Steve Rubinow
Executive Vice President and CIO, NYSE Euronext

Steve Rubinow is Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of NYSE Euronext, parent company of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), where he is responsible for all aspects of technology as well as global innovation for the leading stock exchange in the world. Previously he was the Chief Technology Officer for Archipelago Holdings Inc. in Chicago, where he was responsible for software development, quality assurance, operations, customer connectivity, and technical support for the Archipelago Exchange (one of the original electronic communications networks to officially serve as an institutional stock exchange). The company merged with the New York Stock Exchange in 2006, which then merged with Euronext in 2007 to form NYSE Euronext.

Previously, Dr. Rubinow was Chief Information/Technology Officer for NextCard Inc.; Vice President and Chief Information Officer at AdKnowledge, Inc.; and Vice President of Corporate Management Information Systems at Fidelity Investments in Boston. He began his career as a systems analyst at the Continental Bank in Chicago.

Dr. Rubinow has a BS and an MS in Chemistry, an MS in Computer Science, an MBA in Marketing and Finance (where he ranked first in his graduating class), and a PhD in Chemistry.

Ed Yourdon: The questions I thought I would start off with are the more strategic ones. I can certainly imagine IT is “strategic,” though I don’t want to say “weapon” here. But what element of your IT is strategic? And how?

Steve Rubinow: It is interesting that you said that because a lot of times in the past, people will talk about our industry as an arbitrary battle ground. So yes, war terms are quite common here though we don’t want to use “bull’s eye.”

But if you talk to certain people on any given day, they will tell you that this is a technology firm that happens to run exchanges, as opposed to an exchange firm that has something to do with technology. That is for a couple of reasons. One is that without technology there is no firm. Certainly, the open outcry system with people exchanging slips of paper, that’s from another era, everything is electronic. The vast majority of trading takes place with servers talking to servers. Humans are the trading model builders but they are not there in the middle for the most part where it takes place, except for on the floor downstairs. That is an important, but smaller, part of what we do.

The other thing is if you were to define our business as we do, we put it into three segments. One is the cash trading business. That is what people first think the New York Stock Exchange is for. It is important. Second is the derivatives trading business—we have a healthy global business in both cash and derivatives. The third one, which is the newest one and the most interesting, is the technology business. Every product and service that we build or create for ourselves we are certainly willing to sell to others.

Finally I would think it’s one of the most promising businesses we have. We said to the world last year that within five years we would be a billion dollar business. So the technology feature of the company’s services is a big part of the business in terms of becoming a technology vendor, which I try to point out to our vendors. I remind them that we love that they are our vendors. We love what they do with us. But also in some small way—and maybe big ways in the future—they are our competitors. So it is an interesting focus.

Yourdon: And I was just thinking about the kind of things they show people on television, with human traders waving sheets of paper, even though that sort of thing has been out of date for five or ten years.

Rubinow: A relatively small percentage of our volume goes to the floor and sometimes people ask me what’s the floor for, or why do you still have a floor? So many exchanges throughout the world no longer have a floor. They have largely disappeared. I say what sounds like a company line, but makes perfect sense: The floor will be there as long as there are customers who vote with their dollars and support it. I think the floor is a small but significant portion of the trading that goes through here. The customers support it. It makes money for us. It is a service that offers yet another option for the customer.

As long as that model still is viable, we keep it. If it ever changes, we may reevaluate, but it doesn’t look like it is going to change. And it makes a great platform for CNBC, Fox News, and all our in-house media outlets broadcasting from here, rather than broadcasting from a lifeless place like some of our competitors.

Yourdon: At the other extreme is a whole phenomenon that I was unaware of is the high volume of the high-frequency trading business. I was staggered to see what a large fortune we are all seeing. Will that continue growing?

Rubinow: Yes, it has definitely, the trend has happened for a number of years in the United States, and it is becoming more pronounced in Europe. In my mind it is really just a matter of time before it becomes the norm in Asia and the other continents, too. That is something I wanted to point out to people, from the technology perspective, it is one of the most interesting things we do. Designing something in an industry that is concerned with micro-second response times. In order to develop that, we have to not only understand how to write good functional software, but we also have to know how to write efficient software and you have to understand the operating system, the network, the hardware and all the resources in a computer environment.

When you finally develop the software, you have to realize all these things make it an interesting job. But it is the only way you can do it with microseconds here and there. And then, of course, you have to do it in high volumes. Some of our systems, like our market data systems, run at millions of messages per second. And you have to do it with very little jitter. Our customers do not like oscillations in response time. They want them to be perfectly flat so you get low variance and low response rate with high transaction volume—it has to be very secure, very reliable, and, of course, cost-effective. You put all these things together and it makes for an interesting technical platform.

Yourdon: So performance is part of the problem. It reminds me of the ’60s and ’70s when their hardware was less technical and more limited than ours, and we were starting to be so much more relaxed about that long list of criteria. And now it is back again. I hadn’t thought of that. That is very interesting.

Rubinow: We have two new data centers that we completed last year. One in New Jersey and one outside of London. Most of the space in the data centers is not for us; it is for our customers. Mostly because they want to reduce the limis of the speed of light in the problem. You’ll appreciate this when you walk a customer into the data center, and they see where our trading engines are. They see where their equipment is placed and they’ll see some other equipment and sometimes they’ll say, “Well, what is that over there?”

