The Price of STP

摘要

After trying to plug T. Rowe Price's STP gaps one by one, Doren Jacobs realized it was time to step back and develop his firm's integration plans with a more strategic approach. Jacobs, vice president of T. Rowe Price Investment Technologies, says a number of important questions could then be addressed, such as: "Were we duplicating efforts? Could a single system be used for more than one function? People had good ideas, but we really hadn't looked at integration end-to-end, so we decided to do that at the end of 2002." T. Rowe, like many other financial institutions, is a best-of-breed shop. That means the firm purchases most of its applications from the vendor offering the strongest system in any one area. While having obvious benefits, this approach's main drawback is the extensive integration required for disparate systems to communicate.