The failure of Washington Mutual Bank, along with 100's of other U.S. banks on the verge of failure, has caused consumers to question if a similar event could happen to their bank. However, consumers who bank with Farmers & Merchants Bank (F&MB) in Long Beach, California, don't have cause for alarm. Rating services, such as Weiss Rating, Highline Data, and others, consider F&MB to be the strongest bank in California and one of the strongest in the nation. The bank has assets of $3 billion and a capital ratio four times higher than the FDIC limit and sufficient liquidity to pay every depositor in full.

Financial strength has formed the underpinning of F&MB from the day it was founded in 1907 by C.J. Walker, great grandfather of Henry Walker, the current CEO. For example, F&MB didn't need any government assistance. When Gus Walker, Henry's grandfather became the bank's chairmen and president in 1938, he started the important tradition of transferring much of the bank's annual earnings into capital and reserve accounts. This wise practice enabled F&MB to flourish during the inflation-riddled 1970s, the fluctuations of the 1980s, the recession of the early 1990s, and even to grow despite today's problems.

Today, Henry Walker, along with his brother Daniel, who is chairman and president, continues to carry out his family's legacy, but with one difference - a heavy emphasis on capital investments in technology and facilities. The goal of these investments says Walker is to provide new services and to improve the bank's quality of customer service. Enterpriseleadership.org recently sat down with Henry Walker to talk about the business processes and the investments that've helped F&MB to earn its coveted reputation for financial soundness.

EL. What motivates you to follow in your great grandfather's footsteps?

HW. The bank has three executives:

The proliferation of the Internet, the pressure of a global economy, and the need to remain competitive have transformed businesses all of sizes into extended enterprises. As a result, many companies have a complex network of matrix relationships with permanent employees, with contract staff, with customers, with partners, and with suppliers. Because customers and suppliers might need to have access to information, such as sales forecasts and inventory projections, companies also need to extend enterprise applications to these constituents, thus creating an interconnected network of information.

John Baschab, the president of TechniSource, says that the key to managing an extended enterprise is good collaboration. Baschab's company provides outsourced IT talent, ranging from CIOs to CISCO networking specialists, to privately held companies with revenues between $50 million and $600 million. Baschab, who also teaches part time at Southern Methodist University, and Jonathan Piot, his TechniSource partner, have written two editions of the 600-page book, The Executive Guide's to Information Technology.

Enterpriseleadership.org recently sat down with Baschab to discuss what companies must do to better manage their extended enterprises and what role collaboration plays in this process. Here is what he had to say:

EL: What types of investments are you seeing in collaboration to extend the enterprise?

JB: We're seeing much IT investment going into extending the enterprise through collaboration. When it comes to internal collaboration, we're seeing improvements in the various ways people interact with each other. External collaboration looks at ways to leverage technology to bring suppliers and or customers closer together. The big difference here is who are your customers? If you're customers are consumers, then you can deploy social networking to drive more collaboration. On the other hand, if have business customers, then you have to look at how you can create a platform to

Mark D. Lutchen knows what it takes to unleash the full potential of IT so that organizations can derive the maximum benefit from it. As the former global CIO at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), one of the largest professional business services firms in the world, Lutchen oversaw an IT organization of more than 2,500 professionals serving more than 120,000 employees in 144 countries. Today, Lutchen is a senior practices partner in PwC's IT Effectiveness Practice, where he helps clients get more value from their IT investments and their IT strategies. In 2004, he wrote Managing IT as a Business - A Survival Guide for CEO's. Many graduate school professors have used his book in MBA courses on IT management. Lutchen says that the basics IT management principles in his book haven't changed much since it was published.

Enterpriseleadership.org recently spoke with Lutchen, for the second time, to discuss what disciplines CIOs must put in place if they want to run IT like a successful company. This is what he had to say:

EL: Why did you write the book in the first place?

ML: I wrote the book because the IT clients I worked with seemed to have similar issues. It became clear that technology wasn't the problem. Instead, it was about managing IT and being disciplined about doing it. If you look at the failures that have occurred, you start to see some of the patterns. People have not instilled within IT the disciplines we use in other parts of the business. If you're a CIO running a billion dollar IT organization or even a half billion IT organization, that's the equivalent of running a business. To this end, you need all of the kinds of things in place for running a business. The book was to put this idea