“It’s for another customer and that is all you need to know.”

OK. And that is a few feet closer from where I am. And I’ll say, “OK, let’s review this. Rule of thumb, the speed of light is about a one foot a nanosecond (in a vacuum). So let’s see what a few feet means… that is a couple of nanoseconds. Yes that’s a difference but I don’t know that you can take advantage of a couple of nanoseconds today. Maybe next year, maybe ten years. I don’t know…but it is not something I would make a big deal about because I really don’t think it should be important to you. If that changes, we will take a look at it.”

But in thinking about this, we thought about how does one mitigate that? Well, one is, if we go back to something many people would remember—depends how old they are—go back to the design of the computer like the Cray, which was built in a circular architecture to make all the processors equidistant from the core. So the trading engines are the core and all the customers could be in the perimeter of the circle. So that is one way; we are not doing that, but that is one way. The other way some people have done is that they modify the length of the cable. The further away you are, the shorter the cable; the closer you are, the more slack in the cable. You would think it is crazy, but this is what some people have done to create the schematic to make everyone exactly the same to the smallest conceivable increment of time, as everybody else and that a nanosecond difference is unacceptable. That’s a bit extreme—but these are the sensitivities of the industry.

Yourdon: I was completely unaware of these issues until I got involved as an expert witness in a lawsuit related to high-frequency trading. There are some staggering numbers, and I’m now paying closer attention to things I have been unaware of. Last question I have in the section is to ask your perspective of what IT is doing to retire old legacy systems and prepare for what we cannot do today.

Rubinow: The thing is, we keep pushing the technology envelope in the trading business. We constantly strive to improve. I have calculated, and I am sure my peers in other companies have calculated, what is the fastest speed you can possibly achieve by integrating the most advanced technology and at what point is it a limitation of processors that are not fast enough or memory that isn’t fast enough, etc.

And we do have other considerations we can’t get around. And so we are trying to be on the edge of technology and do whatever is possible. Having said that in the technology business, we address the needs of what we refer to as the capital markets community. We are constantly white boarding new products and services that we think the industry would want and may know to come to us or may not even know they need yet, but it makes perfect sense. And so we are trying to come up with all kinds of things like that.

Yourdon: So you have the “aha” opportunity to introduce something down the road?

Rubinow: Yes, it’s one of these things where that’s so true in so many other industries. If you ask a customer what they would want—for example, the iPod—if you went to people and said, “Describe to me what kind of iPod-like device you would like,” before it existed, they wouldn’t know what to say. But then Apple built one, and people said, “Oh yeah, I always wanted one of those, I just didn’t know it until now.”

Yourdon: It is funny you should mention it. There was an article in the New York Times today that said just exactly that. It is not the customer’s job to figure out what he or she wants. It’s the job of the company, perhaps with focus groups for customers.

Rubinow: I probably have done that so many times. You see someone and say, “Technology would enable the following things.” They would say, “Gee, I never knew that was possible. I never thought of that, but now that you’ve described it to me, it sounds like a fantastic idea.” But it just wasn’t in their gestalt to think about such things and they use it like a little blast from left field to remind them.

Yourdon: I don’t want to go too far off on a tangent, but there is another aspect to this as I am sure you heard of. When you first introduce a new technology to some people, their immediate instinct is to continue doing old, familiar things—maybe a little faster or cheaper—instead of looking to complete new applications. And this is true of all kinds of things that go back to hundreds of years. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he himself told people what they could do was stay home in the comfort of their own living room and listen to a live performance of an artist playing in a concert hall. Is that something you run into in your business as well?

Rubinow: We do run into it because the financial services industry is full of really smart people, but in many cases they are smart people who are in a particular valley or rut mentally, and sometimes when you help break them out of it, they are smart enough to know it, but they never spent the time to do it, because they didn’t have the stimulus or catalyst to make them see things in a different light or from a new perspective.

That is why I am a big promoter of people that have worked in different industries coming together. Only half of my group has spent their whole career in financial services while the other half are newer to financial services, and bring a different perspective than people who have worked their whole life in financial services. We just recently hired a head of global development. When we were doing the search, I wanted to look in other industries, so I brought this fellow in who came from Silicon Valley. He was an accomplished software guy and when he interviewed here, several people said he had never worked in our industry.

But I said, “Well, OK, he’ll learn. He is not stupid, he’ll learn. It is not rocket science.” Second thing, he had never worked in a regulated industry. “No problem. He’ll learn that too. He’ll understand the rules.” The third thing is the most telling. They said because he had never worked in our industry, he has never worked with difficult people.” I said, “Oh man, take your blinders off. We haven’t cornered the market for difficult people.” So it is nice to get other people with different perspectives.

Yourdon: I am wondering if I will see that there is a pattern. I have already interviewed the CIO of Microsoft who ultimately got into the Silicon Valley kind of world, but who started off in a totally different career. I am wondering how to differentiate between the ones who are really interesting and the ones that are not interesting.

Rubinow: Well you know, with my biochemist background, hybridization often yields a stronger product, and I believe that is true even with a CIO as well.

Yourdon: There is another aspect of this that I thought you would be able to comment about: the generational phenomenon. The fact that we have the younger kids without all the preconceptions.

