IDQ Conference 2007

Draining the Swamp: How Schwab Recovered From a Truncated Implementation

Rick Pyle Rick Pyle
Senior Staff - Business Systems Analyst
Charles Schwab & Co.


Thursday 9:45am - 10:45am

Level: All Levels

The market crash of 2000 led to Schwab truncating a project for a new architecture designed to enhance electronic communications with its customers. After four years, the half-implemented architecture resulted in invalid or inconsistent data, increasing dissatisfaction on the part of both customers and employees, and inability to leverage the company’s existing technology. We redesigned, simplified, and strengthened the integrity of the system and its underlying data by:

  • Defining new data rules that ensured the accuracy of the data
  • Updating nearly 5 million rows of data to align with the new rules
  • Consolidating the complex logic for updating the tables
  • Consolidating data access to ensure consistent results
The resulting architecture has improved internal and external satisfaction, reduced maintenance, and increased our customers' use of technologies that are both more useful to them and less expensive to Schwab.



Speaker Bio

Rick Pyle has over 20 years of experience in IT, with the last 17 dedicated to Systems Analysis. He has worked at Schwab since 2002, with an emphasis on Customer Data Integration and Data Quality. Rick has a BA from San Francisco State and an MS from Golden Gate University.
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