Unwinding Folklore to Modernize at Northern Trust with Len Hardy

Episode 148 · 47:24 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

all right great well well domain we uh we're lucky today we've got two great guests i know why don't we i will let i'm excited to have uh mike calino join us again it's been a little over a year now yep um so welcome back mike thank you very much good to be back yeah so guys we have done this before don't worry uh and we've also got we've also got len hardy uh from northern trust who's going to tell us a little bit about his journey uh len why don't you introduce yourself and then we'll get into into the story yeah hi my name is len hardy i'm from the northern trust uh we are a um large financial institution that is headquartered in chicago uh three main businesses asset management asset servicing and wealth management um my role uh now is i am the director of uh both public and private cloud uh engineering and infrastructure um devops uh we use for devops and then business unit type uh application slash infrastructure architecture so uh from the cloud perspective uh i have um sort of the enablement um the engineering uh in the devops sort of uh enterprise practices around that awesome uh so so why don't we start with a little bit of context uh you know tell us a little bit about your business and you know when we talk to customers there's usually some kind of you know driving force behind their efforts to to modernize how they how they use software it's usually some combination of competitive pressures uh with even desire to to better serve your customers just maybe lay some context down for us uh in terms of uh your journey yeah so so our journey into cloud native sort of application development started about two years ago and um at the time we were not

in a position uh nor were our clients uh to do anything in the public cloud that's obviously changed we can get into that a little bit later but um we were looking for um a platform um or an architecture if you will um that would allow us to re-engineer a lot of our core applications as well as uh continue with the digital offering that we had uh had going on um we we knew that we needed to change um to a more agile um development methodology um we thought that we wanted to change and i think it's proven out that it was the right decision that we wanted to change to a uh 12 factor microservices based um cloud native um development and runtime environment um and we wanted to sort of start preparing um the organization and by that i mean the development organization the architects uh the infrastructure folks in the business for you know sort of an eventual uh journey to the public cloud and what that meant so about two years ago uh we brought in pivotal cloud foundry um we sent a couple of teams uh at the time to um pivotal labs over in the merchandise market here in chicago uh they went through the whole um the whole thing uh with programming and paired programming and uh and bringing over product owners and working through a couple of applications there uh and deployed those on uh pivotal cloud foundry that we my group had uh built out uh installed uh engineered and uh operate within our uh two data centers here in the chicago suburbs so that was sort of the beginning um now uh with two years later uh we have about 600 developers on that platform um and they are are supported by the original four devops engineers that we brought on board um so you know the way that we do that is is you know you guys have said this before everybody says this you know relentless automation so we could not have four guys supporting 600 developers without building a lot of things um either into the platform around the platform or or through tooling that we we put in place so we've grown uh significantly uh on the platform we have

you know many many many services in uh production many in um different testing environments and we've got a lot a lot of activity on the platform today that's great and that's those are some nice sort of uh bookends right where you started where you are today and now we've got to figure out all the other books on the shelf in between um i am curious to go way back to that initial engagement um at pivotal labs in their that beautiful chicago office that they have um what was that first application can you share a little bit about what was it doing was it something that was getting refactored was it something new that needed to be built what part which of those three businesses that you mentioned was it supporting yeah so it was it was what i would call an assets it was an asset servicing um i wouldn't even call it an application i guess i'd call it a platform basically what we were doing is we were modernizing the core of the asset servicing business that we have today and uh the application in question or the uh the platform that we were talking about uh developing is something that we were calling tranhub or transaction hub and really it was sort of a real-time platform running on pivotal cloud foundry that took transactions um coming into the bank from any number of different uh scenarios so they could come from the swift network they could come from clients uh they can come from other uh applications uh running within our data center um or things like that and it it was the central place where they were pulled in validated uh reformatted into a common format and then delivered out uh to the application that was specifically responsible for processing it so it was sort of the core around all of the asset servicing uh uh applications clients and um networks uh that we do business with so basically we're looking for uh fast time to market we're looking at uh horizontal horizontal scalability uh we're looking at developer productivity we're looking

