Posting is a bit light as I grapple with remote access from the twisty perils of Caddillac Mountain in Bar Harbor, Maine. But even as I attempt to relax, technology and the hustle of modern Wall Street is no farther from my mind.

What has my goat today (mountain goat if you will) is the issue of remote access to live and performant network systems.

Blogging has been hard enough from such a distant region, to say nothing of trading. I think a number of things conspire to keep high performance computing from reaching the mainstream. One is a lack of powrful handheld hardware. The Audiovox XV6700 that I am typing on is so underpowered that it borders on painful.

Yet we know that economies of scale enable the minds at Nintendo and Sony to provide millions of people the realtime gfx needed to power intense 3D graphics in the hand. Conversely Wall St. is still building hand held apps on weak pocket devices that use software to render graphics, save for a few emmerging devices that leverage the new mobile OpenGL spec.

I’ve often felt that Wall St. needs to demand more in the way of hardware innovation that goes beyond the cost of trasactions per minute.

If I am getting frustrated just typing this just imagine trying to manage trades on a device like this.

I will leave it that for now, but will extend this commentary when I recede to the bottom of the mountain in order to make you aware of some innovative technology to relieve us from this problem, ironically using broadband pipes and minimally powered hand devices. Would you be surprised to learn that it comes from NVidia?

More to come.

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I think we’ll be spending a lot of time blogging on the crossroads of Wall St. and technology, but every once in a while there will be a gem like this one that explores important challanges that can be applicable to almost any business sector. This particular piece takes a very thorough look at how risk management as an organizational expertise is changing. I can’t think of a business service that has a more challenging time evaluating risk than IT on Wall St. We face a constantly changing landscape and we usually work for firms that are experiencing explosive growth, which means that nothing that we build today will really be untouchable 3-5 years down the road from now.

…companies cope with
risk by acting conservatively. Caution,
discretion and prudence are sensible
ways to view a complex world.
But it is remarkably easy, particularly
for large and successful organisations
with a lot to protect, to
become overly conservative. Conservatism
at some point simply has to
yield to growth strategies; the key is
to know when to move.

As a result we need to have a great grasp of managing risk in our analysis of the businesses we service and where they’re going to be in the future. This is a must read.

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