The McCue Interview: Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein CIO, JP Rangaswami

It's the day after the nail-biting finish to the second Ashes test match at Edgbaston that saw England defeat the Aussies with just two runs to spare. For cricket fan JP Rangaswami, CIO at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW), the result was never in doubt. "They choked," he says of Australia.

It looked like a potential whitewash after the way England crumbled in the first test but so confident is Rangaswami that England will push the Aussies all the way, he has bought tickets for the final Sunday of the fifth and final Ashes test at the Oval in a few weeks. That promises to be an amazing atmosphere but it is still unlikely to rival the cricket matches played in front of 100,000 crazy Indian fans he witnessed as a child growing up in Calcutta.

As a self-confessed "child of the Empire" - the Raj is one subject covered in his collection of more than 27,000 books in his home library - Rangaswami grew up playing billiards, bridge and golf.

"While we can argue about the costs and benefits of being in a colonial environment, I pride myself on the opportunities and the educational environment I grew up in - part of which included doing The Times crossword and finishing it when I was just 10 years old," he says.

Deterred from a career in mathematics by his professors at St Xavier's College at the University of Calcutta, he graduated in economics and statistics and started a career in journalism by joining the family business editing a financial journal.

Rangaswami then moved to the UK with the intention of continuing his career in financial journalism but, unable to get an NUJ card, he responded to an advert in Press Gazette and joined Burroughs (which later became Unisys), writing manuals and running training courses for their international banking products.

That was the transition point for a career that Rangaswami admits was taking a fairly "random" path at that point. He moved onto Data General, where he gained mainframe, mid-range, development and marketing experience before various attempts at consulting and heading up an offshore services company in the early 1990s finally led to the call from DrKW in 1997.

Initially starting as a consultant, Rangaswami was thrown in at the deep-end working on the Euro conversion and Y2K, although he doesn't see the millennium bug project as the nightmare that others did.

"I thought it was a project guaranteed to succeed. No board had the guts to say no to the money you would need, no consumer could change the end date and you could change what you delivered to make sure you were on time because failure was not an option. Guaranteed deadline time and guaranteed access to resources and power to alter the deliverable will make sure these projects always succeed," he says.

Rangaswami was promoted to CIO in 2001 but his first task was to slash costs. His IT budget is now half what it was then and he cut the 2,000 strong IT department in half, though he says a lot of these cuts came through ditching consultants who "don't see any of my business anymore".

Despite the aggressive cuts, Rangaswami has still managed to make DrKW an aggressive leading-edge adopter of innovative and disruptive technologies, particularly around open source and collaboration.

"Now no-one gets fired for using Linux or for having Apache or using Tomcat. But this has happened over a relatively short space of time and we have been aggressive in recognising that trend and becoming contributors to the open source movement rather than consumers," he says.

And he sees open source providing more viable enterprise competition for CRM and ERP systems in the future. "The open source movement is where we're heading."

In fact, he describes open source as the "new outsource" and criticises some of the badly-informed decisions to outsource both onshore and offshore in recent years. In financial services in particular, Rangaswami sees great potential in shared service opportunities between competitors for standard and commodity processes.

"Much of what I see sent offshore is commoditised stuff where the value should have been in coming together as an industry and saying we'll build utilities that all banks and financial houses can use. The concept of some of our commodity activities being considered differentiating just is not sustainable any more," he says.

Instead companies should only be going offshore to acquire talent they can't get in the UK or Europe. In fact the "war for talent" and the lack of IT graduates coming through UK universities worries Rangaswami. He lays some of the blame at the door of other CIOs who he believes talk technology down too much.

"I am concerned at one of the trends to say, 'I am not IT, I am the business'. We have reached a stage where people don't want to join IT as a discipline in universities in the west. If I walk around saying 'IT is not important', why should a kid join Imperial College to do a computer sciences degree?" he says.

Instead he says the industry needs to energise already tech-savvy youngsters from an early school age about the exciting challenges around open source, identity and information. And it is information that he says is the most important part of being CIO.

"The CIO of today has to have a real understanding of how information is an asset and how that asset is managed and grows, and the role of human capital in that. That means soft leadership skills are more important than pure data processing management," he says.

As a financial services company, regulation features high on Rangaswami's agenda. But he says this is not a new thing for the industry and he downplays concerns about the cost of implementing forthcoming MIFID regulations. "The noise in the market being driven by consultants is much greater about MIFID than the reality. There's always a reality check and what's implemented through time is usually more pragmatic," he says.

But Rangaswami feels the regulators do need to get to grips with the way technology is changing and its impact on the industry being that much quicker. "I want the regulator to be discussing blogs and RSS today rather than beginning to come to grips with instant messaging a decade after it's been in the industry," he says.

As the interview draws to a close the conversation gets back around to cricket and to Rangaswami's "un-Googleable" trivia questions. "I used to try and set questions for my department before going away at Christmas but it was getting harder and harder to set something that wasn't immediately Googleable," he says.

He kindly reveals one of the questions exclusively as a challenge for silicon.com readers: There is only one test series where an 'asterisk/dagger' (that's a wicketkeeper captain) played against another 'asterisk/dagger' in the history of test cricket. Email your answers to editorial@silicon.com