When we develop requirements for our technology projects at the Bank, we always cry for more, at less cost.  That’s not a bad thing, but it has to be done intelligently, with some appreciation for the results.   

Approximately 7,000 customers of the Bank of Scotland, which is part of HBOS, reported seeing additional monthly mortgage payments taken from their accounts this month.

Source: BankNet 360 – Computer Glitch Reeks Havoc on HBOS Mortgage Accounts

Recently we have been uncovering many situations where quite frankly I shouldn’t need to know this, but as the conversation goes this is what gets uncovered – examples (and I am way out of my depth in explaining this here btw):

• a small application that made 110 individual database calls, when in fact it could have made one
• a small app generated from a content management system that re-compiled itself every single time a customer clicked, yet the option to cache it once, and serve it multiple times existed but wasn’t used

I will stop there rather than display my lack of technical knowledge.  My point is that we Bankers are so smart that we press the developer team to do obscure and strange things because we don’t allow enough time or development planning. Bank systems are horribly complex, and spaghetti like, and it takes a strong technology team focussed on development quality to deliver quality.

So back to the HBOS example.  That sort of thing shouldn’t happen, but there will be a reason, and development quality is likely the culprit.

Relevance to Bankwatch:

As we work with the technology team, be careful what we ask for, because we may just get it …. and then we may learn that’s not what we expected.  Real innovation really requires a business group that can intelligently talk to the development team, without “relationship managers” posing as translators /business analysts.  Technology is the business and we all have to understand it.