Foresight Pays For Board Of TradeForesight Pays For Board Of Trade

Steven Bass' easygoing manner seems somewhat out of place in the intense world of futures and commodities trading. When the bell sounds, signaling the start of an open-outcry session, all eyes are raised to the large green-screen monitors overhead. The traders shout and gesticulate, trying to lock down the best prices for the coffee, sugar, and other commodities they're buying or selling.

But Bass plays his role outside the trading ring, where the senior VP of IT for the New York Board of Trade is responsible for making sure the board's Trade Input Processing System is up and running, its members' data is safe, and it continues to incorporate new technology into existing processes.

Perhaps Bass' greatest asset as an IT leader is his carefully measured approach to dealing with the unknown. That's exactly what Bass found himself doing on the morning of Sept. 11. But a well-laid-out business-contingency plan engineered by Bass and Pat Gambaro, executive VP of operations, enabled the board to regroup and resume operations even though its offices and trading pits at the World Financial Center were destroyed after the World Trade Center collapsed.

"Three things have always been true about business recovery--plan, plan, and plan," says Bass, who was on the Path commuter train on the last leg of the trip from his home in Bucks County, Pa., to lower Manhattan when he heard about the Trade Center attack. By 11 a.m., the Board of Trade had declared an emergency, and he was on the phone with Gambaro. Bass was one of the first board employees to make it to Comdisco Inc.'s business-recovery center in Long Island City in Queens, N.Y., the board's backup facility.

Even though the board didn't trade again until the following week, its readiness further proved to members that Gambaro had made a smart investment in Comdisco's services and that Bass had done his job in making sure the money was well-spent. "Steve helped me convince the skeptics on the board that we needed to spend the money on a hot site," Gambaro says. Once the board gave its reluctant consent, Bass' job was to execute Gambaro's business-continuity plan.

The Board of Trade's business-recovery wake-up call came in 1993, the year before Bass joined the firm as VP of IT, when terrorists first attacked the Trade Center. The board, then known as the Coffee, Sugar, and Cocoa Exchange Inc., took that first tragedy to heart. "It's crap about lightning not striking twice. It does," Bass says. As a result, one of Bass' first responsibilities was to help the board find a suitable backup site.

Acting on the business-recovery plan went more smoothly than expected, mostly because of work done during the planning phase, says Bass, a 35-year veteran of the IT industry. He earned an industrial-engineering degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1965 while working for AT&T and an MBA from Baltimore's Loyola College in 1970 while employed by Pfizer Medical Systems.

Still, preparing the Board of Trade to withstand a disaster posed some unique challenges to Bass and his staff. "All the board members are owners of the board," he says. "You're working with your owners every day, so there's an immediacy of demand." Because the board's business is driven by information--commodities and futures prices as well as external factors such as politics and weather that affect the production of coffee, sugar, cocoa, and orange juice--Bass and his staff must ensure that information is fed constantly to the traders and that transactions are reconciled nightly. That data is also sent to Comdisco, a practice that proved valuable when the board's Tandem Himalaya servers were buried under the rubble of the Trade Center.

Taking the reins of an IT department is something Bass had always wanted to do. "I was training myself to take over an entire IT operation," he says. At the Board of Trade, Bass' experience with strategic planning, application development, networking, and systems analysis help him strike a balance as a manager and mentor to about 60 staffers. "A lot of people think of IT in terms of the propellerhead or the techno-nerd, but the board's IT staff is also qualified on the business side," says Bass, who spent about four years as CFO at Salomon Brothers before joining the Board of Trade.

Bass points to the competency of his staff as one of the main reasons the Board of Trade has been able to launch IT initiatives despite shifting its location. The staff continues to test an electronic order-routing system that will let traders enter orders directly online in real time, rather than reconciling trades at the end of the day. "I've got to keep my staff moving ahead and looking forward to new goals," he says. As for Bass' state of mind, he has lots of time to think, now that his commute has gotten a little longer. When he's not at work, he can count on his 1-year-old grandson to lift his spirits--his affirmation that, indeed, life goes on.