at um very high reliability uh all the things that you get from cloud native um development patterns and from pivotal cloud foundry specifically in this case and what about let's talk a little bit about some of the uh i guess some of the process and culture issues you have to deal with uh as you as you transition from uh kind of where you were to where you are today um you talked about automation and having a relatively small group of four supporting the platform and uh supporting all those developers i imagine that's a very different scenario than than previously uh can you talk about how you how you approach some of the organizational and process challenges you have yeah so so that's interesting so i don't know how much you guys know about the northern trust but we're about 130 year old um financial institution in chicago so um 130 years old there's a lot of legacy out there so there's a lot of uh in in air quotes there's a lot of culture uh there's a lot of um uh bedded down thought process and all of that had to be changed uh in order to to move forward with what we wanted to do here from a cloud native development perspective and i guess the way that we uh the way that we approached that at least initially was so so the four the four develop uh devops engineers uh infrastructure engineers if you want to call them that that that we have that are responsible for the operation and the automation of cloud foundry were hand chosen and basically um we pick them um for a diversity of skill sets uh we have a person on the team who is probably one of the best um java architects that we have here at the northern trust we have someone who is a a manager and a technical manager who managed um uh web uh mobile uh database development for a number of different um very high profile platforms uh the third member of the team uh worked on our what you would call our tiger team i guess that attacked problems from a variety of different areas so very strong on networking very strong in infrastructure operating system something like that and then um but first but least we have a new

college graduate uh with from a comp sci program here in illinois who was uh very technical and very uh interested in learning new things could pick up things very very quickly and was was was very diverse in sort of the skill sets that uh she brought to the problem so the first thing we did is i think we picked uh a cross-functional um uh very enthused uh very forward-looking team in order to stand up the the product to support the product and to build automation around the product uh secondly what we did is we handpicked the teams that went to pivotal labs uh right you know the old uh i guess it's martin follower you have to be 42 inches tall to ride the ride well we didn't want anybody that was three foot tall in the initial uh in the initial implementation so we basically handpicked a team of uh pretty good rock stars and sent them out uh to pivotal and we've rotated several of these through and when we brought them back uh we sat them down with um i don't want to say legacy teams but we sat them down with teams that hadn't been through the program um and we tried to sort of infect or infuse those existing teams with that same thought process in that same methodology that they learned uh at at pivotal labs now in terms of the automation you know we went uh head to head and tooth and nail with our control officers uh with our auditors uh with our regulators uh and basically proved to them that what we were putting in from an automation perspective um was probably more secure and more compliant than the four to six to eight different manual steps that were in the process in the past so it was an education process for uh for the people on the compliance and the audit and the risk and the control side but they really stepped up too once we were able to show them you know we're going to allow an application developer to start and stop a service by themselves in production but in the background we're going to automatically put in the service now ticket and we're going to make sure all the documentation is in there and it's all consistent it's all of a specific format um and it's going to be better than if somebody manually put the ticket in and you know you get you know run on sentences and you got inaccurate information and you get somebody just pushing a

button in order to get the ticket completed so the minute we were able to prove that what we wanted to do was in fact more um compliant than what we had from you know 15 manual steps in the past everybody sort of jumped on board and we're extending that now into some other things that we're doing as well what do you think was the turning point in your conversation with that compliance risk and audit control team where because you mentioned that they've really stepped up but it was an education process yeah can you think of like a moment where it seemed like things clicked and accelerated with that team well yeah uh yeah let me get to that i think i think what you i think what we found and this is probably true for any um organization that's been around been around for a while is the controls uh that were in place uh were all interpretations of things that had been passed down through through the ages and were pretty much uh word of mouth among people or uh controls that were stacked on top of each other because things had potentially failed in the past right so you know maybe in the past there was a control where i had to verify that two numbers matched and then somebody didn't do it right one time 10 years ago and they added two more controls on top right so basically what we had to do to make them sort of see the light on how this was going to happen is sort of unwind all of that uh folklore and uh and hearsay and telephone tag in terms of why these were put together in the first place and get right down to what is the controlling for and what is the purpose of it and then as soon as we got that and got people to agree on that and have a common understanding of that we can very very easily automate that and then show you know through through hard numbers and screens and in tickets that are out there on service now how we were able to automate that and and actually satisfy the control but without the reams and reams of overhead so i think it was really just uh uh pulling around pulling out the actual purpose of the control eliminating anything around it and showing how we were going to solve it that's interesting and i i love that kind of expression

