As CIO, it's my job to set direction and lay out a vision. A huge part of that -- 70 percent to 80 percent of my time -- is spent addressing the development of the culture and how the teams come together. It is the single biggest challenge we have.

The integration itself is pure execution. We've done this seven times before. Virtually the same technology management team from the legacy Ameritrade, myself included, will be working on this. We've got a playbook.

While it's daunting and it will probably cause me and some others a couple of sleepless nights, it's just execution. We've done it before.

As the new CIO for Ameritrade, what are your objectives over the next year? The integration is my :No. 1 priority. But, other things we'll be working on: We will be focusing on a data center strategy that's moving us toward an active/active approach. That's not something Ameritrade's done typically. We're going to continue to deliver innovative products to our client base because that's part of aggressively running your business, and not doing that is why many merger integrations fail. We're also going to focus on business intelligence in the data warehouse. With the new company and the new brand we're going to launch in the spring comes a new, cranked-up focus on clients. Knowing those clients is critical. We're hellbent on not pigeon-holing our clients. We need to understand their needs based on their behaviors and offer them a variety of solutions. To do that we need to improve our data warehouse and improve the sophistication of our business intelligence tools.

Have you chosen a BI vendor, or are you developing this internally? We're not going to develop the analytical tool internally. We're in the process of evaluating that. We are refining the underlying structure of our warehouse and our operational data store internally. We've got some folks who have done that before.