Witad Awards 2020: Technology leader of the year (end-user)—Amie Caban, Guggenheim Partners

The road to excellence is paved with many challenges. To Amie Caban, some of the challenges she has focused on as CIO at Guggenheim Partners include being more data-driven and using metrics to help with the decision-making process. 

Caban, who wins this year’s award for technology leader of the year (end-user), is putting the appropriate foundation in place at Guggenheim to drive efficiencies and deliver innovative solutions to the firm’s business partners. 

In January this year, she stepped up from her previous position as deputy CIO and replaced Jim O’Donnell, Guggenheim’s former CIO. Caban is now leading the transformation of Guggenheim’s infrastructure and application development environments. This includes the consolidation of legacy applications to modernize the information architecture for the firm. 

Caban says the transformation initiative focuses on establishing a modern technology platform to meet business objectives in a scalable and cost-effective way. 

“It involves centralizing data stores and standardizing business intelligence and analytics capabilities, implementing next-generation technologies and skillsets, and retiring costly legacy systems. This is a major opportunity as it will provide a more streamlined and scalable platform that will enhance execution time and support continued growth,” she says. 

Since joining Guggenheim in 2010, Caban has led the firm through several strategic technology programs, including establishing its information security program, where she was responsible for security policy and program management. Part of the program involved implementing an event detection and analytics system, which led to improved visibility, higher-quality alerts, and a 66% reduction in “false-positives,” resulting in the ability to initiate a user behavior analytics program and leverage resources more efficiently.

Together with her team of more than 200 technologists, Caban is focused on shifting toward a cloud/hybrid architecture to be pragmatic about getting the most value when running applications and services. 

Caban is drawn to understanding new disruptive technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI). She notes that the challenge with implementing the latest trends is finding practical use-cases and understanding the implications of emerging technologies and how they best fit into the organization. She is also passionate about the use of AI in the ever-evolving security landscape.