The RBS IT failure is a typical IT failure happened recently.
The RBS (The Royal Bank of Scotland) recently has encountered a serious IT failure and losing £125 million to compensate customers, leading its half-year loss to £1.5 billion, comparing to the £794 mission loss a year before. Mr. Hester, The CEO of RBS said that he would not take a bonus this year because the loss caused by the IT failure.
How serious problems could IT failure cause? The answer cannot be more straightforward: the software update failure. How could software updating caused such a serious problem? I just want to quote the words of Mr. Tyrie, the chairman of the Commons Treasury Committee:" every night the bank was processing about 20 million transactions in batches. When an Edinburgh-based team did maintenance work on the system, one of these batch processes failed."[1] Imagine what will happen if more than 20 million transactions are blocked in one night. I think RBS is so lucky losing such little money.
Nowadays, a lot of business, especially CEO and CIO think that IT department is totally a cost to the company. There is no need to invest too much money in the IT department. The fact is that IT investment is decreasing instead of increasing as the figure blow shows.
Although, IT truly has brought a lot of disadvantages to companies. These systems, which are too complex are dragging the development of the companies. These useless legacy systems are another waste of the originally tight budge. However, can companies live without IT?
The answer is never. How can these data be managed without the efficient DBM? How can these business logic be implemented without the ERP system? Most importantly and seriously, people nowadays has got used to IT. In other words people cannot work without turning on their laptops.
The investment of IT is still badly needed. However, it should be the wise investment. Organizations should reorganize the IT sources existed and make a detailed investment plan in IT. In term of the RBS case, the money will not lost if the bank could invest more money in the security issues. Software Security is the gap existed in the whole system.
I still want to warn the plan makers that, again, the money should be invested wisely. How many banks invested millions of dollars buying lasted updated computers only to run Microsoft Word? Every cent is meaningful if used in the right way.
Lucky, after the accident, other banks also start to check their IT systems, but why do not they do things earlier?
Refer:
[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18648359
No comments:
Post a Comment