The most important event of course was ING Group’s announcement on 12 January 2012 of its decision to explore other strategic options for Insurance/ Investment Management in Asia due to turbulence in the financial markets. Some may find this disappointing but in my view, this is the point at which the strong can be separated out from the weak. In a “goldilocks” economy, business development could hardly have been easier, but now, faced with troubled times, we can show what we really stand for and demonstrate our added value.
There’s not much point in throwing in the towel anyway: we have a fiduciary obligation towards our clients so we can safeguard continuity in managing their assets. As employees, we have no influence on external events. My manager once impressed on me the futility of expending energy on something over which you had no influence; not only does it sap your strength, it contributes little, other than to your own frustrations. On the contrary, we should focus 100% on aspects of the business we can influence, such as our clients, our performance and our people.

Recently, I contributed to a training day for the board of a large institutional client, together with my colleagues Lida Tijdeman and Jasper Streefland. When asked to do something like this, the words of my manager immediately come to mind. ING IM exists thanks to the goodwill of its clients, its people and its performance. These occasions give us the opportunity to show to our clients exactly why they called on our services. After the training, it turned out the client has suffered little from these external developments; they awarded us the highest possible rating!

Another extremely welcoming bit of news comes from our Belgian colleagues. Brand new CEO, Paul van Eynde, tells us that the introduction of the “ING Credit Select 2016” fund has met with so much success that the capacity limit (a word we thought had disappeared from our dictionary) was reached in the space of one-and-a-half weeks. If you can keep putting in performances like that in today’s climate, particularly in view of current developments at ING IM, then all I can say is well done!

Word has also reached my ear that a major Dutch health insurer has chosen ING IM to have a large mandate managed by colleagues from the successful Core Fixed Income team, so, as far as I’m concerned, pride is well and truly back on the agenda. Our clients, as this demonstrates, aren’t really that concerned about what’s happening within ING Group.

Our clients want one thing only from us – and that’s to do what we’ve been asked to do. At this point, I can only repeat what I always say on the New Employees Event First IMpressions: “You are here because of who you are, not because ING IM was unable to find anyone else to do the job and decided to hire you instead”. It’s the people who make this company and, in view of the recent successes amidst these turbulent developments, I’m extremely proud to be able to call these people my colleagues!

Wishing you all a happy and successful 2012,

Willem Jan Ruiter

As Knowledge Manager in the Investment Content Management department, it’s part of my responsibilities to disseminate our investment view to internal and external clients. Last week, together with colleagues from cross-regional business development and the value boutique, I made a tour of our offices in Romania and Poland. It was a fascinating trip! First stop on the programme was Bucharest. Our Romanian colleagues there had organised a meeting for their distribution partners, including Citi and Millennium Bank. We had the honour of telling them about the asset management industry, ING IM as a company and what our products and services might offer them.

I’d never been to Central or Eastern Europe before, so I had no idea what to expect. I was only familiar with Romania from the television pictures of the revolution in 1989. I must admit, Bucharest is a wonderful city, full of historic buildings and a lot of parks and gardens. We were a little on the early side, so our Romanian colleague, Manuta Dumitrache, thought we should at least take a look at the concert hall. An elderly, but nevertheless distinguished looking man showed us around and proudly told me in 15 minutes more about Romanian history than I’d learned in a year at school. After this inspirational tour we hurried along to the Hilton hotel where the meeting had been arranged.

Zornitza Nihtianova kicked off the meeting with a presentation about ING IM and more specifically about investment funds. This was followed by Carl Ghielen’s presentation about High Dividend strategies. To see if we’d got the theory clearly across, we played the famous ING Investment Game with all those present. During the game, players step into the shoes of a fund manager and experience what it’s like to manage a portfolio. The “Killer Bees” won by a clear distance, not only getting the better of the market, but the other teams as well.

Next stop after Romania was Poland. Warsaw is an equally wonderful city, but tell a Pole that their country is part of Eastern Europe at your peril … Poland is a Central European country! What struck me in Warsaw were the impressive statues of national heroes. Just like the Romanians, the Polish are proud of their country, their heroes and their history.

The intention in Warsaw was to provide our colleagues there with the tools they needed to get our strategy across effectively to customers. The Investment Game was likewise a key part of the proceedings. The Game was played out amongst various Polish colleagues, with the final team winners being the “Robber Barons”. They were the only team to attain a positive result in a negative market, so hats off to them!

I had some time on my hands before my flight departed and to my surprise, I found out that our Communications Manager, Caroline Wroblewski, was also in Warsaw. She took me on a tour of the old town and also introduced me to some traditional Polish dishes at a pavement cafe near to the statue of the “Little Insurgent”, a monument to all the child soldiers who fell during the Warsaw uprising in 1944.

Back in the Netherlands, it was straight down to business again at the Derivates Training course, organised by my colleague, Lida Tijdeman. During the drinks get-together afterwards I was explaining at length about how wonderful Bucharest and Warsaw were, when one of the participants tapped me on the shoulder and said that he originally came from Romania. He was proud to hear that I was so positive about his native country. Funny, because that’s exactly the same way I felt when Polish and Romanian colleagues talked about ING IM: proud!

Here at head office in The Hague, people might seem to take this as a matter of course. I know I do. So it’s good now and again to hear from others how they look upon the people at IIM and the organisation.

ING IM is a dynamic business and there are all kinds of developments going on which are beyond our control. Right now, we stand on the threshold of an IPO and a re-branding campaign. That brings a lot of uncertainties with it. In these kinds of situations I think back to the words of Gilbert van Hassel in concluding his presentations: “With uncertainty comes ambiguity and that brings opportunity”. These developments will indeed bring many opportunities and anyway, how often in life can you say you’ll experience a flotation and a change of name at one fell swoop? You can certainly count on me being there!

