Natwest/RBS glitch
Discussion
Spitfire2 said:
Piersman2 said:
I've been banging on about the UK allowing it's intellectual property to be leeched away to Asia by a succession of lazy, accountant driven managers for a few years now. We really need to wake up to this because when we've lost the knowledge we've lost it. We have a whole generation coming through with no graduate schemes available as the UK companies managers all try to make themselves look good for their 3 year rotation by sending work abroad to 'cheap' locations and hide the true costs to make it seem effective.
Of course, 4 years down the line the issues; lack of knowledge, lack of ownership, lack of development, lack of innovation, lack of QA, etc... all come home to roost and the almighty f
k ups begin... with no-one around who knows how to sort it.
I'd hope the other companies off-shoring would look at this and consider whether accountant driven savings in the short term are really the best long term approach to business... but I don't expect they will as let's face it 'It won't happen to us' will be the mentality.
You are dead right with all that. There is just no getting through to the fannies at the top - even when these offshoring plans are a dead set failureOf course, 4 years down the line the issues; lack of knowledge, lack of ownership, lack of development, lack of innovation, lack of QA, etc... all come home to roost and the almighty f
k ups begin... with no-one around who knows how to sort it.I'd hope the other companies off-shoring would look at this and consider whether accountant driven savings in the short term are really the best long term approach to business... but I don't expect they will as let's face it 'It won't happen to us' will be the mentality.
1 huge electrical manafacturer
1 huge oil and gas company
1 huge gas company
1 huge domestic products company
The five companies above all have at least a couple of things in common; I've worked for them in the last 10 years and they've all used varying yet substantial amounts of offshored services.
I can state, hand on heart, that every single 'service' offshored has been worse and more expensive in the real world. There are no benefits other than on a made up spreadsheet, it's a bit like PFIs where weighting factors are used to justify the business cases.
As an example of the 'service' failures. The place I'm at now has a helpdesk that is outsourced to India, surprise
. The service may actually be cheaper than the previous onshore one, but mainly because the service is so bad from a user perspective that no-one bothers to ring them anymore. So hours are wasted whilst highly paid people wander around fixing their own laptops and the helpdesk continue to do not much more than close tickets which they raise whenever someone does bother to phone them.But why do we do it? Mainly due to f
k-witted upper managers who are buttered up by the big four and 'persuaded' that the savings will be massive. It needs a few more Natwests to happen before the trend get reversed. Or the offshore resources price themselves out of the market. But we'll be off to Africa then Asia becomes too expensive.
Important Information for our customers
We are still experiencing technical issues with our service which means account balances may not be displaying correctly. Some of our online services such as payments, may also be unavailable. We would like to apologise to everyone who is affected by this.
To help customers, we have extended opening hours in over 1000 branches on Monday 25 June from 8am to 7pm.
Staff are ready and available to answer any questions and help with emergency needs. Find out more
....etc etc ....that's from RBS online banking website 5 minutes ago, so, as you can see, it's NOT fixed.
We are still experiencing technical issues with our service which means account balances may not be displaying correctly. Some of our online services such as payments, may also be unavailable. We would like to apologise to everyone who is affected by this.
To help customers, we have extended opening hours in over 1000 branches on Monday 25 June from 8am to 7pm.
Staff are ready and available to answer any questions and help with emergency needs. Find out more
....etc etc ....that's from RBS online banking website 5 minutes ago, so, as you can see, it's NOT fixed.
Message to Customers from Stephen Hester RBS Group Chief Executive:
The problems of the past few days have caused disruption and inconvenience for our customers as well as for many customers of other banks.
I am very sorry for the difficulties people are experiencing. Our customers rely on us day in and day out to get things right, and on this occasion we have let them down. This should not have happened.
Right now my top priority, and the priority of the entire RBS Group, is to fix these problems and put things right for our customers.
...
Ok Mr Hester - how about re-employing some of the decent IT staff you have awarded P45s to in recent times and scaling down the new offices in India?
The problems of the past few days have caused disruption and inconvenience for our customers as well as for many customers of other banks.
I am very sorry for the difficulties people are experiencing. Our customers rely on us day in and day out to get things right, and on this occasion we have let them down. This should not have happened.
Right now my top priority, and the priority of the entire RBS Group, is to fix these problems and put things right for our customers.
...
Ok Mr Hester - how about re-employing some of the decent IT staff you have awarded P45s to in recent times and scaling down the new offices in India?
I can see the panic when they phone to 'outsourced expert help call center'
Out bank is down
Yes, how can i help
We need to speak to the director now (whos not answering his phone)
Yes. who is this..
..
..
Do you know what the issue is?
yes
Can you fix it?
yes
How long will it take?
yes
etc.etc
I have seen this a number of times...
