Oh no, RBS has gone titsup again... but is it JUST BAD LUCK? And here we go again, another IT systems failure at RBS. RBS appears to have been having a remarkable run of high-profile core-system failures, but I suspect that it has been rather unlucky or at least everyone else has been lucky. Ross McEwan, the new chief executive of RBS admitted to us in a canned statement that "decades …
From what I can see banks basically have to do two things :
1) Provide savings products and a prudent lending service which gives customers and businesses access to finances and the bank makes a tidy profit and not run the bank into a wall requiring a massive government bailout to prevent the collapse of the economy.
2) Run a reliable transaction system that supports day-to-day personal and business transactions.
RBS fails on both of those counts so, one would have to ask : Why is it still in banking!?
This is pretty fundamental stuff!
Their Ulster Bank subsidiary over here which operates in Northern Ireland and is also one of the largest consumer banks in the Republic of Ireland suffers these IT glitches too as their IT platform was centralised back to RBS HQ some years ago. (I was with them for a long time before that and there was never any issue!)
When the RBS system went down in 2012, Ulster Bank customers faced nearly 6 weeks of disruption! The RBS and NatWest customers' issues were resolved a lot sooner. It was absolutely unprecedented over here and it really sent a lot of customers running to other banks. I mean can you imagine being without your current account and debit cards for over five weeks?!?!
I'm not sure why the Ulster Bank situation took longer to resolve than RBS and NatWest, but I would speculate that they've merged they may have merged their IT infrastructure, but still all be running quite different software albeit out sourced to a single centre somewhere. So, I'm guessing the IT unit either didn't know how to work Ulster Bank's legacy software or that it failed differently somehow when the glitch happened.
Clearly banks operate in some kind of parallel universe where this kind of stuff can happen and they remain in business thanks to government support.
To be honest, as a customer I couldn't care less how their batches operate.
They left me without money for nearly 6 weeks so they won't be seeing a single cent or penny of my business EVER again.
The good old Bank of Mattress and Bitcoins are starting to look like an ever more attractive option when you see how wonderful the mainstream banking industry is!
if you don't care why the difference, why ask?
Also, did you go to the branch and talk to them, I was under the impression that they were extending credit to anyone who needed it. Or did you just sit at home and bitch on the Internet?
Oh, and good luck with Bitcoins and mattresses. One is seriously unstable and the other is prone to fire, flood, burglary...
The market will soon start to see that not bringing their infrastructure into the 21st century may kill their business. RIM, Nokia, Sony are all learning it right now. The banks are the most fuddy-duddy conservative of all businesses so they will be the last to get their poo in a pile, but how many of them will have to go under before they realise that doing nothing is no longer an option?
"The banks are the most fuddy-duddy conservative of all businesses"
They are and they should be, look what happens when they stop being conservative and lend unchecked?
Also, the banks were the first companies to use computing, way before any others, they understand it better than pretty much any other company. Rushing for the new shiny shiny will have your company always in flux and never settled. Slap it all on a z server and keep it running for decades, if it needs a new functionality, add a satellite system, never change what you have got that works, unless you absolutely have to.
Pretty accurate. It's a problem even at small businesses. The scariest one I've seen is a local jeweler. His customer database won't run on anything newer than Windows 98 and there's no way to export the data anymore except as a report. Exporting the actual database requires a separate application that seems to be extinct. (I've no idea where he got that system, but I can see why the company that made it isn't around anymore.)
The article doesn't really "get" business. To the IT guy, a 30 year old system which no one really understand, is a disaster waiting to happen, and it would make sense to spend money to fix it before it breaks. To a CEO, a 30 year old system which no one understands, is a technology unlikely to break in the average five years the CEO will be with the company, and spending money to fix it before it breaks will cut in to profit/bonus.
What people really have to understand is that the management act to maximize their own short-term profit, not the best long-term interests of the company.
What people really have to understand is that the management act to maximize their own short-term profit, not the best long-term interests of the company.