Cheers!  Willem Jan Ruiter

The problem comes when you need to change some of the underlying infrastructure. There has been a new release of the SOA infrastructure you are using, it add some new features that will help operation maintaining the platform and it also has some performance benefits. But if you haven’t secured funding during the budget rounds at the end of the last year this isn’t going to happen. There is no project funded by end users that will pay for the upgrade and all the regression testing. The upgrade will only benefit the IT department and they will have to fund this. I’ve seen it happen more then once at several companies that they will just skip the upgrade this year. No one is getting into much trouble by missing an upgrade as it saves money to be spend on other new shiny things in the datacenter.

Then suddenly the SOA infrastructure vendor sends out an End Of Life notice for the software you are using. They are no longer going to support your version within 6 months. If you are lucky someone will read the notive, take it seriously and inform management. Then a lot of things will happen and the atmosfere won’t be all that friendly. How are we going to pay for this, it wasn’t budgetted, who forgot! We don’t have any people available for this as we have many projects lined up who have important deadlines. There are also technical issues, as you skipped releases upgrading might not be as straightforward as it could have been. You might even have to upgrade to an intermediate stage before you can get to the latest release.

As you haven’t done any upgrades up till now you don’t know how to do this, there are no run-books, best practices or even ready made regression tests. This means that you have to do this for the first time under a lot of stress in a short timeframe with limited resources. I don’t have to explain how that will effect the chance of something going wrong.

So if you are starting a SOA project make sure that you include life cycle management and include the costs in the yearly budget rounds. Upgrading should be made easy from the beginning, it should be in the DNA of your SOA infrastructure. Some vendors are better at this then others but it should be you who is safeguarding that the capability stays in your infrastructure. Just like regression testing should be a standard automated exercise. Don’t take services into production that come without a regression test or are hard to upgrade.
Blog by: Richard Valk

The Data Warehouse is a process which forms the center of an information supply supply chain, with several inputs and several outputs. Each input and each output is subject to change based on factors such as vendor upgrades, new interfaces, expanded interfaces, and perhaps most importantly end-user (client) evolution. All of these changes happen continuously. As people use the Data Warehouse, they become more inquisitive. They want their output and analysis rolled up or down in different ways. Predicting (i.e. planning) for Data Warehouse change can be as difficult as predicting (and therefore planning for) the weather. This environment of ever-changing needs fits neatly into the confines of Chaos Theory. But what is chaos in this context? What is Chaos Theory exactly?

From the book “Chaos Theory Tamed”, author Garnett P. Williams writes:

Chaos is sustained and disorderly-looking long-term evolution that satisfies certain mathematical criteria and that occurs in a deterministic non-linear system. Chaos theory is the principles and mathematical operations underlining chaos. (pg 9)

Meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960s determined that even the tiniest differences in an initial measurement can have a huge impact on an outcome. In other words, as his butterfly effect posits, a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can affect weather patterns in North America. Weather is a system which has a highly sensitive dependence on its initial inputs.

The foundation of the Data Warehouse is only as stable as how you control for the tiniest changes to the inputs into the information structure. As weather, it too has a highly sensitive dependence on inputs. One tiny change to a source system can have almost catastrophic effects on the Data Warehouse.

Finding Order

However, despite the chaos, we should be able to find some order. This is what Lorenz and scientists after him tried to do. The first step in this process is understanding that even seemingly random changes are not always as random as they seem. If we can understand that changes to our Data Warehouse are not random, then we can build a better Data Warehouse.

There are a few things you can do to tame the chaos:

• Be consistent and systematic. The more predictable you and your Data Warehouse team are, the easier it will be handle change. In other words, control any and all variables that you can.
• Adopt proven analysis and development methodologies that others have had success with. This is not to say that some level of adaptation to your environment, team skills, and situation are not required, but rather, start off with a good foundation and follow along where it makes sense.
• Keep the team close. Quality and frequent interaction among the people who make and run the DWH is essential.
• Stay in the groove like an improvisational jazz band. If your data modelers are not in tune with your decision-support analysts who are not in tune with your DBA, then you can’t expect to handle the challenges of chaos.
• Feedback and evolution are two very important aspects of Data Warehousing. Keep your ear to the wall and try to anticipate changes before they occur. This takes practice, but (back to the improvisational jazz band analogy) practice makes perfect.
• Keep in step. In the Data Warehouse world, change is natural and will come in waves. More significantly, if changes cannot be implemented quickly, your clients will lose confidence in your ability to keep up.
• Think and act quickly. The longer you debate, the longer your client must wait. While they wait, they construct workarounds or look elsewhere. If you’re lucky and they do wait for you, their change may become outdated and no longer relevant; an opportunity might have been missed (and you’ve essentially failed them).
• Don’t be afraid to be wrong. The consequence of acting quickly is that you might get something wrong. Just be agile enough to respond and deliver new change with urgency.

I’ll post more thoughts on this over the next weeks. I’m particularly interested in how users of the Data Warehouse become more and more sophisticated as they use its tools and applications.

Blog by: Tod McKenna

If I look around myself in the workplace this has become one of the questions I’m asking myself. Why is this person here, what drives him. Is it just work for him or is he inspired to create or improve something. Is he moved by personal gain or he is out to create something beautiful.

If you’ve watched the video and seen the golden circle with the why, how and what. Most people will tell you what they do and how they do it. A few will tell you why, keep your eye on them.

If I interview people for a job this is always one of the questions I ask. Why? What drives someone to join a company and do the things they will have to do.

Blog by: Richard Valk