Out bank is down
Yes, how can i help
We need to speak to the director now (whos not answering his phone)
Yes. who is this..
..
..
Do you know what the issue is?
yes
Can you fix it?
yes
How long will it take?
yes
etc.etc
I have seen this a number of times...
Edited by joe_90 on Monday 25th June 08:20
Pints said:
...
First Direct, here I come.
And you think they are any better and immune to such failures? Do a Google for a systems crash of their own just last November First Direct, here I come.
Then also search out LTSB and Barclays...you may have to go a little further back for the latter.Your best bet, IMO, if you really want to mitigate against such things is to spread your finances across institutions. And as per the financial guarantees operated here, be sure you know who the parent organisations are
They all operate very similar technology and all end up with similar approaches to maintaining/upgrading it.
MilnerR said:
I work for a large pharma company ($30 billion plus sales per year) and our IT provision is a cobbled together mess. A mixture of legacy systems, make do and mend, failed half-complete projects across multiple platforms. So I'm not surprised that other large companies IT less than perfect!
This is spot on.Off-shoring is only part of the problem, and the only reason off-shoring gets on the agenda is because the mish mash of systems in place at these institutions are so expensive to maintain.
I can never work out whether it's board members wilfully ignoring CIOs, or CIOs not being skilful enough at getting the message across. Either way, strategic thinking and sound investment in technology rarely happens - I'm on the tech side of life but think the CIOs need to shoulder most of the blame here. Their job is to persuade the business to do the right thing. Though I think this would be helped if CIOs had equal status at board level (at least).
Large institutions need to realise that looking after a 60s/70s system is like an equivalent age car. It will need frequent maintenance that will get increasingly costly and may at some point simply not be possible. You might be able to make it faster over time by clever mods, you may be able to make it look different with a lick of paint or a body mod, you might be able to get it to perform different functions with a bit of ingenuity and compromise, but fundamentally it will always be a 60s/70s car...
Also, it would help massively if businesses took some accountability for understanding their own processes etc. Too often in these institutions it is impossible to find people in the business who can explain why things work as they do. And when it comes to getting them to express what their requirements are (to modify or replace current systems), to allow sensible budgets for them without arbitrary cuts or to allow sensible maintenance windows...forget it
Me and other half are with LloydsTSB, the company he works for banks with one of the RBS ones, on Friday the wages didn't go into any of the workers' accounts, so the company were giving each member of staff an envelope with some money in against this coming weeks wage. As of this morning, the wage has still not gone into his bank account.
Murph7355 said:
Off-shoring is only part of the problem, and the only reason off-shoring gets on the agenda is because the mish mash of systems in place at these institutions are so expensive to maintain.windows...forget it
And how much will the latest 'glitch' cost them in bad publicity? Offshoring is a huge part of the problem IMO - done purely for immediate short-term cost-saving and as a dogmatic strategy. When the people who design, develop, test and rollout the systems are not the same people, and hence not under the immediate risk of being fired, then you will get these problems on a more frequent basis.Got an email this morning.
Dear crmcatee,
Please take this as confirmation that your mortgage transfer to Natwest has been completed.
The figures will have changed slightly due to the 3 days of added interest. We will send you a completion statement with a breakdown of all these figures.
Love and kisses
Natwest's Legal company.
We'll I don't think I'll be paying that added interest due to their error.
Dear crmcatee,
Please take this as confirmation that your mortgage transfer to Natwest has been completed.
The figures will have changed slightly due to the 3 days of added interest. We will send you a completion statement with a breakdown of all these figures.
Love and kisses
Natwest's Legal company.
We'll I don't think I'll be paying that added interest due to their error.
fido said:
And how much will the latest 'glitch' cost them in bad publicity? Offshoring is a huge part of the problem IMO - done purely for immediate short-term cost-saving and as a dogmatic strategy. When the people who design, develop, test and rollout the systems are not the same people, and hence not under the immediate risk of being fired, then you will get these problems on a more frequent basis.
I'm not totally disagreeing with you...but this sort of thing has been going on for a lot longer than off shoring has been fashionable for.Off shoring is as ill thought out as many other things that influence the supportability of systems (in source/out source, contractors/perms, develop/ootb etc etc).
The short termist approach comes from many angles, not least the businesses structuring themselves this way due to their shareholders' demands.
It will take something far, far more catastrophic than this "glitch" to cause wholesale change of approach. It'll happen at some point, but I doubt it will any time soon (I've been expecting it for at least 8yrs now and it hasn't happened yet!). The visionary CIO who can get his board to invest in wholesale rethinks now will be doing them a big favour. Am not sure they exist though.
As some have pointed out Outsourcing is only one issue. As any sane person knows it only causes problems in the long run and is the go to for cost cutting management who just want to hit targets and not provide the service they are hired to do.
