Managing innovation in a 129-year-old financial institution is not an easy job. Northern Trust’s director of architecture and innovation and chief architect, Len Hardy, talks to Joy Macknight about transforming legacy applications, processes and people. 

Len Hardy

The best way to tackle legacy applications, says Len Hardy, director of architecture and innovation, chief architect at Northern Trust, is phase out the old monoliths and build new capabilities in modern architecture, then integrate those capabilities into existing applications with a service-based approach.

Tapping innovation coming out of the open-source community is also part of the institution’s modernisation strategy. As with other enterprises, Northern Trust has embraced open-source software, from Linux operating systems to big data and container platforms. It also implemented an internal cloud native platform, in addition to using public cloud.

Going public

Today, public cloud makes sense for artificial intelligence and machine learning, where hundreds or thousands of machines are needed for a relatively short time, according to Mr Hardy.

“Public cloud providers have invested vast resources into algorithms, machine learning and speech recognition, so why would we reinvent the wheel? Our job is to figure out the sweet spot between public and private – including personal information that should be kept within our four walls – and the best way to interface between the two alternatives,” he says.

He believes that a hybrid model, or a mixture of private and public cloud, will prevail in the foreseeable future but, ultimately, the shift to public cloud is inevitable. “If we had to build another data centre today, then we would be looking at [public cloud] very hard,” he says.

Staying agile

Mr Hardy is building a development and operations (DevOps) culture, bridging technology and the business – but admits creating a culture that embraces change in an incumbent institution is challenging. “People are used to doing things in a certain way and making a dramatic change – and real DevOps is a dramatic change – takes time. Processes change over time and often people don’t know why things are done the way they are, yet truly believe that they must be done in that way,” he says.

“The key is to figure out why the processes and procedures exist, then implement automation that achieves the same controls as the manual processes. In some instances, we have 10 different manual controls in place where one automated control would work,” he adds.

When the institution brought in its private cloud, Northern Trust decided to run it with DevOps methodology. So instead of bringing it into the legacy operations area, five individuals were chosen, ring-fenced as platform operators and paired with teams using the platform. The institution plans to roll the practice out more broadly across more of the legacy operations.

Career history: Len Hardy  

  • 2009 Northern Trust, director of architecture and innovation, chief architect
  • 2007 Northern Trust, rapid solutions, internal technical consultant
  • 2000 Northern Trust, division head, client-facing digital applications – passport products

It has also adopted agile software development techniques. Mr Hardy says: “We took three different teams out of the Northern Trust environment and put them into an extreme programming environment for six months. We re-embedded them to educate and encourage other employees to use the same methodology.”

To this end, Northern Trust built several agile spaces in its Chicago offices. “In under 12 months more than 200 services have been created using DevOps, agile technologies and cloud-native architecture,” he reports.

Deepening relationships

With responsibility for identifying technology innovation opportunities, Mr Hardy regularly visits Silicon Valley looking for solutions that will create value for partners and clients. If it believes that a start-up could deliver business value, Northern Trust will engage very early on in a proof of concept and help steer the product to meet its specifications. “If that is successful, then my job as chief architect is to integrate the solution into Northern Trust’s architecture and then offer it to the business line technology groups,” he says.

Mr Hardy sees a trend developing around offering everything as a service. “Everything will be service-enabled, and all client data will be available securely, in real-time via a service,” he says. Northern Trust is already receiving such requests from customers. “Some of our largest corporate clients want to be able to securely call a service over the internet and retrieve trade data, and then integrate that directly into their own applications,” says Mr Hardy. “And those applications could be running anywhere, in a data centre, on a public cloud or an application service provider.” He believes integration will be key to this trend going forward.

To cope with the increasing pace of change in technology, the relationship between IT and business is becoming much tighter. “It really has to be a partnership,” says Mr Hardy. “IT needs to be in tune with what the business is trying to do from a product and services perspective, or we will quickly get out of synch.”

Aligning with customers is also imperative, which is why Northern Trust’s technology group has quarterly meetings with counterparts at the bank’s large customers to discuss market developments and IT strategy. “We talk about the top 10 technology trends of the year and see if we agree. It is important to have close synergies with our largest clients to ensure we are heading in the same direction,” he says.

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