you use of unwinding folklore yeah um and you know although i can imagine you you know that's not i mean you can walk up to your compliance team be like i understand you have some folklore and i'd like to find it um that may that may get things off the wrong foot the thing remain the thing the thing is is that the the control officers only all they do is they hand you the actual document that has the technical control uh written down and then the implementation of that is always left up to the people that are either building the application or the business side or or some other people that had oversight over it so once we could sort of distill down what that actual document said and make it practical and then show them how we were going to do that in a very practical way they didn't really care about the folklore it's not really their folklore it's more the people that get that get audited that people are asking questions of and it's like well i do these six or eight ten manual things and here that's what proves that this is right as opposed to you know here's an automated approach and here's a number on a screen and that's what proves it's right okay that's interesting that that's helpful i think that it's not the folklore from the compliance team it's the folklore of the people who are receiving the audits yeah so implementers yeah okay so then does it does it come down to like you know the way that like some event storming activities happen right you've got to get everyone in the room which is hard right scheduling is hard yeah um but we we need to all get physically in the room together and just start to to talk through each of these things until we get that common understanding is is that what it looks like or what does it look like when you actually yeah so how we did it is we had we had it's it's a it's a give and take and it's it's a uh it's a negotiation basically so so the way that we did it is we took one of the controls that were um in scope for you know a specific thing and we actually had somebody

on the application side or on the platform side who read the control and documented what he thought it meant in english and in practical manners on in like six or eight bullet points you know this could be like a 10 page control and he said okay what i got out of this is i need to do a b c and i have to approve d so we started with that and then we started taking around to other people that actually had a had a had a uh a buy-in somehow for the process and we said do you agree with this does this 10 page control really only mean i need to do this these six things that's where the debate was you know and it probably wasn't didn't end up being the sixth thing that we started with but it wasn't the 47 things either it was somewhere in between and as soon as we had a common understanding and everybody could nod their head and sign off you know the control officer um the developer uh the architect the platform owner the people that support our itsm applications if all of those people were on board and signed off that these were the six things we have to do then all we had to do was automate it right that was the simple part and so mike when when and how did solstice kind of enter the picture or maybe len you should give your version of the story first and and then mike can elaborate from there no no mike can go the solstice was a a development partner from from our digital perspective uh in a lot of cases they did a lot of ui ux stuff uh with our what we call our passport products which is our uh our web-based um portal type products in our in our digital uh uh mobile offerings for both um retail clients uh and corporate clients so they uh solstice was a partner with our internal development uh folks on uh designing and developing those things yeah and solstice has been around for roughly 18 years and our first client oddly enough was northern trust so we've been working consistently with northern trust for about two decades now as len mentioned uh our primary focus has been in the

sort of external customer facing applications uh and many of those have been uh running on legacy portal technology platforms uh since their inception in initial creation and so uh once the corresponding architecture had been proven out the platform had been stood up uh these are the the applications that were sort of first tagged to be moved over off of the portal technology onto the little cloud foundry so ultimately we are as development partners of the northern trust customers of the the platform and the services that it provides to its developers across the ecosystem over at northern trust uh my particular area of focus um historically has been on enterprise architecture uh that's a group that i used to lead here at solstice and in many cases on these northern projects we would um collaborate with len and his team uh and then oddly enough from a timeline standpoint as solstice looked at uh cloud partners in the lot in the landscape roughly around 24 to 36 months ago that's where our partnership with pivotal started on a very similar timeline where northern uh again one of our longest running customers uh had been evaluating the platform and had selected to actually bring it in house and stand it up so um you know a perfect marriage in terms of you know the the partnership from uh not only in northern to solstice standpoint but back from a solstice to pivotal standpoint in the sense that we could come in and help uh northern as a development partner uh move legacy workloads onto the new platform yeah mike it's funny you mentioned the the length of the relationship i remember a time in one of the old buildings we used to be in over on canal street with jay sitting in a sitting in a a little cubicle and just actually pounding out code himself so that was a long time ago right absolutely yes our former uh our initial uh ceo and founder and now he's actually the ceo of the

