Charles Schwab & Co., the big financial services company, grew up around its information technology capabilities. IT was the key factor that allowed the young discount-brokerage house to offer customers lower prices on trades than traditional brokers. Later, as discount brokerage became more of a commodity business, Schwab transformed itself into a full-service, online broker, and by 1998 it was earning a significant share of its profits in the online trading business. But in the next few years competitors caught up to Schwab, and some surpassed it. Several brokerage houses, both discount and full service, were frequently able to beat Schwab on price.
Surprising as it seems, given the company’s strategy of using technology to distance itself from competitors, IT had become part of Schwab’s problem. By the company’s own reckoning, IT staffers’ responses to business requests had become slow and expensive. IT engineers had to spend more time than ever fixing bugs in the systems. Meanwhile, several big, ambitious projects were overdue — including the tax-lot accounting system Schwab had envisioned to serve its most profitable customers — and the slow progress of these projects was preventing the company from responding effectively to competition. Still, the company kept throwing money at projects because it didn’t see an alternative. “We said, we have to keep spending money because we’re half pregnant and you can’t be... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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