Austin Adams has seen almost ninety mergers in his three-decade IT leadership career in financial services. But in his new role as CIO of JPMorgan Chase, he’s a key player in the granddaddy of all bank mergers—the integration of Bank One, where he was previously CIO, into a new entity with over $1 trillion in assets and a $7 billion IT budget.

We sat down with Austin recently to hear what he had to say about leadership, mergers, competitive advantage, and what gets him up in the morning.

"Our technology costs are too high, our spend proportionate to our major competitors is higher than it should be. ... We spend $7 billion on technology, we think we can reduce our costs, we think we can help the business dramatically improve service levels."

"Try to have all those tough and dirty and ugly conversations first, and then you just roll out the matrix and say this is it."

"I don't think we've historically done a good job in framing [strategic dialog]... there's a real shortage of technology leadership that can effectively interact and deal with business issues."