the public parent company that owns a space in the uk so yeah the the relationship with northern trust um as well as the um you know just the the significant people especially those in leadership positions still here at solstice who've been here from the beginning uh all of them have worked uh at some point in time on significant um endeavors over at northern trust yeah and speaking of trust talk a little bit about building that trust over time between a uh a services provider such as yourselves a company like northern trust who's been around for i think you said 130 plus years uh does the length of time of that relationship really help when it comes to working on these types of initiatives and how do you build that trust over time i can take it first i mean i i've been at solstice myself for seven years so i've come in um sort of after the relationship uh has been stood up but at the same time every year um you know it seems like we're in newer areas of the organization over there um and so it's definitely a relationship that has grown and evolved uh so much to the point now where i think it's very interesting when solstice holds that's bring your kids to work day uh there's actually a lot of northern um northern stakeholders that actually uh bring their kids uh over to the solstice offices for a couple hours uh usually in the afternoon each year so it just talks to you know how close the relationship um has sort of blossomed and matured to but um i think the other thing too is that uh northern very much has its sights set on the future and understands the value of sort of digital craftsmanship uh all the way from sort of the top of the stack all the way down to the platform itself and so i think there's just a a general alignment of uh again where we think both organizations are going and so uh it's just a really great relationship for us to again sort of care nurture and move forward uh collectively as we

as we look to the future so what i heard out of all that was that northern trust would trust you with their children absolutely you know i i guess i would say you know i'll chime in on that a little bit i i think you know when it comes down to it it's this is uh you know this is this is business and they have to deliver and they they've delivered right so you know as much as i like mike and you know we know jay and we know everybody over there but you know they need to continue to deliver and they've done that so i mean that's what sort of that's what sort of you know keeps people uh together keeps people doing doing business together you know and keeps relationships strong is you know the ability to trust each side to deliver what they say they're going to do yeah and so i want to double click back on um something that mike was referring to which is essentially that you know since this is a long-standing existing relationship you know the kids are are hanging out together and everything um how how or did it change at all uh when sort of this this move to adopt the platform and start to modernize these applications come in mike you mentioned that a lot of the applications kind of the front-end customer-facing applications that solstice had been working on for a long time we're running um on you know the kind of portal back-end system that was the first things to get modernized so i just want to double click a little bit into that and see you know did this did this change the relationship at all how was solstice impacted by this sort of change to now becoming a customer of this new platform that had come in yeah it's a really great question um and i think uh from a technical standpoint um obviously len and his team uh had to go across the business business partners at northern trust to to sell the investment in terms of the platform but i think uh the teams on the ground uh solstice ones included uh were really the the the uh key messaging partners back to the

actual lines of business and application uh owners themselves as to you know release by release what the platform is going to provide uh them and the applications that they own and so i think that's what really um was one of the sort of the the changing points of uh or turning points i should say of the uh relationship as it relates to uh solstice and northern uh in the context of the platform was that we were able to educate um our the application owners the business owners on a release by release basis the some of the functionality that we would be moving off of the legacy platforms into the new platform and what that was ultimately going to provide for them and that's what really made it tangible and real for them and really made them um sort of get a front row seat as to what the platform could provide for them long term as they saw it in the context of their own application yeah and i think the technical model that was chosen for that was really interesting and it did show from a business perspective how the new platform could deliver value very very quickly and could um you know really get that that that incremental speed to market i mean what they chose to do so the platform that that mike's been talking about is sort of our private or our retail offering both you know web-based and uh and uh and mobile-based but it was on and some of it still continues to be on sort of a legacy infrastructure you know um monolithic java type stuff and there's always investment into this product they're always bringing out new products and services you know for the for the end user and the decision was made you know starting today every new piece of uh uh functionality that we're going to deliver through this platform is going to be developed on this new platform uh pivotal cloud foundry it's going to be um cloud native architected from the start it's going to be microservices um it's going to be 12 factor um and we're simply going to call those services from the old legacy application via rest calls right so everything that was built that was going