Rubinow: We will take advantage of it, and I will say, in my limited experience I read and hear all about that. You know, for years and years prominent scientists said that their most creative discoveries were in their twenties, but they didn’t think the big discoveries were as likely as they got older.

I can tell you that I think all the time about the younger generation, meaning people in their twenties working here. They grew up with video games. They are used to very visual interfaces. They are certainly not strangers to technology. They have certain expectations for what their workplace should be like.

In my immediate work environment, I find that someone in their forties may frequent and be as adept at Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as someone in their twenties. Maybe a 20-year-old is better at video games. I don’t know if such distinctions help us that much in what we do, but maybe the examples haven’t jumped out at me. Maybe there are subtle differences around, but I just haven’t noticed them. I don’t see a profound difference. I have found smart people in every generation. I find different people in every generation.

Yourdon: Well, it’s a profound change to go from a world where we have limited resources that are very expensive that are controlled and regulated and doled out very carefully to a place where many of these are pervasive and free and therefore ought not to be controlled, yet they are.

Rubinow: Yes, and that is one of the positive aspects of technology we have today, and if I heard it once, I have heard it a thousand times. When I was a developer I used to ignore performance in software—because the assumption was, oh well, buy a bigger server. We don’t have that luxury here because, first of all, we are very cost-conscious, but second of all, the idea is not to rely solely on hardware because the software has to be hyper efficient too, otherwise you are not competitive. And you can be sure that the competitor down the street is thinking the same way.

So anybody who comes in and says, “I’m a software guy. I don’t have to worry; just buy more memory, or buy more processors.” It is not as simple as that. You actually have to think about a lot of things, but we have a niche that not everybody plays in. So we do think about those things.

Someone observed the other day that they were looking for a typewriter ribbon and they used the Internet to find a typewriter ribbon. So it is kind of ironic that you would do that. It is a cultural thing. One guy here, in his thirties, made a comment about using a Rolodex to look something up. I said, “Let me stop you for a second. Do you think someone ten years younger than you would understand what a Rolodex is?” And he said, “You know, they probably wouldn’t.” Well that’s a term that we take for granted but it doesn’t make any sense anymore

Yourdon: The other aspect of this generational thing that I heard a lot about from financial services industry is that the difficulty of reaching out to the consumer marketplace. They’re asking themselves, “How do we make our stuff more relevant to kids in college, who would only find things out through Facebook or Twitter?” It’s a pretty big culture shock. This is probably not so relevant in your realm, because you are not marketing to college kids.

Rubinow: You’re right. Our direct customers are traders and they’re not so focused on it. In fact, in most of what is built, they help guide the development of the interface. We are just the technology supplier, and so they can leverage whatever pleases them. But we do have a website and we do sell our data on the website and a few other things. And we want to make it appear contemporary and create an innovative impression. Regardless of the industry we look at, we want to let people know that we are the leaders of the twenty-first century. And that helps to create that impression.

We haven’t gotten into general mobile applications in a big way because few traders would do anything mobile (other than in the special instance of using wireless devices on the floor of the exchange) because of response times and security, among other reasons. And we want to create an impression that we are out there. We look around the country and see a lot of iPads around. Our use of them is symbolic of us trying to show that we are where the innovative people go. You bring the iPads to me and maybe there are applications that would be informational, so we are exploring all of these things.

Yourdon: I would think iPads would be interesting to trade from.

Rubinow: Well, it takes us down another avenue of discussion in terms of collaborative technology. Our technology group is spread out to many cities in the world. Four throughout the U.S. and three in Europe, and we are trying to find ways to make it feel like, whether it be with an iPad, video, or collaboration tools and knowledge sharing, we are exploring all those things to try and bring the community closer together. This also includes customers, vendors, and academics, so that anyone who wants to be part of our network is properly segregated, working confidentially, but they all participate in helping us to become smarter and do things better.

Yourdon: That’s interesting because that has become one aspect of a whole collection of issues, when you want to do things behind the firewall, but also cross the firewall, and communicate with outsiders like former employees and customers and so on.

Ironically the best examples I have found so far are in the pharmaceutical industry. They have an enormously long product development cycle—from ten to fifteen years to bring a newly discovered drug to market. Eli Lilly and Pfizer are examples of companies with collaboration involving people outside their firm, and these are very conservative companies. So it’s very exciting to hear you talk about this, all the more so in a regulated industry like yours.

Rubinow: As a matter of fact, just this morning there was an Internet radio show called CIO Talk Radio. I was on that program talking about what they were terming “collective intelligence” and we touched upon this very subject.

Yourdon: This generational phenomenon is one that people seem to react to very differently, especially when it comes to tools, and I would imagine that must be relevant to developers. For example, I ran into someone who said the average college kid today has never seen Microsoft Outlook, and would be horrified if he did see it—not just because of the user interface, but because of the overall perspective on how he spends his day.

In my case, I get up in the morning and think: what do I have to do today? I look at my e-mail to see which clients are complaining, which clients have new tasks and deadlines, and so on. But a college-age kid is likely to get up in the morning and ask, “Where are my friends? What are they doing? How far away are they?” I see that kind of thing on Facebook with my nieces and nephews. In fact the whole world revolves around that.

Rubinow: Well, I understand that perspective, but I am sure there are other reasons Microsoft thought of that interface when they developed Outlook. A better solution to that is being put into Windows 8 on the desktop. With the limited number of people I have talked to that have a Windows 7 phone, they like that aspect—that they have a Facebook tile and whatever else they use often that they run continuously and they are literally one click away.