No, that would be what bad managers do. Good managers realize that long-term company interests equal long term profits for them to. Sadly we have more bad managers in the world than good ones.
Barclays online banking was unavailable last night (was after 00:30 this morning, still down at 04:00), no idea what happened, but it is back now. Nothing on their website to say why. Their website was up, just the online banking unavailable. A page stating that it was down and they were working on it was displayed when clicking on online banking login. I did email the newsdesk at el reg, not heard anything, not seen any articles yet.
… is the stuff you can't change.
I was involved in updating a tracking system used by a mining company to track copper cathodes. It had been running well, but the owners felt the machines were a little old, and so wanted to move to something newer.
11:09:35 up 1083 days, 22:40, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
That was the uptime of one of the two servers. Running Ubuntu 8.04. That was just before I typed 'sudo poweroff'.
We were going to move the platform to Ubuntu 12.04. They wanted to move it to their VMWare infrastructure, so I set up a VM which would become their production system. So I set up a dev environment, compiled all our stuff, then found one module which needed the Oracle libraries. No worries, I try installing them.
No chance, it needed an older version of libstdc++. So I go looking on Oracle's site for a newer release, find one, install it, then get everything built.
Come commissioning day, we discover that version, the oldest one I can get which builds, won't talk to their Oracle server because the Oracle database is too old. I wound up getting them to download the Gentoo Install CD, booting the VM up off that, then I shelled in and did a P2V of one of their existing boxes, so that at least the hardware was looked after. We'll tackle the software another day.
The cause is probably the same reason as last time and most major cockups i have been involved in the past 5 years. UK legacy programmers with decades of experience replaced in their hundreds (not retired, not retrained) by cheaper inexperienced Indian staff.
My own personal experience is of 75% of the UK IT workforce (most of whom developed the system 15-20 years ago and were still supporting it) given 6 months, before they were made redundant , to train their Indian replacements who had left university and just finished a 2 week mainframe course. Most of the workers then had to find new careers with a very small percentage getting a new IT job (it took me 3 years to find another role in the UK with 200 people applying for every mainframe job). multiple that across banking, retail, insurance and utility companies and you have very small pool of mainframe people still working in this country. If these experience people were still looking after these systems then the problems would not have happened. these companies are moving too fast, too quick and put no value in experience.
That applies to everything be it operating systems such as Z/OS, UNIX and Windows, databases such as DB2, Oracle and SQL Server; third party software packages such as SAP or in house bespoke applications.
All will contain routines by people who resigned, retired or passed on to that great programming pool in the sky some time ago.
The question is not the age of the code but how easy is it to support its continued execution without risking systemic failure .
With regard to banking the basic computer algorithms of its core accounting ledgers have existed since at least the 1970s when these processes first started to be automated ( with the underlying rules having been applied clerically on paper systems for centuries before). I find it difficult to believe that a basic business process that seemed to run without to much problems in the days when programs were loaded from punch cards and data was keyed in on paper batches has now mysteriously become impossible to execute reliably 40 years later. I am afraid I do not believe that the 'legacy' technology is at fault since it should be perfectly possible to design, code, test and run this stuff on nearly any current major platform. However, that does depend on having staff sufficiently well trained, paid and motivated to do the job. On suspects it is this element that is ultimately behind these problems is human and organizational failure. And that is the fault of the people who are paid to manage the banks.
I used to work for Visa Europe up until a couple of years ago and they're still running BASE I and BASE II which were designed in the 1970s. Yes they work and yes they rarely break but the last person in Europe who had intricate knowledge of BASE I retired in 2009-ish. To get some kind of advanced understanding you'd have to plough through ancient operating manuals as training courses for these clearing and settlement systems simply do not exist.
And yet today, despite VE investing millions in its own clearing and settlement systems, BASE I and BASE II still somehow soldier on. And in the rare event when they break down...all hell breaks loose. I believe this is because Visa America refuse to dump the system despite sustained pressure from Europe and other major banks in the world who depend on Visa for their transaction services (and thus their reputations).
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