Dave: I'm the Senior Vice President of Information Services for the bank. My areas of responsibility include the overall data center, which includes the network and the iSeries system. I'm also responsible for the e-services area, which includes our Web site, our portal, and our online help desk.

Dan: I'm the Vice President of Network Automation in the Information Services department. Our group is responsible for local area network and wide area networks here at the bank. Besides the LAN and WAN, our group is responsible for the overall health of the network, the workstation deployment, and our infrastructure, including our voice over IP telephone technology.

Dave: I started in the computer science world when I got out of the service, which goes back more than 30 years. I actually started as a programmer, writing in assembly language code for a major downtown Chicago organization.

Dan: My first introduction to a computer was on a 286 class machine. It had a miniscule hard drive and barely any RAM, and I thought it was the greatest thing in the world to be able to print out a banner on a dot matrix.

Dave: IT plays a very critical, integrated role. As the organization has grown, IT has had to become a participant in reaching the bank's goals and objectives. We've seen that happen on an ongoing basis ever since I started working for the bank almost 18 years ago. Today, behind almost all user requirements and objectives is some type of automation product that we're responsible for implementing and supporting.

Dan: In the financial industry, we're governed and managed by a lot of regulators. So a lot of our direction for IT is guided by external forces, and we find ourselves sometimes having to be very reactive to the latest attention-getters that are in the news. For one exam period, it could be Internet banking; for the next, it could be spam and e-mail management.

Dan: We're expanding our market area with something we refer to as Remote Merchant Capture, which allows our commercial customers to scan their deposits and send them to the bank electronically. It frees them from having to come to the bank to do their daily deposits. It also allows us to reach markets that have been a little more difficult to access, either geographically or for competitive reasons.

Dave: I don't want to say that controlling costs was not important, but in past years it was easier to justify spending because the bank was in a growth acquisition mode. In the past 18 to 24 months, we've had to be a little bit more aware of managing costs and possibly delaying projects that may not have a big impact on the bottom line.

Dan: Right now we have a mixture. However, standardization has become increasingly important for us to run efficiently and effectively. And so we decided last year to migrate our network to an all Microsoft environment to take advantage of some of the efficiencies of that platform.

Dave: A mixed world is becoming more difficult to support, not only from the standpoint of integrating new applications, but also having the resources to manage it. Finding an individual that has a Novell background is becoming more and more challenging.

Dan: Open source hasn't had a large impact on us, because so many of our applications are vendor driven and most of them run in a Microsoft environment. Even if that was something that we thought might be interesting for us to branch into, we haven't had a whole lot of demand for that yet.

Dan: To sum it up in one word, depth. One of the key strategic reasons we went with Microsoft was its depth as a development platform. In the past we've had to pass on a couple of key applications that were not available for the Novell platform. And the depth of the applications themselves, the technical support, and the knowledge within the IT community was really attractive to us.

Dave: I find both of them entertaining and enjoyable. I'll take the middle of the road here.

Dan: I lean toward Star Wars, probably because it's just a little bit more epic in nature. I love all of the parallels to some of the old lessons from mythology and the hero's journey.