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RBS/NatWest/Ulster Bank


CaleyD

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Unfortunately due to ICT's own woes I've not really had much chance to look at what has happened at the RBS and they've not give any real reasons as to why the banking system melted down....but I have to say that I am not surprised in the slightest.

Having worked for RBS Change Management (Specifically New Technology) during the Natwest/RBS merger I witnessed first hand the high risk strategies involved with some very very large projects.

When we did the NatWest/RBS Systems merger we faced a "risk" identical to what has just happened this weekend past. When we flicked the switch to transfer all the date from one system to the other we were effectively entering a "no go back" zone which could have brought the bank to it's knees....so much so that news that leaked prior to that event saw a sizeable chunk drop off the RBS Share Price. not checked the RBS share price for the last couple of weeks, but wouldn't be surprised if a similar trend existed.

All this chitter chatter of them having strict controls and never doing anything that can't be undone was BS back then, and it appears that it is BS now.

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If your backup fails, you run it again, you don't think "feck it, we'll just install the new software anyway".

Unless of course you work for a large banking group that's not know for being overly-endowed with common sense...

Sounds like something that my former employers in mortgage administration might have tried to do. :rolleyes:

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What actually happened was that a routine upgrade of the batch processing software was implemented. However in 'live' the new version slowed things down considerably so they decided to back it out, and it was reverting to the previous version that unexpectedly screwed things up. There then seems to have been a problem reconciling which batches had gone through succesfully and which hadn't, forcing them to retract them all and start again, causing major volume related strain. With many of the people who knew the system inside out having been made redundant in the last few years, a lot of the fixing and reprocessing was done by their replacements, technicians in India, who didn't know the systems well enough to work out how to deal with problems that had never happened before and weren't in the manual.

Unsurprisingly the batch processing software provider (CA Technologies) is already getting a lawsuit over this, but the internal restructuring over the last few years seems to have contributed to the scale and duration of the problem.

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With many of the people who knew the system inside out having been made redundant in the last few years, a lot of the fixing and reprocessing was done by their replacements, technicians in India, who didn't know the systems well enough to work out how to deal with problems that had never happened before and weren't in the manual.

I'd be one of those people :lol:

What you say makes sense, and again it would seem that RBS have failed to learn from past experience. There was servers and computers sitting in the data centres 10 years ago that had notes taped to the sides of them with names and telephone numbers of the one or two people who could fix them if they went wrong. Mayhem was a regular occurrence and I recall one particular occasion when they had to call a number, of a guy who had retired from the bank, only to find out he had died a couple of years earlier.

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This problem seems to be coming more and more prevalent (not just in the banks) as technology gallops ahead at breakneck speed but operators remain clueless of systems outwith the basics of data inputting. IT guy's move on and corporations save money by getting unskilled bods to operate which is fine for basics but when a problem arises they are snookered and the system falls apart. I can see major crises in industries where the reliance on computer systems is total but the infrastructure to maintain and update is crumbling.

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