I just want to bring up one other generational issue. People sometimes say to me, “We have to offer our new younger employee a computer device, and nine times out of ten, they will choose a Mac. If we don’t offer them a Mac, they will not work here.”

My response is: the Mac is primarily a tool. Whether they get to use a particular tool or they don’t, is that the most important thing to them? Maybe—I am not really sure if that should be their primary motive, or maybe they view it as symbolic of the rest of the work environment. I am not sure, but I don’t know anyone who comes to us and turns down the job because we said, “No, you can’t have an Apple, you have to use a PC.” You often hear that, you have to … “X” or otherwise they will not work for you.

Yourdon: Well, I think it is more symbolic with Mac users. I think it is representative of a larger phenomenon. It may be Mac vs. PC, but it is usually smaller, newer devices versus old, and where I see the battle particularly being played out is in the mobile device. I think it is 3M or one of the Fortune 500 companies that has made a big splash in the enterprise when their hire new university graduates and tell them, “Bring whatever device you want. We are not going to force you to have a BlackBerry. We will figure out your iPhone or whatever you’ve got.”

Rubinow: We have talked about that here as well; in one sense it would be a great relief to say, “Here is a list of devices that are in the realm of possibilities. Pick your favorite one—go buy it and we, in combination with the vendor, will support it.” There is a certain appeal to that, but on the other hand, we are a little different from a lot of companies, from a regulatory and security standpoint. We would not be as freewheeling as, say, a non-regulated company that is not under potential attack by a lot of people from around the world trying to break in. But we have talked about it, what it would take to do that, though we have not come to the point where we say, “Go ahead.” The iPad is one that runs through the conversation often. People go and buy one, and it is cheap enough—and now that they have it, they want to be able to use it in the corporate environment. And we make it work, and so we have a taste of what it is like for people to bring in a device to the party and make it work.

Yourdon: It’s interesting that the iPad app environment is somewhat controlled by Apple, as opposed to the Android world that’s open, and that may turn out to be very scary. Well we have touched on “futures” here, and I started off by asking what are some of the new trends influencing industry? Mobile, obviously, and generational issues. Are there any other key technology trends that you see?

Rubinow: Well, I am very quick to say that “cloud computing” as a concept is not something new, but something that other people remember from the sixties as time sharing. One of the main enabling cloud technologies, virtual machines, dates from that era as well.

Having said that, we would like to provide cloud computing, or whatever technology would comprise it to our customers. A private cloud where our customers would include almost any software and infrastructure—whatever service they are looking for, we would provide it for them. It would be the most efficient, and that resonates for our customers, they are all looking for a better solution.

Everyone needs similar infrastructure, so why have your own “server department”? They all do the same thing and instead of them all doing it separately, where there is no real competitive advantage, why don’t they have a firm like us do it for them in a cloud, where we are set up and they get all the advantages of the scale that we operate and maybe some of the analytical services that we do for them today as well? So that is a big opportunity for us in our position.

The other thing that we talked about is social networks and multimedia. We talked about how we collaborate with the larger world—we get ideas when we communicate with people. From the technical standpoint, I don’t know if there is anything unique, we are particularly pushing the envelope—faster processors, bigger networks, more efficient storage—and in some cases we are impressed and in other areas we are disappointed in the speed of the technology. I don’t know if there is anything here that I would say is the “next generation” yet.

Yourdon: Virtualization is right in there with cloud.

Rubinow: There are two categories of applications in our world. One that lends itself to virtualization quite nicely, but it is just an extra millisecond here or there of acceptable overhead. We virtualize a lot of our environment in that respect. But the trading world operates in microseconds now, so it’s important to eliminate unnecessary overhead. And so we virtualize what we can and don’t virtualize what we can’t.

Yourdon: The next thing I had on my list is interesting because with all this thinking about the future, we can all look back there on a bit of history—even if it is only 50 years for the whole industry, it is a lifetime for some of us. What do you think are the most significant IT discoveries in your career—the “defining moments”?

Rubinow: Well, things like the advent of the Internet and the Web, more powerful interfaces. I think that has changed a lot of things. In terms of knowledge versus what people ever had before, I think, there are a lot of things that we are still relatively primitive on. In terms of software development, I don’t think we’ve moved light years ahead. We have different languages, different methodologies, but I don’t know that we are all that better off for them. They are different flavors and people might have more bulletproof software as opposed to “pretty good,” and I don’t know that a lot has happened in that regard, too.

I will tell you in terms of history, there was one of our developers in Europe who wanted to throw out one of our software tools and replace it with a newer one. And I said “What was your primary reason?”

The response was, “Well, the one we use was developed in the ’90s so it is old technology.”

And I said with my typical sense of sarcasm, “Okay, now let me follow this thread. You would like to replace the technology because it was old.”

I said, “Do you know many of the languages and tools we use to write most of our software were developed a long time before the ’90s, so those systems are also based on ‘old’ technology? So I guess you should throw those away too. Clearly, they could not possibly be any good.”

So I think we are always looking at the new stuff and then the old stuff, some of it is robust enough that we sometime don’t appreciate the technology that has been around for a long time and has advanced over time. But in terms of dramatic changes, I think that it is really the Internet along with more powerful interfaces, but I can’t think of anything else that is dramatic.

