* Posts by mr33

2 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2012

Natwest, RBS: When will bank glitch be fixed? Probably not today

mr33

Well I meant 'ordinary' as opposed to 'a bit special'. There is a difference - for a company with the diversity and scale of NatWest it makes sense to differentiate what it decides to outsource. I might decide to have different level of expertise and experience coding my fraud and risk algorithms than I do doing some simple customer service screens. Outsourcing simple stuff is obvious, outsourcing core critical stuff is riskier. Anyone that says outsource nothing is being as naive as someone that outsources everything.

mr33

I used to run NatWest IT 20 years ago and I suspect many of the back end systems are similar to then, but with a multitude of front end systems added for online and mobile banking etc. For all the comments on documentation and outsourcing I'd have to say:

This feels like a major batch scheduling cock up and/or Db corruption to me. Given the length of time it is taking it would seem like they've also screwed up what might have been a straightforward rollback or recovery process. However good your documentation or ITIL processes or scheduling automation it's still possible for a production control issue to happen, but you do need people who understand how it fits together not to make it worse... In my experience that's not the people that are outsourced, at least, I hope they kept a few people who know which batch job needs to go after which...

So I think this is less about app programming and more about production control and operations...

In fact outsourcing the ordinary application programming makes sense and it's naive to blame this on outsourcing. It's often the case that the so called 'experts' that have been around for ever are the worst at documentation or training others because, hey, they wouldn't be the 'guru' anymore. I usually get rid of the guru's as they are often the blockers in getting the applications updated and written properly.