As you read this, we are past the point of debating whether we are in a recession or a depression. Clearly, the one bit of good news out there is that we may have reached the bottom of this economic freefall and we are no longer looking down but up. If you are reading this at your desk inside a major investment house, hedge fund or exchange, congratulations: You still have a job in IT.

Now for the bad news: You and your harried colleagues have to do the work of the IT team that has been whittled down due to layoffs and shotgun mergers. You have never worked harder in your entire life, and now comes the fun part: You have to help prepare the entire firm for the recovery.

This is where the back office shines. When the news media want to show images of high finance in the major capital markets, they always roll video clips of traders waving arms in brightly colored jackets, brokers staring at screens and people screaming into phones. Sure, it’s dramatic but it is a layperson’s idea of financial services. The real heart of the institutional investing takes place in datacenters, high-performance compute farms and the back office. This is the center of today’s investment banking powerhouses.

Consider this: If a hotshot trader comes up with a brilliant trading idea, he or she is not going to turn to their colleague for the tools to get it done. If they need the horsepower for intense calculations or access to historical data, they will have to approach the back-office people to make this available. Once they get the green light from their immediate supervisors traders look to the technology worker bees to make this new strategy happen.
Will it involve cloud computing or a whole host of multi-processor servers? Is a new algorithm needed with some risk measurement thrown in so that we don’t create the next Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers? Chances are these tools that are specific to the young trader’s needs are not yet on the trading floor.