The BlackBerry as workhorse - Penny Crosman

Unlike most compulsive habits, excessive BlackBerry use can be a positive. Take it from top IT executives at Merrill Lynch and the Blackstone Group.

"Most of our investment bankers are addicted to their BlackBerry and look at it every five minutes," relates Alok Prasad, managing director and head of strategy for global investment banking at Merrill Lynch.
"They feel kind of left out if they don't have an e-mail in their in-box." Rather than remove the objects of investment bankers'
obsessions, however, Merrill Lynch is feeding their addictions. The firm is giving its investment bankers - whom Prasad refers to as "our most expensive and critical raw material" - new software applications on their devices to maximize their BlackBerry time.

Until recently, investment bankers typically used Research in Motion's (Waterloo, Ontario) BlackBerry devices mainly for e-mail and phone contact, and maybe in conjunction with a contact management application.
But over the past few years new BlackBerry-ready applications - such as CRM, knowledge management and performance management solutions - have hit the market, and Merrill Lynch is considering most of them. "The intent is to use the wireless BlackBerry in a holistic way that drives a banker's or senior management's productivity," Prasad explains.

"In some ways the BlackBerry can be more powerful than a laptop because it's always connected to the firm's VPN," points out Ira Lehrman, Merrill's chief technology officer of global investment banking. "You're always on, which is important to bankers' mobility and the agility of getting access to data and information at any point, anywhere. We want to take the next step outside of e-mail, outside of standard applications, and we want to see how we can make people more productive." Merrill is working closely with partners and vendors to develop file access capabilities, productivity tools and performance management tools for the BlackBerry devices, Lehrman notes.

Not that a handheld device will ever replace the desktop or laptop, the Merrill executives quickly add. "The BlackBerry is one piece of the overall solution," says Prasad. Desktops and laptops will always have their place. "We're trying to understand the use case - when people use what. In the office, it's ridiculous to use a BlackBerry to do all your work; a desktop would be more productive," he continues, adding that the firm also is exploring other non-BlackBerry tools that help increase off-site productivity, such as a solution that lets users access their office desktops through a browser so that they can easily retrieve a file or use an application while sitting at a foreign computer, at an airport or client location, for example.

Merrill Extends BlackBerry Functionality

For their first BlackBerry project, Lehrman and Prasad extended a homegrown customer relationship management program to the BlackBerry platform with the help of Boston-based mobile solutions provider Vaultus. Getting the user experience, ease of navigation, data security and storage capacity right were critical, Prasad notes. Lehrman adds that data compression also was an important consideration in order to be able to load large volumes of data onto the small device.

In addition, Merrill Lynch is providing mandated courses, such as anti-money-laundering and e-communications policy training, on the BlackBerry, and as a result has seen higher completion rates, according to Prasad. "As new BlackBerry models come out with multimedia capability, we're planning to exploit that more and more," he says.

This year, the firm plans to create new performance management reporting tools, such as a graphical dashboard, using the real-time information gleaned from investment bankers' BlackBerry devices; Merrill has been in discussion with Cognos and other performance dashboard vendors, reports Prasad. "With the CRM tool now on a BlackBerry, we have more-timely and accurate data. Therefore we can report in a more-timely fashion," he says. "Senior managers can, on a daily basis, understand what our bankers are doing, whom they are calling."

Further, Merrill plans to make human resource tools available through BlackBerrys. And finally, Merrill is looking to roll out wireless daily workflow applications, such as pre-trade clearing and expense report approvals, for the handheld devices, according to Prasad.

One day, Lehrman notes, he envisions senior managers and bankers being able to go a week on the road without logging on to their laptops. "The devices are advancing, their screens are continuously getting better, the profile is becoming slimmer, and the amount of memory is increasing as well as the ability to interface with office tools and read large files such as PowerPoint [presentations] and spreadsheets," he notes.

BlackBerry Lockdown

Because Merrill allows investment bankers to work offline on their BlackBerrys (thus necessitating some data to be stored on the devices), the firm added layers of security beyond the BlackBerry Enterprise Server's built-in authentication, encryption and "kill button," which instantly wipes out data on any device reported lost or stolen. For instance, Merrill added an additional lockdown security capability that can be managed wirelessly. "This is a big balancing act because every security layer conceptually adds a user experience hurdle, but you've got to get the right balance," Prasad says. "We also train our bankers and employees to reach out as soon as they lose a device to minimize the window in which information might be flying around."

While security is a major challenge, the hardest part of extending a mobile application, Merrill Lynch executives say, actually is getting people to use it effectively on a day-to-day basis. It takes time and patience for bankers to input data in the CRM system via BlackBerry, for example, and some people simply are not comfortable with that. "That's one reason why we have a portfolio approach that BlackBerrys, laptops [and] desktops are all part of," explains Prasad. Merrill's target user base is 1,100 to 1,500 bankers, he says, adding that today the firm is 60 percent to 70 percent of the way toward that goal and plans to meet it by late summer.

Lehrman says Merrill Lynch also is considering the other end of mobility
- making the investment banker accessible to clients any time, anywhere.
"Bankers are on the road a lot, visiting clientele," he observes. "But at the same time, if a client needs a banker, we want that [banker] to be reachable." One answer, Lehrman suggests, is integrating office phones with the BlackBerrys so calls can be automatically forwarded to a banker's handheld device.

