build on,” the CTO says.

And with that foundation, Buskard imparts a philosophy of service to his IT staff of 150. “To me the success in technology management isn’t the management of technology, it’s [about] the relationship with the customer,” he says. “If you’re aware of what [customers] want to do … you will come up with good solutions.”

As CTO, Buskard is responsible for the long-term technology direction of AXA Financial Services, which has approximately $441 billion in assets. “I oversee the long-range technology planning for AXA Financial. That involves everything from how we would use mainframes to distributive technologies to wireless to desktop to support of our customers, our sales associates, and our home-office knowledge workers,” Buskard says.

Buskard runs the company’s internal e-business steering committee and has e-business development staff reporting to him. His supervisor, CIO Bill Levine, oversees solution development for business areas, security, and vendor management. “I am responsible for all of our deep tech stuff, our DBAs [database administrators], our technical architectures, our information architectures — technologies integral to our strategic planning,” Buskard says. 

Part of Buskard’s strategy is to maintain a low cost for IT support. The CTO refuses to share AXA’s actual costs but says it’s below the industry average. The key to protecting these low cost averages, according to Buskard, is keeping legacy applications intact while increasing access and functionality for internal and external customers and support staff. “What I’ve done is use middleware to put a layer of functionality in front of legacy applications,” Buskard says.

To achieve this goal, AXA moved from a legacy CORBA environment to a single solution with WebSphere MQ middleware that delivers a common way for applications to access data contained in back-end systems. One feature allows sales associates to know who the company’s best customers are easier and quicker than before, Buskard says.

Bob Skinner, executive vice president of worldwide sales at Chantilly, Va.-based ERP solutions provider Icode, says this is a common strategy, especially in this economy. “From a standpoint of total cost of ownership and time to market, it’s easier to leverage your investments in your middleware than reinvest in an ERP application at this point in time.”

Next, Buskard is exploring metadirectory technology that would allow him to join Siebel’s sales force automation and PeopleSoft HR directories. “Rather than having two independent directories, you’ll have a metadirectory. And updates hit all directories. That is intriguing. With all the middleware that we have, all the independent directories — it’s [a cost-saver],” Buskard says.

Because of Buskard’s time on the financial side of the business, he knows just how valuable this kind of technology can be in getting financial services products to market quickly, while keeping costs in check. The focus has to be on the bottom line — something that is supported at the very highest levels of AXA Financial, according to Buskard. “When technology managers don’t have an awareness of the business and products, they tend to try to recommend things that aren’t a good fit for where [the business] wants to go.”