The "crisis management" part of Roseann McSorley's job description has come to describe her full-time job these days.
Ms. McSorley heads business continuity management for the Americas at Deutsche Bank AG, which has four buildings located at or near ground zero in lower Manhattan. Since Sept. 11 she has spent most of her nights at Deutsche's main backup facility in Piscataway, N.J., away from her family in Westchester County, north of New York City.
As the leader of the company's business continuity program and of its crisis management team, she has little choice in the matter. "It's my job," she said.
People who hold such jobs have never been tested as much as they were the day the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center toppled. Ms. McSorley has been at it 11 years - for Deutsche Bank and before that for J.P. Morgan - and "this scenario is something that I never could have imagined," she said.
Banks and brokerages affected by the disaster generally got computer systems back up and running in good time given the circumstances, but many have had to scramble to get new or temporary office space.
Deutsche Bank, which is based in Frankfurt, was well prepared from a facilities standpoint to accommodate the more than 5,000 employees who were evacuated from its downtown buildings. Nearly all of them are now at the company's various sites in midtown and New Jersey, including the 1,400-seat Piscataway facility, Ms. McSorley said.
In a series of telephone interviews, each one interrupted by incoming conference calls requiring Ms. McSorley's presence, she described the events of Sept. 11th and the steps that Deutsche Bank has been taking to recover.
Three minutes after the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center, Ms. McSorley said, she got a call from corporate security at Deutsche's 130 Liberty Street building, which is across the street from where the Twin Towers stood and to this day remains off-limits.
Almost immediately, the company's data processing automatically switched to its backup center in Harborside, N.J. By 9:30, Ms. McSorley had convened the bank's crisis management team - 40 to 50 executives from every department, including senior managers in Germany - on a conference call. The group made decisions all morning and into the afternoon, using constant updates from human resources, technology, and security staffers calling in, as well as television news reports.
For two or three hours, the team had no contact with several senior technology managers from 130 Liberty, who literally were running for their lives. One full-time employee and a temporary worker are missing and presumed dead.
During those hours "life safety was our first major concern," Ms. McSorley said.
By midmorning the crisis management group had invoked Deutsche Bank's business continuity plan, which dictates the dispersal of key employees to the midtown and New Jersey sites. Dozens of these employees - many covered in dust and soot - began arriving at their designated locations by late afternoon.
All this time, Ms. McSorley was working from her home. It was her routine to work out of home one day a week, and it helped that she was there Sept. 11., because telephone circuits in Westchester were functioning much better than those in Manhattan.
After the conference call, Ms. McSorley drove to the Piscataway location, where staffers from her team, as well as technology support and food and mail services were working through the night to ready the facility, which was functional the next day.
Six hundred to 700 people showed up for work in Piscataway on Sept. 12, and the numbers grew steadily as the week progressed. Currently, several businesses, including corporate finance, asset management, and equities, are housed there.
That Deutsche Bank owns its backup facility has helped it to accommodate displaced employees. It acquired the building when it purchased Bankers Trust, which had used it as its own alternative site.
Typically, about 60% of the Piscataway building is outfitted with personal computers and desks that are ready to go in case of emergency. Since Sept. 11, Deutsche has added several hundred PCs, bringing the facility to full capacity.
If it had relied on a third party for disaster recovery, ramping up would have been much harder, Ms. McSorley said. "It's easier to build out if you own the space. Going through a vendor can be costly."
Deutsche's contingency plans took into account the shutdown of a single major location, not four. Even so, its recovery effort went well, all things considered, Ms. McSorley said.
"I think most Wall Street firms had not planned for a situation so devastating or so long-term," she said.
In addition to the Piscataway location, Deutsche Bank has moved people to facilities in Harborside, N.J., midtown Manhattan, and Wall Street, where it is buying a building from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Still, "there is a small percentage of people we need to find space for," Ms. McSorley said.
Things have not gone so smoothly at other companies. Lehman Brothers, for example, had to purchase a one-million-square-foot office tower from Morgan Stanley to house displaced personnel. Until this space is ready - sometime before January is the schedule - it is renting commercial space in Manhattan and Jersey City, as well as 650 rooms in a midtown hotel.
Deutsche Bank also succeeded in switching important data processing tasks housed at 130 Liberty. Despite a traumatic evacuation from the Liberty Street building - some employees crossed the Hudson River in tugboats - Deutsche's money transfer business was up and running two hours and 10 minutes after the chaos began.
It took Bank of New York, a fellow money-transfer bank with operations near the disaster site, until the end of the week of Sept. 11 to fully restore operations. Robert Grieves, a Bank of New York spokesman, said damaged telecommunications links between its downtown Manhattan processing site and its backup sites in New Jersey and Westchester County were to blame.
With the disaster now more than a month behind them, Ms. McSorley and her team are continuing to monitor Deutsche Bank's infrastructure, systems, and businesses and starting to update its continuity plan and advising managers in other parts of the globe.
And as business slowly returns to normal, a personal goal of Ms. McSorley's is eventually to get home for good to her husband and 2-year-old daughter.
