Since joining Scottrade as CIO in 2005, Ian Patterson has racked up a series of IT accolades for the stock brokerage firm, which manages $55.7 billion in assets. In both 2008 and 2007, Computerworld named him to its Premier 100 IT Leaders, a list of the country top IT executives. In 2007, under Patterson's leadership, Scottrade got named to the CIO magazine's CIO 100, an award that recognizes outstanding strategic IT leadership. Scottrade has also made it on the InformationWeek 500 list of the most innovative users of IT in the U.S.

What has made Patterson so successful? As a former consultant with Deloitte, Patterson realized that many companies view the IT organization as an outsider, different from other business units. He says, "This never made any sense to me. Why should IT be treated any differently from marketing or finance?" At Scottrade, Patterson created an environment to converge IT into the overall corporate strategy to promote growth and profitability. He says, "Of course, a strategy without execution is just a dream. Our leadership meets regularly to review our five-year plan and to make any adjustments to it."

Every year, Patterson makes sure that the company carries out technology initiatives to better compete in the marketplace. Because do-it-yourself traders comprise much of Scottrade's customer base, Patterson strives to be proactive about what would happen if a market crash occurred, causing a huge spike in the company's trading volume. He says, "We look at our average volumes on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis and come up with our capacity needs to be three to five times that volume." For example, before Scottrade built its recent $25 million, 34,000-square-foot data center. Patterson made sure that the data design had enough redundancy and processing power to support both transaction growth and unexpected transaction volume caused by market fluctuations. IT also upgraded the network so the 300 branches would have a more streamlined, faster, more secure and stable connection to the home office.

In this podcast, Ian Patterson, CIO of Scottrade, talks about how the governance council plans and executes on key technology initiatives, how the company measures the success of these initiatives, and what the company has done to improve the customer experience.

Bio
As CIO at Scottrade, Ian Patterson oversees all of the company's technology staff and technology operations, including the data center and the internal network for more than 300 branches. Before joining Scottrade, Patterson was the senior manager of IT strategy at Deloitte. He also previously held positions at Pivotpoint and Electronic Data Systems. Some of Patterson’s past clients include General Motors, Del Monte Foods, Graybar and W.W. Grainger. Patterson has a B.A. in Business Administration with an emphasis in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona.

Resources
St.  Louis Commerce Magazine - Takin' Care of Cyber Business
St.  Louis Commerce Magazine - New Data Centers for IT Surge
Computerworld  - JScottrade's New Data Center - Redundant Everything

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive  Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio  Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music  Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production