The culture at DrKW is in many ways an enabler for IT innovation, says Jain, pointing to the very flat management structure where it is not at all unusual for a regular software engineer to be able to make serious suggestions to Ramji. Fred Perry and Gary Casey, based in London, are the two main architects of openadaptor, and although they dreamed up the architecture and the project three years ago, development moved to a global scale quite early on. Since then it has evolved gradually into the open source release, influencing the way other projects are developed in the bank and promoting collaboration among all of the bank's IT staff worldwide. It's not the usual mode of development at investment banks. But unlike openadaptor, they are often not implemented globally or across all divisions.
External use is more likely, particularly if clients and vendors become more involved.
DrKW has a core architecture team looking after openadaptor, but because it interfaces with around 70 applications in use at the bank, these application teams also have an interest and participation in the development of the framework. Future open source projects at DrKW are being evaluated, but it's more likely these will, like openadaptor, be connectivity software rather than particular applications, says Jain. Read our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions .