One of Edward D. Miller's favorite computer games involves guiding a sailboat into a dock while avoiding an explosive collision with a nearby gasoline tank.
The game is in some ways a ready analogy for Mr. Miller's work as the ranking technology executive at Chase Manhattan Corp. He is ultimately responsible for ensuring the nation's largest bank does not sink in the choppy waters of technology.
But in contrast to the electronic game, Mr. Miller's job is a group activity all the way.
Decision-making by committee has been a hallmark of the Chemical Banking Corp. merger with Chase Manhattan Corp., and Mr. Miller said the $323 billion behemoth has no plans to end the practice now that many of the merger-related projects are nearing completion.
"Technology can't be central. This organization is too complex," said Mr. Miller, who as senior vice chairman also has responsibility for the regional bank and nationwide consumer services.
He added, "Complexity is a challenge, but not in a negative sense. I see few downsides to our size on a given day."
Mr. Miller is one of the 23 executives serving on Chase's technology council.
The group's charge, at once simple and complex, is to decide how to mine and allocate one of the industry's richest technology lodes - in budgetary terms, $1.8 billion this year.
Consultants who have studied Chase's organizational structure said that management by committee has been a key factor in the bank's ability to wring profits out of technology investments.
First Manhattan Consulting Group recently completed a study of the bottom-line impact to banks from their technology investments. "Chase ranked No. 1," said James McCormick, president of the New York firm.
Chase "held up to scrutiny as an example of a bank where customer-level decisions sold more profitable products, retained the most profitable customers, and turned around the economics of the unprofitable customers," Mr. McCormick said.
Though Mr. Miller emphasizes teamwork, colleagues and other observers said his leadership was crucial to the team's success.
As top technologist, Mr. Miller oversees technology and operations units with 23,000 employees in all. In addition, he leads a tight-knit group of senior bank executives and heads of business lines charged with finding useful applications for the Internet, smart cards, and other technological tools.
Those who have followed Mr. Miller's three-decade banking career - first at Manufacturers Hanover Trust Co., then Chemical, and now the reconstituted Chase - said he is a technology-savvy executive whose skills spring from years of hands-on experience.
"He has an open-ended appetite to build on his information and his skills," said Denis O'Leary, Chase's chief information officer, who has worked with Mr. Miller since the Manny Hanny days.
Mr. Miller's involvement in technology is not limited to the bank. He is vice chairman of the Banking Industry Technology Secretariat, an offshoot of the Bankers Roundtable that is devoted to preserving a dominant voice for banks in the development of emerging technologies, electronic commerce, and payment systems.
Described by some as a "renaissance-style executive," Mr. Miller is known to be as conversant with the minutiae of data mining technology as he is with retail banking or boating, a favorite hobby.
"He's as comfortable walking through the back office as he is walking through the board room," said Mr. O'Leary. And he said Mr. Miller is constantly tinkering with the latest technology.
The senior vice chairman often spends weekends at a vacation home in eastern Long Island surfing the Internet and playing CD-ROM games.
"The Internet is fascinating," he said. "It's important not just to understand it but to feel it."
At Chase's Park Avenue headquarters, Mr. Miller is known for a management style that pays little regard to corporate formalities. "He has a high tolerance for irreverence," said Mr. O'Leary. "Ed never wears his epaulets."
Mr. Miller said the consolidation of computer systems in the recent megamerger has been by far Chase's most important technology investment to date.
That consolidation has taken more than a year. Eventually, the unified computer system will yield a sort of all-star team, combining the most efficient pieces of technology from the old Chase, Chemical, and even Manufacturers Hanover.
It was during the Manufacturers Hanover process in 1990 that Mr. Miller at Chemical developed the concept of decentralized technology decision- making.
"The infrastructure and the support remained central," he explained. "It was done to ensure that the development of technology would remain close to the businesses themselves. That gives you scale and control."
With the new Chase's computer framework largely in place, the technology council has turned its attention to developing new applications and consumer products.
An increasing share of the annual technology budget is funneled to research and development, said Mr. Miller.
One of the fruits of such labor: The bank has designed profitability software that breaks markets into minute segments and helps determine whether a given technology will appeal to customers andbring in profits.
One of the primary advantages to a bank the size of Chase is that it has the capital to replace systems that do not perform and to experiment with unproven technologies, said Mr. Miller.
"We are not wed to our legacy systems," he said. "We have no big investment other than maintenance and middleware, because we expensed them. If there is a situation where we can use technology, we will."
One of the areas in which Chase sees opportunity is smart cards. Chase has acquired a 20% interest in Mondex USA, the San Francisco-based franchise of the chip card organization started by National Westminster Bank of Britain and soon to be controlled by MasterCard International, another organization Mr. Miller has been active in.
Chase and Mondex will participate with Citibank and Visa in a smart card pilot scheduled for next fall, in which 500 merchants on the West Side of Manhattan will be equipped to accept payments from about 50,000 cardholders.
Mr. Miller sees the smart card as an opportunity to find new ways to satisfy consumer banking appetites while bringing in new revenues, said Mr. Miller.
"We can use it to create loyalty programs," he explained. "We can link our merchant base to our card base."
Other initiatives include Chase's home banking product, to which 80,000 of the bank's 25 million customers subscribe. Internet banking is also being studied.
Chase also has hired NCR Corp. of Dayton, Ohio, to automate its 500- branch network, including computer systems, platform automation applications, and workstations. It has signed an agreement with Checkfree Corp. of Norcross, Ga. for bill-payment processing services. And Chase has ongoing imaging and data warehousing projects.
But Mr. Miller said the technology council has been careful not to buy into every new gadget.
Chase's branches, for example, are not equipped with two-way video kiosks - terminals that have grown popular with several large regional banks, including Mellon Bank Corp.
"You look at a sequence of priorities," he said. Customer segments "want certain things, but most want the capabilities that we provide."
As far as ensuring that Chase will be on the right side of the next technological revolution, Mr. Miller is sanguine. "It's not so much having the right answers as having the 70% solution that's 100% implementable," he said. "I'm very bullish."
