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WORKING OUT OF A TEMPORARY OFFICE HASN'T KEPT THE NEW YORK BOARD OF TRADE FROM IMPROVING EFFICIENCY BY EILEEN COLKIN
There's a crowded back corner of a coatroom in a converted warehouse in Queens that shows just how determined the New York Board of Trade has been not to let the attacks of Sept. 11 stop its progress.
Eleven of the board's IT employees walked across the Brooklyn Bridge that day last year to the warehouse, which held two backup trading pits maintained in case something ever happened to the 13 pits that were housed in 4 World Trade Center. By that night, 18 people were working furiously to ensure that the backup site was ready for business. On Sept. 16, the day before trading resumed, employees fanned out across the city to buy 200 cell phones for traders to use until heavier-duty telecommunications gear could be set up.
But that frenetic activity gave way to the routine of everyday work. Only then, weeks later, did IT project manager Warren Feuer realize that his team had lost all the work it had done on a wireless-trading project. Traders use a paper-based system to record buying and selling of options and futures contracts on commodities such as coffee and sugar, and Feuer's team had almost finished work last September on 30 custom-configured, handheld devices designed to replace the paper pads. Losing them was trivial given the scope of what had happened, but it's the kind of small setback common to thousands of project teams in New York and at the Pentagon. Feuer's group decided it wasn't going to put innovation on hold while waiting for a permanent headquarters, so it resumed the wireless project and made the cramped coatroom its project headquarters. "After we took a deep breath and realized we were OK and that we were going to be here for a while, it appeared this would be a great place to try this out," Feuer says.
A year later, the Board of Trade is still...