The bigger issue is that these old systems are still running. This is not much different to the Y2K problem in that decades ago someone built a system for a purpose for a company. As time has gone by new business processes have been created, other companies bought or merged into and newer shinier technology brought in to update the interface.
We have a similar issue where I work in that there were tons of old systems doing things that no one knew they did because the people who had known what they did have left or been made redundant and no one was enforcing the creating and updating of documentation on the systems. So you would replace one system and turn the other one off only for a vital business process to no longer work as it past through this system but it was not documented anywhere and no one was aware it did it. These are the kind of things you find in dev/testing but what it means is that you keep building layer upon layer upon layer and it reaches a point that it is not sustainable.
I understand that decades ago the techie guys just lived in the basement and cast magic spells over the boxes with all the lights on but considering how integrated business now is into technology CIO's and positions of that type need to have equal power at the board level so that business people, one eye on the budget and the other on their bonus, don't force IT departments to go down routes that they know are wrong and will have impacts in the future.
The kind of thing that happened to RBS/Natwest happens all over the world every day. Just not to such a large organisation and the only way it will ever be resolved is if technical staff are allowed to do their jobs which is helping the business to do just that, business.
And breathe.
The bigger issue is that these old systems are still running. This is not much different to the Y2K problem in that decades ago someone built a system for a purpose for a company. As time has gone by new business processes have been created, other companies bought or merged into and newer shinier technology brought in to update the interface.
We have a similar issue where I work in that there were tons of old systems doing things that no one knew they did because the people who had known what they did have left or been made redundant and no one was enforcing the creating and updating of documentation on the systems. So you would replace one system and turn the other one off only for a vital business process to no longer work as it past through this system but it was not documented anywhere and no one was aware it did it. These are the kind of things you find in dev/testing but what it means is that you keep building layer upon layer upon layer and it reaches a point that it is not sustainable.
I understand that decades ago the techie guys just lived in the basement and cast magic spells over the boxes with all the lights on but considering how integrated business now is into technology CIO's and positions of that type need to have equal power at the board level so that business people, one eye on the budget and the other on their bonus, don't force IT departments to go down routes that they know are wrong and will have impacts in the future.
The kind of thing that happened to RBS/Natwest happens all over the world every day. Just not to such a large organisation and the only way it will ever be resolved is if technical staff are allowed to do their jobs which is helping the business to do just that, business.
And breathe.
Carfiend said:
We have a similar issue where I work in that there were tons of old systems doing things that no one knew they did because the people who had known what they did have left or been made redundant and no one was enforcing the creating and updating of documentation on the systems. So you would replace one system and turn the other one off only for a vital business process to no longer work as it past through this system but it was not documented anywhere and no one was aware it did it.
In my experience the above is true at almost all large companies. "We've got a legacy system that does the job ok, why would we spend £10m replacing it with something else?"130R said:
n my experience the above is true at almost all large companies. "We've got a legacy system that does the job ok, why would we spend £10m replacing it with something else?"
It depends what it does and how much something like the RBS events would cost you in real terms. And, of course, whether you can guarantee something new and shiny wouldn't do the same thing Puggit said:
PPPS Where is Stephen 'My leadership is worth millions' Hester? He'll appear on TV and radio to defend his salary and bonus but mysteriously fails to say a word when millions of customers can't access their money or obtain a balance
I imagine the meeting with the BOE on friday wasn't the way he wanted to start his weekend. As for where he is now well he was outside the office about 10 mins ago giving a tv interview on the steps. 130R said:
Carfiend said:
We have a similar issue where I work in that there were tons of old systems doing things that no one knew they did because the people who had known what they did have left or been made redundant and no one was enforcing the creating and updating of documentation on the systems. So you would replace one system and turn the other one off only for a vital business process to no longer work as it past through this system but it was not documented anywhere and no one was aware it did it.
In my experience the above is true at almost all large companies. "We've got a legacy system that does the job ok, why would we spend £10m replacing it with something else?"Over time, they were noticing that the parts being made were always a set amount different to what they'd originally wanted. Anyway one guy suspected something in the code and I spent bloody ages comparing manufactured products build up data to the design data looking for a pattern.
Anyway, turns out the original programmers had stuffed all sorts of fudge factors in to account for manufacturing accuracy at the time. As time moved on and machines got more precise the fudge factors started to show themselves, compensating for slack that no longer existed.
Personally I couldnt believe such a big company used something so old and seemingly (mostly) without question about what it was doing. No one had any documentation on it either... infact we didnt even have a copy of the code for ages!
Murph7355 said:
It depends what it does and how much something like the RBS events would cost you in real terms. And, of course, whether you can guarantee something new and shiny wouldn't do the same thing
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