Yourdon: You brought up a good point. You are probably familiar with Howard Rubin. He often makes a point that in terms of development, some of the organizations are a hell of a lot better than they were 20 or 30 years ago, but the average productivity level hasn’t changed all that much. It’s a little depressing that conference organizations calling people like me to give talks to the current generation, about software development—and they just want updated versions of the talk about things I used to talk about in the ’70s.

Rubinow: There is something else that is kind of a “back to the future perspective.” As you know, processor speeds are not growing at the same rate they were, and to make up for that, one of the things we talk about all the time is in order to keep the ball moving at a reasonable rate in terms of performance and speed, we should have better parallel programming models.

We don’t have a lot of these models. We ask where has this occurred before, and then we can use the language that was designed to attack a similar problem 20 years ago (as in the telecom industry) and it wouldn’t be necessary to start all over again.

But if we focus on that kind of thinking and teach programmers how to do things in parallel, as opposed to primarily letting the operating system do its best, we could take advantage of all the multi-processing options that are available to us. That is something that a lot of people in our industry talk about and I don’t know how soon we will be able to accomplish that.

Yourdon: You have actually touched on something important there. My colleagues have written a lot of books suggesting that we look for the specific solutions rather than general solutions.

Rubinow: Yes, you have touched on something that I think about a lot lately—the way we are thinking, and I can tell you now that I think I am an example of that. Because of rapid changes in information presentation technology, I jump around from one hyperlink to another. We see less and less of the desire to sit and think deeply about a problem and research it to a high degree. Once upon a time I used to think like that, but I think like that less now than before because of the information environment in which we work.

Some people will argue that it helps you to think more quickly versus the argument that is there are times you need to think deeply about a problem and spend a long time on it. When I was in high school, I was a chess nut. I was very competitive and I could sit at a chess board for hours. I would lose all track of time. I cannot do that anymore. My mind won’t readily support the same single activity for hours, and I regret that.

Yourdon: Some of that, of course, is age.

Rubinow: Ha, you have to remind me.

Yourdon: It is definitely because I used to watch my sons play competitive chess and the younger boy placed second in a national championship. But I don’t think it is typically an advantage, especially when we have so many other urgent problems to solve.

Rubinow: You may have heard about the software that you put on your desktop that shuts off your e-mail. It forces you not to have e-mail, so you cannot be distracted. Wow—I would have never thought of that, but I understand the value in someone telling OK you have enough e-mail, I’m going to shut it off for a while so you can focus.

Yourdon: Yeah, that is intriguing. Let’s see, what next on my list? What about problems and issues that you worry about?

Rubinow: We are always trying to be more cost-effective. It is always a big issue for us, especially because of the nature of our business—there is a lot of focus on efficiency here. And then the other thing is that because we are an icon of capitalism around the world, we are particularly attractive to people that have bad intentions. So security is a big issue for us.

Another concern: how do we find the best and the brightest, and how do we keep them? How do we motivate them? How do we get peak productivity? From an economic standpoint, our business is correlated to volatility in the world because that’s when people trade more.

Yourdon: Actually you have just reminded me of a question. When I was looking through your file, I saw that you guys are out there in public forums quite a lot, whether it is CIO Radio or keynoting in any number of conferences, and so on. And clearly you are not talking to your immediate subordinates or peers. It is not like here in the office, but people outside. Do you see a growing role for CIOs in general, as a public spokesman for some aspect of your business?

Rubinow: Yes, I certainly do in this company. Certain people in the world know that there is this place on Wall Street and they see the big American flag, they see activity on the floor there, and they don’t realize how significant we really are.

When I tell people what we do, with sophisticated people and sophisticated technology, they say, “That is really amazing, we never knew that.”

So part of my job is to remind people of that—our customers, our employees, and our potential employees, those people who would say, “Why would I ever work here?” Many of the things we are doing are cool, so I am a PR person for the company. I do that a lot.

Also, another customer base that we haven’t talked about: the customers that are listed here, we get revenue from that. I don’t talk to every company but I do talk to a lot of technology firms, and I explain to them why their technology might be used here, what their affiliation with us means to them, and the interesting things we can talk about together and that we can work on together. And in some cases they weren’t aware of it and, it might be an obvious partnership for us and then again it might not be. So for all these reasons, I find myself talking about these things.

Also, in some regard, we try and help push the industry forward. Here is an example: when IEEE was talking about networking standards, the next one they wanted to go to was the 40Gb standard. We said, it is going out of style—we’ll surpass 40Gb in no time, why don’t you guys think about 100Gb? We tried to advocate our need for technology, so people would do things for us that we need them to do.

Yourdon: I was thinking simultaneously that where you have historically assumed that the spokesman for the company would be the founder or the CEO, you would not tend to think of the CIO as the technology spokesman—but, of course, those were the more classic companies and now there is a much larger set of “classic companies” that rely entirely on information.

Rubinow: You are absolutely right though; let’s use Apple as an example: I don’t know Steve Jobs, I’m sure he is a very capable guy, but he is not solely responsible for the iPhone or the iPod. Apple has all sorts of products, and he does a really good job of promoting Apple but it takes others as well. From my perspective, many of the things we do are the products and services that all of our customers will become familiar with one day—and so I can probably talk to them better than many other people in the company, so I have a very useful prospective that someone on the business side may not have.

