ANZ's frenetic CIO moves on

He hasn't had a free summer since he was a 12-year-old working on his grandfather's farm in Angie, Louisiana, in the United States. Since then he has climbed the IT ladder and reached one of the most lucrative positions in Australia.

But after what was a short-term contract with ANZ Bank extended to six years, David Boyles will enjoy his first free summer in 2005.

While he still has 72 projects worth at least $1 million each to oversee, just about everything in the bank's IT that could have been overhauled, has been.

Boyles leaves amid speculation he was pushed after a systems breakdown last year. But his record of frenetic restructuring and innovation - which has led to some of the bank's leading-edge solutions being exported to one of the biggest banks in the US - overshadow the rumours.

``If you can find a chief information officer who has never had a systems issue, I would like to meet them," he says. ``We have hundreds of projects going and any one of them has the capability for creating a problem."

Since he was hired, ANZ has completely redone its IT infrastructure, moving legacy systems to Windows 2000, introducing an Internet Protocol network, new desktop machines, data equipment, telecoms links, servers and even UPS.

Later this year the last of the significant infrastructure changes - equipment for the tellers - will be introduced.

A whole new suite of Peoplesoft products, running not on mainframes but on Windows, has also been brought in.

While the overhaul was going on, some unique solutions were also being developed.

Working with Kaz Computing, ANZ developers have come up with an item processing (scanning) system for cheques, vouchers, debit slips and other banking paper using a workstation, specialised software, keyboard, magnetic ink character and optical character recognition readers. Boyles says it is ``dramatically less expensive" and takes one step instead of several to process.

Now one of the biggest banks in the US, and others, plans to buy the system.

``We have done a fair amount of innovating," Boyles says.

ANZ, which manages most of its systems in Melbourne, has about 900 developers, about 13 per cent of whom are contractors.

Although the bank's communications networks are outsourced to Telstra and desktop maintenance is outsourced to Fujitsu, the bank has not outsourced its core development.

In 1998 the bank had ``inflexible, high-cost" technology, 15 data networks, six core systems and eight main platforms, he says. There was also poor disaster recovery, inconsistent architectures, poor project management and incomplete, inaccurate billing.

Their Tandem systems are being phased out over the next two years and being replaced with open systems environments on Windows.

In 2003, the Unix and AS/400 systems have been rationalised from 100 boxes globally to a handful. Unix will continue but will eventually be replaced with Linux. ``We are not currently implementing Linux but do believe that it will eventually replace Unix as the development and management tools mature," he says.

All critical processes have a disaster recovery plan and technology costs are regularly reported to senior managers through new IT governance standards and policies.

Detailed billing is provided to each business unit for IT services and a central repository for all project reporting was established to inform all of the bank's senior executives.

In 1998, IT staff turnover was between 18-20 per cent and now is less than 3 per cent.

Boyles has been a big advocate of offshore programmers - the bank has 450 in India - and is proud of the bank's involvement in the software standards bodies citing top recognitions for the bank's Bangalore site.

Boyles is now keen to get involved in new ventures and several calls have come his way from mid-sized Australian technology companies.