AFTAs 2015: Best IT Team—Morgan Stanley

The Morgan Stanley Fusion Center, established in July 2015, made the most compelling argument to the judging panel, thanks largely to its blend of innovative technologies and the degree of collaboration between previously disparate support teams, making this project as much as a cultural initiative as it was a pure technology one.

Fusion Center, which spans two floors, each the size of a New York City block, is an open-environment information and operations hub designed to encourage collaboration across technology disciplines and teams. The Center enables a deeper level of monitoring across the bank’s entire enterprise by leveraging new technologies and tools to correlate data in innovative ways. The Center’s establishment required collaboration among eight different teams spanning corporate services, enterprise infrastructure, and technology and information risk. The teams partnered to develop not only the Center’s underlying technology, but also its end-state operating model. 

Phase one of the project, which introduced the first 100 of the total 745 seats on the premises, included the integration of new systems, technologies, and building construction. Teams collaborated to design and install the assemblage of new technologies, including touch-enabled video walls, state-of-the-art end-user desktop equipment, customized multimedia technologies, and data correlation and visualization tools, all of which were delivered in just five months. 

The teams that now occupy the Center, many of which were involved in its design, are responsible for delivering a new level of multi-disciplinary engagement for the firm; the environment encourages face-to-face communication, which not only allows for faster incident response times, but also engenders longer-term planning. Employees are now able to function across technology disciplines, resulting in an environment featuring a single, multi-disciplined team of experts who are not only physically integrated, but also operationally aligned. 

In an industry where integration and collaboration is so sorely needed yet so incredibly difficult to achieve thanks largely to legacy technologies and operating models, it’s encouraging to learn that it’s not impossible. Morgan Stanley has proven that.