to be enhancements to that was built in the new platform and then as mike said they started pulling off older pieces of functionality and putting them on the new platform as well um until they sort of got uh uh an economies of scale thing going and then they basically flipped the front door to point to the new platform when they only had a couple of old ancillary services running in legacy so they're able to keep sort of keep the production line rolling by delivering new products and new capabilities because it was so quick to market while they were modernizing the stuff that was uh already in existence on the legacy platform and then again get to a tipping point where they're able to put the front door into the new platform and just have a couple of old ancillary services running in the background okay what i'm just curious like what kind of um methodologies and other technologies were useful in that transition i've i've heard a number of things i don't want to i don't want to put words in your mouth but i'm just curious as you go through and you're trying to understand like here are the you know we're going to build start with just anything new goes somewhere on a new platform and we'll we'll make those risk calls back to the to the legacy um monolith and then over time we're going to start to carve off pieces of that monolith until like less and less is still existing there what what things help provide visibility into that to be able to understand this is this is where we should you know make those cuts those those first cuts but that kind of thing well i i think you know and i'll let mike chime in but but i think you know the whole the whole agile methodology helps with that because there was a uh a product owner for this product and um that product owner was uh sitting in some new space that we built in one of our buildings in the loop here that was uh co-located with you know the product owners the developers uh the architects the data people that support this this project um they the product owner knew what the new capabilities are that needed to be developed uh they prioritized those capabilities um they sat down with the application

development folks from a from a from an engineering perspective uh and figured out how that was going to sort of fit in from a ui ux perspective and then they applied the scalpel made the cuts right so i think they they kept doing that they kept prioritizing new things that they could roll out at the same time that they were carving off the old things and bringing them into the new platform right so it had to be a combination of a product and business and other words what do you want to offer but then tech in terms of how am i going to do that so i can almost kill two birds with one stone right i can offer new capabilities but i can carve some of the legacy off at the same time and bring it over to the new platform yeah exactly i mean i think a lot of these modernization stories um similar to the one that we're referencing here at northern trust uh is is really um a place where you see a lot of business folks in the room uh trying to understand from a feature grouping standpoint from a priority standpoint and more importantly from an architectural impact standpoint what are the things that we can prioritize uh and potentially um you know sort of lump together and releases where we're delivering new functionality as well as potentially moving away from some of the old uh functionality as part of just you know the fact that we're touching certain pieces uh or places in the architecture within an application so a lot of of meetings sort of cross-functionally between uh the business owners uh as well as uh the corresponding enterprise architects as well as some of the domain architects to really understand how can we group these releases together uh so we're getting the most bang for the buck and moving as much off of legacy um as possible you know what i think is interesting is how everybody's perspective changes so i'm talking about legacy monolithic java applications and in practicality those were probably developed two years ago right so the pace of change that we're seeing now is just just it's just amazing and you know legacy used to mean 20 year old cobalt now it