Managing Portfolios Wirelessly

While Blackstone Group also provides CRM functionality to its BlackBerry users, the firm is pushing the mobile application envelope further, delivering portfolio management applications to senior managers and portfolio managers on BlackBerrys so that they can access portfolio and customer data and experiment with what-if scenarios, according to Adrian Iosifescu, Blackstone's SVP of IT. "The other aspect that's critical to us is being in continual contact with investors and potential investors with information related to companies and real estate deals, or looking at potential targets for new deals," he adds.

"We targeted very senior managers and partners in the firm who are familiar with technology that can work while they're traveling or at their vacation homes, who need to have information available 24/7, but who don't prefer laptops and other devices," Iosifescu continues. "The cell phone and BlackBerry are two devices they know how to use and want to use."

With the help of Pyxis Mobile (Waltham, Mass.), Iosifescu extended an existing desktop asset management program to the BlackBerry platform.
Thanks to Pyxis' integration efforts, senior managers now can look at portfolio performance dashboards on the handheld devices and drill down to information on specific positions. So far, about 15 people in three businesses are using the wireless asset management application, according to Iosifescu, who notes that the tool eventually may be rolled out to as many as 50 users.

A smaller group that includes marketing executives uses the CRM capability. When executives do presentations or meet with existing or potential investors, they have the latest information available on their BlackBerrys, whereas before they used to carry books and bags of paper, notes Iosifescu. For example, senior managers often travel to find new investments, and they used to call into the office every hour or so to have somebody go to their desktop and look up information, especially when they were close to a new deal or trying to sell a position to an investor because they didn't have the information available or the information was already stale by the time they reached the client, he relates. Today, the real-time data is accessible from their BlackBerrys.

Insatiable Appetite?

The next step is to provide a way to run what-if scenarios on the BlackBerry devices. "Navigation gets a bit more complicated there, and I'm not sure how much appetite the senior managers have for that,"
Iosifescu says.

Also under development are coverage alerts - up-to-the-minute bulletins on specific topics delivered via BlackBerry. If Blackstone had been helping to take Delta out of bankruptcy, for instance, the people working with Delta would want to receive on a regular basis relevant market information and proprietary Wall Street research. There has never been an easy way to push that research out to people on the road, except by sending an e-mail to the BlackBerry with a link to a PDF, according to Iosifescu. "It's somewhat painful to read a PDF on a BlackBerry," he says, noting that he'd like to extract the critical information from the PDF - possibly by using automatic summarization software - and compose a dashboard that contains a snapshot of all pertinent information, including the research.

Also down the road is providing wireless access to Blackstone's digital "deal rooms," which hold contracts and other proprietary documents pertaining to specific deals. Security is tight on these deal rooms, which are hosted by a third party that provides strict controls not only on document access but on entitlements (i.e., who can do what with a document - read it, print it, change it and so on). Blackstone is seeking a digital rights management solution that can provide time-limited rights to files, watermarks and redactions (blackouts) of sections of the document, and deliver all this via BlackBerry. "We're looking at this but it's early on," Iosifescu concedes.

Asked if he considers new handheld devices, such as T-Mobile Wing or the next Palm, Iosifescu says, "We're always looking at new technologies."
But he expects the BlackBerry to continue to dominate the Street. "The challenge is a cultural one," Iosifescu observes. "These guys are so used to and love their Blackberrys, the ROI would have to be tremendous for them to move to something else. But that doesn't mean we're not going to look at things, and if we find the right solution we'll try and present it to them. Right now, BlackBerry is their tool of choice."

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Can Wireless Trades Reduce Risk?

When they're out visiting clients or attending shows, Wall Street portfolio managers have tended to place trades the old-fashioned way.
"If you go to a buy-side conference, you see the portfolio managers constantly checking their BlackBerrys, and at every break they're calling back to the trading desk to submit orders and allocations through e-mail," says Adam Honore, senior analyst at Aite Group.

"That creates risk issues because there's often a communication gap between the desk and the portfolio manager," and that gap can cause serious trade losses, Honore continues. A typical e-mail might take the trading desk 20 minutes to acknowledge and address. "Twenty minutes is a long time when you're dealing with large volumes of buys and sells," he says.

To mitigate this risk, portfolio managers are starting to turn to wireless trading on BlackBerry or Windows Mobile devices. According to Honore, at least one firm conducted a price analysis for wireless portfolio management software. "They figured that if they could prevent one trade loss of decent size, that would pay for the software," he explains. The firm adopted a wireless application, and risk managers subsequently prohibited the submission of orders via e-mail, cutting trade losses through e-mail to zero. The wireless application also provides an audit trail and some enforcement of compliance rules, Honore notes.

On the other hand, letting people trade wirelessly can raise data security issues and the potential for error on transactions executed on handheld devices. Authentication and encryption are important to protect any device that provides access to sensitive data. Research in Motion (Waterloo, Ontario) provides both on its BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and an entire industry has sprung up around network protection.

The other issue is the possibility of making trading mistakes on a tiny handheld screen. "I've known a few people who've made significant mistakes using their wireless device," says Ray Wagner, research vice president at Gartner. One person using his Palm during a meeting decided to order $100,000 worth of stock, according to Wagner. Later, he realized he had ordered 100,000 shares of the stock, which tanked the next day.

Still, "The fact of the matter is that we're going to go in this direction - people yell and scream too much about convenience, and eventually they get what they want or they go around you if you try to block them," Wagner says. "We have to move in this direction, and it's a challenge for the security experts and the user-interface designers.
It's not something that can't be controlled, at least to the extent that we control our corporate network and desktop computers - there's nothing inherently different about a handheld device than there is about a laptop device or wired desktop."