Yourdon: Well, the CIO of Microsoft said something interesting to me—he said, “A lot of our customers come to us and say ‘You’re a big company and presumably you know stuff about IT. How do you discover it and how do you do this or that?’” And so his role, from that perspective, is to be a spokesman or the champion of technology.

Rubinow: The CIO is becoming more prominent in the highest levels of the corporation. So many industries have an information technology emphasis and some CIOs are so prominent that he or she is going to be the spokesperson for one of the most important growing parts of the business. They focus more on communicating then they ever did before. And that sort of resonated with me, too.

Yourdon: My wife suggested an interesting example to me: So many of the problems and recalls we’ve been hearing about lately in the auto industry seem to involve software. And so you often wonder, how would that be handled in different IT organizations, with different CIOs?

First of all, how would that problem have been created in the first place? And second of all, who found the problem? And thirdly, how was the whole thing handled by the CIO? Whatever that story is, it’s probably different at Toyota than it would be at Ford or Honda. So it points out that the CIO not only has to explain to the media the good things that are done, and why your company is so successful, but also how you screwed up with its use of IT in its products or services.

Rubinow: This is my philosophy. We talk about two things that I like to get people focused on. One is communication skills, and I always point this out to people. People ask who had the greatest influence on my career. I say the first thing that pops into my head is my father, primarily because he told me, no matter what your job is, you are always a salesman. You are always trying to sell something to someone.

It is not enough to sit back and say “I am brilliant” and everyone will recognize you’re brilliant. You’ve got to make it happen. So I thought about communication skills since a really young age, and I encourage people to do that too and to take advantage of as many communication opportunities as they can.

The other thing is that you never get too far away from your technology, it is critical for me to keep on top of it. But many CIOs, too often, were a developer at one time and now they’re an administrator.

I know one CIO from another firm and when I talked to him, I asked him his opinion about technology. And he said, without hesitation, “I don’t have to think about it anymore, I have people who think about those things for me.” And I said, “Wow, we all know that technology can be very challenging and you have to have a seat at the table. Otherwise, what they are going to end up doing is that everyone around you will be smart and give you conflicting recommendations and ideas and all types of things.”

I often find myself with two smart people; one says we should go right and one says we should go left, and if I don’t have an appreciation for what they are trying to decide and help them come to some conclusion, then I just have to say, well you know, he is usually right, so I will go with him.

So I try not to get too far from technology either. I try to stay close to the work going on. I am a voracious reader and I think in order to be an effective CIO you really have to comprehend a lot of technology. It doesn’t mean that you can always tell what qualifies one project as a success and the other as a false start, although I can do that with some things. That is the culture of things we are talking about.

Yourdon: Would you emphasize the whole multi-disciplinary approach? That seems to be consistent with your career and what you have seen elsewhere.

Rubinow: Yes, I would do that too. I think that there are many computer specialties, and there are many different aspects of a business. Technology is always important. And I would go further: I don’t want to say that someone that has been at the same company for decades is limited, but in the earlier part of my career, I got my degree in chemistry, but I always used computers as an essential tool.

I wanted to develop more and understand things better, so I started taking classes in computer science. Because I knew the direction I was headed, I would probably never write an operating system, or write a network protocol on the job. But I wanted to make sure I was more well-rounded and on top of that, an even better technologist—but I also wanted to understand what business was all about. I tried to get myself exposed to as many situations as possible.

It worked for me and I think I would encourage people to have as many different perspectives as you can have because it also helps to bring fresh ideas to things that need freshening up. I always liked the idea, and like people who have done a bunch of different things as an augmented background, because they make contributions to people that are more useful as well.

Yourdon: On the other hand, you said something fascinating that will be true for every student today, but that was not true in generations before: in every university, a significant part of your arsenal of intellectual pursuits from high school onward involves computers. And obviously that was not true for me when I was in high school in the 1950s. There is a period of time that you can either get involved with computers or not.

Rubinow: Today, you can take it for granted. I remember my very first programming class was when I was in eighth grade, and I had to go across the city to a university computer room to use the technology—which was the mainframe—and I had a terminal. And it was nice to have a personal computer at home where I would program ever since then. I was an outlier then, as to what was expected.

Yourdon: Well, actually, you don’t have to worry about being an outlier. My youngest son originally intended to study physics in college, but ended up with a degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago. And then, about five years later, he went back to Columbia to earn a bachelor’s degree in physics and then on to Toronto to get a master’s as well. I envy the broad background he got along the way.

Rubinow: And I respect that as well. People come up and say to me, clearly you don’t use this chemistry you studied. On the contrary, I developed disciplined problem solving based on the scientific method. It applies to the sciences, but is also applies to so many different things in my job and so, no, it is useful every day.

Yourdon: Yes, scientific method problems solving.

Rubinow: And you know the processes—the logic, philosophies, analytics—are valuable.

Yourdon: Let me turn that around and ask you, is there one common piece of advice for people who want a career path to the CIO?

Rubinow: People that come to me and say, “I want to do what you do,” focus too much on technology. If they’re really technically smart, then it is a logical progression, and then I tell them there is this whole other thing called management and leadership. You can’t find it in a book, it is really hard to take a course and say now you are an effective leader.