means two year old java so that's that's interesting to me yeah um that i definitely would not have assumed that so um yeah as as you start it's just like you know when you've been driving down the freeway at you know 60 70 miles an hour and then you you kind of pull off and now you're on side streets it's like everything feels weirdly distorted and you risk speeding because you're like no no i'm used to this faster speed so um yeah yeah i'm proud you've been living on the freeway speeds now so um i want to also come back to something that you mentioned len you mentioned early on that kind of the the move to public cloud has also been um you know that was a that was kind of a key factor in a lot of the decisions made a couple of years ago um and mike you touched on that as well as as something that's that's been kind of part of the a change in the work that you've been doing so let's take a look at that because you mentioned those those first applications you know the team um that team of four operators that you you described len they they set up the platform on two local data centers and the first labs engagement that's where that got pushed and now the other end of the book end here we are we've got 600 developers it's the same four um and you alluded to the fact that things have changed in terms of the the bank's ability to make use of the public cloud yeah so that's something that we're starting uh actually trying to figure out what we want to do in the direction we want to go so we you know i i took over sort of the public cloud uh enablement and engineering group um what is today the 21st 21 days ago so i took it over uh on june 1st so i'm just getting my feet feet into this trying to figure out what what the business want to do again this is a very business driven um organization in terms of how we're going to roll this out we're getting together some groups of um sort of architects from each of our business areas

that are responsible for driving what they want to do in both the private and the public cloud my belief is i think for the next you know pick a number um five years six years three years we're going to be in a hybrid salute uh a hybrid situation i don't think we're going to see um everything in the public cloud at least from our perspective um there are there are use cases and businesses and data that will remain um in our data center um but there are some things that uh we probably would be interested in putting in the public cloud now what architecture we're going to use uh how we're going to stage those things uh what are we going to do from an enterprise perspective from a compliance and a governance and a security perspective that's all sort of being worked out as we speak so like i said 21 days into this um excited about it but uh i think we got to start uh start thinking about it it's probably something that's inevitable okay with that how do you think that the the work that you've done over the last couple of years will help you with that oh i think i think it it'll help immensely from a variety of of things so so getting a community of developers um up to speed on what it means to be a cloud native application is a huge thing right so there's a huge difference between doing something for the cloud and a 12-factor architecture than just putting together a you know a java or a.net or a python monolith that that does the business logic right so just getting the developers to think in a cloud native manner and to develop code in a cloud native manner i think is a huge thing to get the rest of the organization um to get their heads around uh what you need to do to be uh to be agile and and you can think of that a couple of different ways you probably do need you know an agile methodology when you're doing cloud native development um how how i can get a faster time to market how i need to automate these things the conversations that we had with our control officers and our auditors and our regulators in

terms of automating some of these manual controls all of that is multiplied by 100 when i move into the public cloud i think so just getting the people to think in that manner i'm getting some of the skill sets that some of these uh these developers these engineers these operators these infrastructure people need to have uh and then getting um the business and um the control officers and stuff to get their head around um sort of what the the new world is as it relates to cloud i think is is is very important i think i think it was a stepping stone and a required stepping stone to get people thinking in the right way okay so so as you look back you know over the last last couple of years what would you say are your biggest lessons learned or maybe even maybe another way to think about it is if you don't mind me putting on the spot a little bit what do you think what would you do differently one or two things that you've learned that you know if you if you could do it again you might have done a little bit differently yeah so i think uh one of the things is i might have had a more controlled rollout and what i mean by that is i think i alluded to the fact that the first couple of teams that we we put through this you know the first you know half a dozen dozen teams that we put through this were were were very very well uh educated in terms of what they needed to do um they were sort of hand-picked in the cream of the crop we did not do a really good job of getting sort of the rest of the developers or or or the consulting help that we get that's not solstice right we use a lot of different consulting companies and you know offshore companies things like that and try to get get people up to speed and train again what i talked about what it really means to be a cloud native application and what it really means to be 12 factor uh in what it really means to be self-healing and how do i do that and what are the skill sets required um i think we should have probably thought about a more formal training program um as as that as that goes and we are actually having conversations with

