The Nat West fiasco, Any bets for Bosses Bonuses at end of year?

[youngmafbog]

In this era of paying for failure the bosses of Nat West must be in for a bumper payout.

This is a disaster of epic proportions. Unite are busy blaming the offshore outsourcing, which in my direct experience of it in some mjr companies (10 years+) there is a very good chance they are right. Banks seem to have lost their way in pleasing the bean counters but as we all know you get what you pay for.

So CA7 or the Inian offshore? or both? (mixed with gross incompetance of course)

Here's a Gaurdian link before I am accused of being racist.

http://www.guardian.c...eltdown?newsfeed=true

[jake-the-peg]

I too have some experience of mission critical applications

I'm sure they are blaming the offshore outsourcing

Who's responsibility is

Selecting the outsourcing company?
Agreeing the specification of the software?
User acceptance testing?
Implementation?
Ensuring there's a roll back plan?

Sorry that's a cop out - I'm pretty damn sure the outsourcing company don't operate the servers and didn't make the decision to roll the code out.

The history of computing is filled with outsourcing failures from way before it went to India

The London Ambulance service system is a classic case study.

Yep the outsourcing company make the errors but the responsibility for the service lies with the comissioning organisation

[ChuckFickens]

Governments are traditionally even better at implementing outsourced IT projects that don't work or don't live up to expectations than any private companies.. (I realise that RBS isn't strictly speaking a private company any more)

[rojash]

Blaming CA7 would seem a bit far-fetched too.
That would be a bit like drilling a hole in the wrong place and trying to blame Black and Decker.

[emmie]

bit like this perhaps.

http://www.dailymail....-scheme-scrapped.html

[MoonRocker]

I am pretty close to this, I work with CA7 for another bank this article spells it out quite well:
http://www.guardian.c...eltdown?newsfeed=true
as does this excerpt from the Telegraph web site from an ex RBS employee:
"…I’m anonymous for very obvious reasons, having been one of the recent 1000+ to find their roles now being done from Chennai, however I have been speaking to a few ex-colleagues who are still there and can confirm that a CA7 upgrade was done, went horribly wrong, and was then backed out (which will have been done in typical RBS style – 12 hours of conference calls before letting the techie do what they suggested at the very start).
My understanding is that most, if not all, of the batch team were let go and replaced with people from India and I do remember them complaining that they were having to pass 10-20+ years worth of mainframe knowledge on to people who’d never heard of a mainframe outside of a museum…"

[emmie]

i know of a company here that let loads of staff go, then asked them if they would be kind enough, all expenses paid to fly out to Mumbai to teach the locals the work. Talk about getting shafted.

[MoonRocker]

This is not the fault of CA7 or the hardware. This is a basic mistake of somehow losing or corrupting the CA7 control file. Then compounding the error by not reacting quick enough. The problem occurred on Tuesday.

This field of computing is often maligned by the java set but the fact is that a huge amount of processing is done all over the world by what many would refer to as legacy technology. Managemnt try to save money by outsouring the functons to cheap but essentailly poor quality IT staff. This shows that this approach can be fals economy.

We are always losing highly skilled people here and filling the places with clueless offshore personel. The RBS issue was always going to happen at some point, I hope the bosses are taking notice.

[jake-the-peg]

Actually what is criminal is that in 2012 they are still running batch processing on Mainframes!

What is this the 60's?

I'll bet it's almost all of the banks too

What you've got is people too scared of legacy systems to invest in replacement technology

Can you imagine this at CERN?

Sorry we'vce collected all the data but we can't tell you if there's a Higgs boson for 4 months because we've a whopping great IBM mainframe running a batch COBOL program from 1983 and the only guy who understands it and hasn't retired is on holiday right now!

[jake-the-peg]

//This field of computing is often maligned by the java set but the fact is that a huge amount of processing is done all over the world by what many would refer to as legacy technology//

Yup - I'm one

It's legacy because it's not been maintained and the knowledge about it has drained away (see comment about 10-20 years of mainframe experience)

[MoonRocker]

I can see you know nothing about this jake. There are on MF because they are the best tool to do the sheer amount of processing. Have you any idea how much IO is done? We have unix boxes round here that would take a life time to do one day's MF processing. Cobol is making a come back:
http://www.theregiste...1/01/20/cobol_update/

Most serious data processing is COBOL/CICS/DB2 there's is a good reason for that. Your midrange are ok for number crunching but for sheer shifting you need the big stuff. What banks have is not particularly CPU intensive but there is just vast amounts of it. We converted a subsystem earlier this year to midrange and it now rarely gets in on time. "Progress" mmmm?

[MoonRocker]

Jake, you see to have a scientific background and yes no doubt our system would take a while to analyse the LHC data but that's not what it's designed for. MFs in the banking world are just huge virtual paper shufflers, our calcs are janet and john stuff. We have to store huge quantities of data on massive databases and react quickly to world wide clients requests and Swift processing etc.

[Bazile]

Can I join in this discussion ? - i must warn you though, i'm a cleaning technician ; therefore you might have some difficulty following me .

[sp1814]

JTP knows what he's talking about on this one - I too work in IT, and can see the errors/assumptions in the way this story is being reported.

[MoonRocker]

I actually work for a bank on mianframe systems and we do use CA7. What hardware/software do you work on Sp?