Citigroup’s Secret
The Vision
Sanzone credits the creation of Mystic to Citigroup's merger phase. The company needed a way to standardize all the different technology processes across the organizations that came together.
"Mystic was really envisioned after we had put a whole bunch of disparate tech organizations under one management," Sanzone says, adding that he was put in charge of the development organization for the new Citigroup in 2000. The concept was to standardize the development processes on a global scale. The goal was, for example, that Citigroup in Asia would have the same processes as Citigroup in New York.
He adds, "Given that these (development groups) came from different companies, we didn't have any consistent processes of any size around the globe. We had 50 different flavors at that point and therefore one of the goals was to have predictability in performance."
Sanzone originally came from Salomon Brothers. There, he said, projects were managed on a decentralized basis by group. Each group had its own practices, its own Microsoft project plans, and its own way to work with each client base. "None matched across the organization."
The Mystic platform changed all that, and did a lot more, according to Sanzone.
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