some of our sales people from pivotal on some new things that you guys have i think coming down the pipe in terms of how you're going to uh support organizations like us from a from a training uh and uh and an engineering perspective right so i think we could have probably um done a little bit a little bit better job with uh developer training um yeah that's that's what i would say and and what role does you know in terms of just determining who your best candidates are from from your existing developers to make this transition do you look at it like hey there's going to be some people that you know they're they're eager and and excited to make this transition and others that are you know going to be a little bit more challenging to bring along how do you think about managing your your team in that sense yeah that's interesting so i think we have two i think we have two two different approaches one is um new talent so uh we started a program that we call rdp or rotational development program we started it about three years ago we started it about a year before pivotal cloud foundry and basically what we do with that program is we bring in you know eight to ten to twelve uh college graduate either engineers or computer science graduates and we bring them into technology and we give them three rotations in different um different areas and in technology for six months at a time so for example uh one of them could start in a web development team they could rotate into cyber security and then spend uh the last six months of the rotation on uh in an enterprise architecture group so we've for the last three years we've had um classes that start you know after the spring semester is over um and we bring in the new blood right and we're looking for people that are self-starters that that can learn very very quickly that have some of the basics of some of the things we're looking for from their either computer science or computer engineering um bachelor's degrees um and then we put them after the uh the rotations we put them into positions that both benefit northern and and are uh towards where they want to go in their career

um we give these people mentors right but we also do this thing that we call reverse mentoring so right if i'm somebody's mentor you know i'm trying to teach the way around northern trust and i'm trying to teach the relationships that we have and in the core values of the company but if somebody is reverse mentoring me they're trying to teach me what a 21 year old straight out of an engineering school wants to see in an organization when they sit down to work right so it's really a two-way street so that's one of the things we do the other one i think what you were referring to is really what do we do with our our you know our longer term tenured employees and what we found i i think this must be human nature but what we found is people tend to self-delect right so if i go into a group of five programmers and they've all got you know 15 to 20 years and they say hey put up your hands if you want to work on this new exciting cloud-based project now you're going to have to learn a lot of stuff you're going to have to do your own research um it's all going to be very very fast paced probably half of them are going to put up their hands and the other half of them go work on um the mainframe stuff that we still need that we still have and we still need talented people to work on so we haven't had very very many situations where either somebody has signed up for it and failed or somebody uh you know where we thought somebody was going to be you know up for the challenge and they haven't really worked out it self-selecting i think tends to work in an organization where you really need both skill sets like if we were just something if we were a cloud only organization self-selecting wouldn't work but we still have a large legacy structure of of mainframes and as400s and you know java monoliths and dot net and oracle and all this other stuff and we need those people and talented people there to support and to run those applications as well yeah that that jives with what we've heard from other other folks like john's one over at great american insurance company um specifically calling out you know do do the volunteer model as long as you can because you get folks who are really

hungry to to do that and to make these changes so um what's interesting is like thinking about your comment about you know really picking um handpicking the folks to go into those first labs models and then kind of coming back and having to figure out how to like how to bring this to the rest of the organization um you know there's there's a lot of different ways to approach that so it's great to hear you sort of share your lessons learned on that because i think that's something that a lot of folks um are eager to to understand how to take those first steps uh effectively you know and i think the other thing to consider for an enterprise like us is you know over the past what 15 or 20 years companies like ours have sort of commoditized the engineer or the developer right i mean everybody that we hired uh over those 10 years you know either had to be an architect or an analyst or something because you know we were doing um a lot of offshore development at the time right and and i think we're trying to pull that back now because the skill sets that we're looking for um and the quality of the people that we need i think are better suited for uh northern trust uh employees or uh close development partners you know like solstice and others so um what we ended up with was a lot of you know 10 and 15 year um uh experienced tenured people that were more at the higher level so you know bringing in these these rotational development programs and sort of reconstituting that that programmer or sort of engineer level i think is very important to us so you know over the past three years we've probably brought in you know 40 or 50 new new graduates fresh blood into that into that uh into that sort of engineering layer within the hierarchies that we have yeah that's that's really interesting sorry go ahead jeff yeah i was just going to comment i really i like the idea of the uh the reverse mentorship you know just because somebody's you know fresh out

