Techies, what's with the RBS computer?

googler

Billy-no-Money wrote: »

And here was me thinking banks close overnight and most of the weekend!

RBS have been offering 24-hour telephone banking for many years, and Internet banking for not as many years.

Please tell us how you think these services 'close' over the weekend .....

Owain_Moneysaver

ringo_24601 wrote: »

Want to tell that to the A&E department of your local hospital?

Haven't got one any more :mad:

ringo_24601 wrote: »

I'd love to get an idea of the throughput of a banking system. I've been working on a soon-to-go-live hospital lab system, and we've estimated a throughput of 50,000 messages a day (24hr service) which is quite high in clinical terms. Banking must be so much higher.

UK payments says for 2009:

294.7 million Faster Payments;
5.6 billion Bacs Direct Credits and Direct Debits;
39.1 million CHAPS payments; and
949 million cheques and credits.

which I make 13,000 transactions per second over a year (assuming a billion is 1000 million)

Owain_Moneysaver

spud17 wrote: »

Does anyone think that perhaps someone at RBS believed the telephone caller from the Indian sub-continent, who told them they were infected, and then went to the suggested website and installed Logmein?:rotfl:

What's worrying is that such activity is probably routine if you work for a major bank these days, or anywhere else with offshored tech support.

No way would I at home let someone remote in, but at work it happens all the time and we take it on trust it's IT

Billy-no-Money

googler wrote: »

RBS have been offering 24-hour telephone banking for many years, and Internet banking for not as many years.

Please tell us how you think these services 'close' over the weekend .....

I meant physical bank branches, not the online services - and my point is that a department like DWP doesn't stop doing business outside office hours - online presence is a long way behind the sophistication of the banks but it's there and growing. Millions of payments are issued every night. I was trying to answer the assumption that a government department could simply do without its computer systems for a few days whereas a bank can't. I don't for a minute pretend it's as critical to the country as a major bank going down but it's certainly not trivial.

A few years ago DWP was in the headlines because most of its office PCs (about 120,000 desktops at the time) had their registries corrupted so nobody in the offices could work; but the 'back end' systems continued to operate so pensioners continued to get their payments. If it had been the other way round the public would soon have recognised the importance of those core systems.

mikeaudra

And they even tried it midweek???
Whatever happened to Close of biz... Saturday.. at least they would have had an extra day to start fixing things..

S0litaire

The "RBS Online" system goes down every night between 2am and 4am for "maintenance".

That's usually when balances are updated between local and regional databases. Funds go locally into your account between midnight and 1am and i've been told the 2-4am shutdown is for the online system to sync up everything.

exprog

tocsin wrote: »

Hey, Mr/Ms ChiefGrasscutter!

That post sounds like a raw nerve has been hit - you aren't a banking IT manager are you?

My vote goes to exprog...

Obviously did hit a nerve given that rant. Blaming the customer is the first response of bad management.

ChiefGrasscutter wrote: »

...and the customers who want cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper everything everywhere, but are not prepared to face up to the consequences of their choices.

You the public [blah blah, go back to beginning and start again]

But that isn't true is it?

Lots of people, for example, are happy to pay more for Fairtrade products; the ISP 'Plusnet' uses UK staff in England.

If you think I'm 'the public' then let me tell you that 'the public' want UK business to employ UK people at UK rates so that they can buy UK goods and services.

And I don't want a shoddy T-shirt from China. I want a good shirt from M&S, like they used to sell before management decided to tell the customers what the management had decided the customer ought to want. And I wouldn't dream of bodging up repairs in my house - I used to get girlfriends to do difficult things like change a plug, but now I live in the middle of no-where so I get a little builder man do these things as required. He is currently quite cheap and available due to his livelihood having been wrecked by all the cheapo Polish workers being given all the jobs on building sites - another management decision currently wrecking the UK.

ChiefGrasscutter wrote: »

So engineers were trusted to write whatever ...


I fully expect some of my stuff has by now been incorporated into some gigantic do it all program

A typical disaster in waiting caused by management letting you loose to do whatever you like.

I once worked for a company in the finance sector. There core business all revolves around one large program. It was bought by directors from a couple of their mates and imposed on the IT department. What was the reason given? It was written by accountants, so therefore had to be doing exactly what was required and couldn't possibly have any problems. Right?

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

If they haven't replaced it (bet they haven't) it's only a matter of time before they have a catastrophe that may well be unrecoverable from.

Like I said, this is entirely the fault of management.

lizzie68

I understand that smart logic provide computer systems for the banks and wonder what they have to say about where our money is. Chief Executive Jeremy Bentley owns at least two spare homes in Spain while we can't afford to eat here in Wales. Where did all that money go seems like a big con to me.

alanwsg

More info via The Register .....
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/26/rbs_natwest_ca_technologies_outsourcing/

InsideInsurance

Wish people could learn the difference between outsourcing and offshoring.

RBS's Indian technology team are all RBS employees (or contractors) and so it is offshoring not outsourcing!


Depending on what the changes are that are made you cannot simply back out code. As others have pointed out there are thousands of transactions per second. If your new code has fundamentally changed how those are managed you may not be able to "convert" them back to the old format and likewise you obviously cant decide to simply delete the millions of transactions that have happened between the code going live, defect identified, decision to back out made and everything readied to execute the reversal.

You cannot plan for every eventuality because even with the best will in the world you cannot predict every eventuality to be able to plan for them. Even if you do predict something the plan to deal with it can be exceptionally painful or difficult to execute. Ultimately all business is done on a risk based approach as there is never a 0 risk when doing anything especially change, banks have a much lower appetite for risk than other industries too.

Mistakes happen, how a company responds to a mistake is always much more telling than if mistakes ever happen to them or not. Sympathy really has to go to the normal staff on normal wages that are having to deal with the issues. The one P1 incident I was involved in the complete IT team that had worked on the project and its release were told they couldnt go home at the end of their shift until the problem was identified and a plan signed off (or if they did then dont bother coming back in) and based on the email trail it wasnt until 5am that they were released.