I don’t often know the prescribed path that people take to become good at those skills. It’s acquired through experience, coaching, and mentoring, or being mentored, and all those sorts of things. I impress upon people, those “soft skills” differentiate CIOs from wannabe CIOs. They need those skills to work effectively in a company.

I’m often asked, well what class do I need to take to become certified, say, in Microsoft skills? And I say it goes well beyond certifications. And by the way, I don’t always have the answer to that. You may not have the oratory skills of President Obama no matter how hard you try. Similarly, not everyone can be a really good leader.

Yourdon: To go off in a different area, how do you have conversations with your peers in the business units about the crazy ideas they bring to you?

Rubinow: You know, I think that there is an assessment you can do with numbers and that’s the easiest tool. Then there are the people who become “believers,” or intuitively they feel something is right. And you sometimes have to dissuade them from it if the facts don’t support it.

My decision ability is good, so when they recommend something to you, you may know it doesn’t make any sense. It is not just a difference of opinion; it just doesn’t make any sense. You go to them and say, for the following reasons, “I don’t think this will work.”

And they say to you, “But why?”

I’m pretty good at making decisions and if my intuition is telling me it is a pretty bad idea, you have to work extra hard to find ways to tell people that I don’t think that is going to work. And then again you can be wrong too, but…

We have had some examples of that in the last few days. People come up with ideas here, and I immediately get ten examples or changes in priority to accommodate them, and somehow they feel it has more value than it really does. And that is the way it is and you have to find ways to persuade people with leadership and management because these are other people over whom you have no authority and you can’t order them to do what you want.

I learned this more than any other place when I worked at Fidelity Investments. A new job was created, and I interviewed for it, and they hired me for it, and my job was to integrate things—to develop an information architecture integrating all the relevant information of 40 divisions.

And I said “I am not naive about these things, not everyone is going to report to me. How do I get them to do go along with it? How am I going to do this?”

And they said, “Oh don’t worry about it: the chairman wants it done.”

I said OK. So I go to Boston, and I go to the first meeting and present a report on another technology.

And they said, “Why would we do that?

And I said, “Well, apparently the chairman wants it.”

They replied, “Well, can we give you a list of all the things the chairman asked for? Join the club.”

So I said to myself, that is not going to work—so how do I get all these guys to do what I want them to do when I can’t order them to do it? And I found many different ways. I found persuasion, escalation, politics, barter, forcefulness. I found there were many different ways, and I got cooperation from people, not always on my schedule, but I got people to do what I wanted them to do. The practice of influence management was a very valuable lesson from this. Good communications skills, good listening skills—that is a very important skill and I notice that among people who work for me.

When they get frustrated and complain to me, when they want that guy to do something and he just won’t do it. I tell them, you just try it a different way. Here are some of the ways you might approach that. And that’s a good educational lesson, too.

Yourdon: There is an aspect of that I would like to explore a little further. In a way it has to do with this global issue of the CIO getting an equal seat at the table with other C-level officers. You mentioned earlier that in many businesses, there are people who are now up at that level who have been very successful on their way up at doing something, which is usually instrumental to the success of the company. Now they may have been the best automobile engineer and as a result, they often feel that that defines the company’s success. How in general do you think the CIO is going to be able to get the kind of influence and respect that they need to be able to operate as an equal?

Rubinow: Well, sometimes I think that every technology department in almost every company should have their own PR function or internally rely on skilled people to make contributions in the best possible marketing way, as if they were selling toothpaste or another consumer product.

We do remind people. And just a couple of weeks ago for our management committee, we did a report of what we’ve done over the last three years. It is mind boggling, the things we have accomplished. In terms of cost reduction, in terms of output, in terms of innovations, and we put it together because we are conscious of it every single day. But our management team has other things to worry about, and they’re not focused on, how great has IT been in the last year?

But when we brought them the report, it reminded them and they were unanimous. They said, “Yes, we were aware of this, but when you put it all together, it is a great record.” But we have to keep reminding people of our contributions, and our impact—and relying on other people to take an active role is not a good strategy.

Yourdon: Well, in fact, it seems more often that you don’t even have the option—you are more or less thrown out. Howard Rubin used to make that point a lot, there is an enormous amount of money being spent on stuff the senior executives couldn’t touch or feel, it is very intangible. And yet if you package the story properly, you often could say, “By the way, this is really what we have done.”

Rubinow: I remember one of the managers I worked for at Fidelity on the business side, said to me, “Show me what you’ve accomplished every month.”

And I said, “Like what? A total redesign of our network?”

“No,” he said, “that activity is invisible to me. You might think about the amount of money you saved the company.”

And I said, “How about quarterly?”

“No,” he said. “Every month …do something.”

We found things to do. We know that certain managers are skeptical, and we’ve got to find away through our activities to remind them of the value we provide.

Yourdon: That is a big part of the future as well. First, recognizing the need that can be addressed with IT— and then being able to pull it off.

Rubinow: Well, everyone wants to see progress. When people have the confidence that you are doing good stuff, the outcome becomes more predictable as a result. So you have to think long term.

Yourdon: Here’s a different question: what attributes do you look for in the direct reports who are going to be part of your “CIO team”?