of college doesn't mean they they don't have you know some some great perspectives to offer uh and of course you know as as the technology landscape evolves you know it's going to be that fresh blood that's going to be critical uh you know to at least in part to the evolution of your organization and taking advantage of of these opportunities yeah absolutely in fact this year for the first time we brought in four of these uh rotational development program um participants for infrastructure alone so you know we're going to have them working like within my team on public and private cloud and dev ops you know we're going to have them working on uh infrastructure analytics and predictive analytics from an infrastructure perspective where in the past years it's really been targeted toward application development we've expanded it now into engineering and infrastructure and devops and a whole bunch of other um bunch of other uh skill sets uh within technology absolutely and you know as as we're we're getting a little bit close on time but i would love to to touch on if you could if you could help us translate all all the great stuff you've been working on all the things we've talked about today uh to you know the business goals you know the the larger strategic business goals of northern trust how do you see all the great work that you're doing uh you know connecting to those to those objectives well i i would say there's a couple of things you know so you know our competitors the northern trust competitors you know used to be the other big banks you know and we were all sort of in the same ballpark um i think what we're seeing is competition from uh startups and fintechs and things like that now as well so we're not just competing with you know the other big box banks you know either here on wall street or wherever they happen to be you know we're competing with you know venture capital funded companies in silicon valley and in other places around the world that are using these same tools and techniques in

order to deliver product faster and more reliably and more scalably right so i think that we have to up our game in terms of how we deliver in envision product in order to up and hopefully surpass those kind of companies now the way that i see it it's easier for someone like the northern trust to learn how to do cloud native development and agile methodologies than it is for a four-person startup in silicon valley to have 130 years of financial services experience right so um i think that we are well positioned to uh compete there um but it's going to need some tweaks to um and when i say culture that that's kind of a loaded word because culture to me is a combination of things like ethics and morality and thought process uh with process so we need to change our process and procedure we need to keep our ethics and morality at the soul of the company but i think that you know we are we are well positioned to do that so from a business perspective it is it is it's time to mark um you know in quality deliverables and learn and interesting uh user interfaces and things like that i mean it's what people are used to in their personal lives that we have to deliver uh from a professional perspective so on on that note kind of switching now just to my my kind of last question for you i'm not going to promise that but i'm going to say that um i don't know when like another question comes up um what you know that was a great kind of time to the to the business schools but what are you personally most proud of i think it is that i think it is the the sort of the i i for for my own personal uh profession and i know i think mike probably knows this but maybe no one else but i've i've been at the northern trust for 36 years right so this was my first year uh my first job out of college i like to tell people i started when i was 12. i was just a lot no but i mean i i had a variety i mean as you

can imagine what was technology like 36 years ago i started as an assembly language programmer so i've made i've had 15 different jobs in those time periods from you know language development to uh some of our first personal based applications in dos to leading some of the portal teams to enterprise architecture and now into cloud i think i think i think in the private cloud thing what we're with this conversation is targeted on it it's the amount of change in the fastest amount of time that i have ever seen in my 36 years right so it may not seem like much to uh outside people looking in but to make that much progress on the platform in a two-year period um based on what i know about uh things that have happened in the past is just an extraordinary amount of change that was sort of rippled across the entire technology organization so i think that's probably what i'm most proud of and i'm expecting that or more in the next two to three years as well as things just progress and change and uh uh and as we look forward wonderful and uh you know i i appreciate how 36 years of perspective on that um really says something so thank you yeah you're welcome well where can folks kind of um keep tabs on you or the team and learn more about the engineering uh opportunities at northern trust well obviously linkedin right um we've got a couple of uh opportunities out there already uh we're looking for some some new some new people in the uh in the public cloud world my new world um we're looking for a couple of new people uh from a leadership perspective there um and then you know certainly my own uh my own linkedin uh stuff you can take a look at uh northerntrust.com we've got a brand new spanking shiny new website as of a few days ago or a week or so ago so uh there's a lot of information

out there all the careers and everything and all the opportunities to listed and um uh yeah i would say that would be the way to go wonderful we'll include that in the show notes it was great to talk to you great to catch up with you mike as well um thank you so much for joining very good my pleasure we'll see you guys bye-bye

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