Rubinow: I remember reading something a long time ago about a study on football teams. You can have a really great football team where none of the players like each other, but technically they are very competent. But if you can, a football team that is technically good and where they also really like each other, you’re going to have much better results. And I think that is what we have here. We tend to enjoy working with each other and understand each other; we know what the expectations are.

People know what to expect from them. They know when to ask questions and they are on the same wave length. That is an extremely important thing. And by the way, when working long hours, you want to do it with people that you like. You don’t want to spend 12+ hours a day trying to solve a problem with people you can hardly stand, or need to get away from. There are some people here that I have gone on hiking trips in the mountains with, because we really get along well. And so that is an important characteristic.

Then again, technical competence and all those kinds of things have a big role in making good decisions and making the right calls. Also risk taking, perspective—otherwise, you will not be able to advance as you want.

There are several things I ask of people when they work for me. One is that you can see a lot more than your immediate job—see the bigger picture. Second, if you make a decision and it turns out poorly, I ask myself and others if another skilled practitioner would have made the same decision at the same time given the same information. If the answer is yes, then even if we’re not happy with the outcome, it’s hard to fault the decision maker by using hindsight. On the other hand, if you made a decision to go left when other people in your position would have said go right, then I think there is a bit of a problem. Thirdly, let’s not make the same mistake over and over again. Let us learn from our experience. And I think people understand that.

So I think there is a sense of loyalty here. And equal commitment to each other. I know that they have my back and they know that I have their back. When times are tough, I am not going to distance myself and say, hey, there’s a problem, I didn’t know what was going on. We know we can count on each other. And that, combined with the other points makes a really great team.

Yourdon: You mentioned in that effort, you would be working 12 hours a day. Do you see this job as a 12-hour-per-day job?

Rubinow: I am a self-admitted workaholic. However, I don’t try to impose that on others. But having said that, there are things here, especially during the day, the trading day, where you know that something is pending, involving a lot of money.

We’re global and so we need to talk to each other all hours of the night. People know that I read my e-mail at two o’clock in the morning. I don’t tell everyone, but they know I am going to be that way. Most of the people here work a standard work week on the job, but they are really available seven days a week. And it is rare for someone to say, you know it is a weekend, I’m on holiday or I’m on vacation, don’t contact me.

I don’t want to ruin anyone’s family life but if you don’t mind it, because you’re part of the team, you have professional pride. And that is just the nature of what we do here. You will find people that work here, even off site, who work really long days. Work is part of what we do. And they enjoy the personal satisfaction of accomplishment and being part of the team.

Yourdon: Do you think that’s true of CIOs across the board?

Rubinow: I think people are not hiring, so people are working longer hours, doing more jobs. I do see that, until times get better. People do want to have some time at home, and the hiring will start to peak again. And I’ll tell you—in 1998 when I went to work at a start-up in Silicon Valley, I had this image that I was going to work day and night, that I was going to sleep in the office at night, and that I would survive on a diet of Diet Coke and Oreos. These are all the visions I had. And when I got there, I did find a lot of hard-working people, but I found I was one of the hardest-working, so I asked some of my younger colleagues about this. They said they didn’t work late nights just because someone thinks they’re supposed to work 12 hours a day. It’s also generational—they also realize that there is a life outside of work. Dedicating yourself to the company is not a life that they need to or want to emulate. I understand that and I respect that. It is not a choice that I make, but I understand.

Yourdon: I remember after I first visited some of the companies out in Silicon Valley, a lot of them had the motto, “Live hard and play hard.”

Rubinow: I think younger people are even more so that way, than maybe people who have grown up in a different generation—for whom work really dominated their lives. I was thinking, though, that some people understand how important work is and are far too passionate about their jobs. In some countries, labor laws have prevented people from working too much and they are realizing the benefits of that.

Yourdon: I remember hearing that in Germany, they would literally lock the office doors at five o’clock—and if the server crashed, you could not get into the building. I was stunned.

Rubinow: And that is the lifestyle they want. It’s very successful.

Yourdon: That leads into my last question, not about that technical but about the social aspect. One of the philosophies of the “agile” approach to development is that of a “sustainable” work schedule. You’re not running a sprint, you are running a marathon. And you got to be a little more careful to pace yourself. If you go at top speed all the time, you are going to burn out. I’m curious from your prospective what do you think about this whole movement in general.

Rubinow: Agile development—I like it. I like the outcome, like the fact that I know what we are going to do in the timeframe of a single sprint. Everyone knows what they are supposed to do and I like the productivity. For the right application, it really has a good impact on programming, too.

Yourdon: On programming?

Rubinow: Yeah, wherever it makes sense to use it. Sometimes we use it for entire projects. Sometimes we use it for individual tasks. So I am an advocate for all these things.

Yourdon: I’ve been amazed by the growth of agile—I went to the last big Agile conference last year, and there was somewhere near 1,200 people in attendance. They are coming up on the tenth anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. And there are some very interesting surveys and statistics about making it work with multi-national projects, making it work in regulated industries. It definitely works in certain environments—especially when it’s already in place and the project is all inside one organization. If you have arms-length, contractual relationships between vendors and customers, and you have developers all over the world and it is more than 100 people, then it can be more problematic.

Rubinow: We are a little more careful with that but then again we use it where it makes sense.

Yourdon: Okay, I think this is probably a good point for us to wrap things up, and bring the discussion for a close. I’d really like to thank you for taking the time to talk with me today.

Rubinow: Thanks.