Hahahaha at natwest trying to blame a indian worker!!

InsideInsurance

Fiddlestick wrote: »

ultimately resulted in the redundancies of many of the old-hands that had the institutional knowledge not only to avoid such a problem but to recover from it quickly.

As has already been said, what exactly went wrong and what explicit knowledge would have helped?

Again, your experience seems to be very different from mine. I have seen IT teams reduced by 50% to move to a lower cost but it is a blend of people that go and rarely those with the indepth knowledge of the archaic mainframe system that is the backbone of the organisation. You do lose some occasionally tempted by the large redundency settlement and early retirement but then every year you lose some to retirement or competitors.

Clearly there are exceptions but generally, in my experience, those that are lost are the most replaceable and you dont suddenly find the tea boy being made the release manager.

Of cause, if you need an extra 50 hands at short notice and have those that recently left you'd consider paying a premium for them on a short term. I've been contacted by employers/ clients that I have left voluntarily afterwards and been asked to provide short term assistance.

WendellG

Debt_Free_Chick wrote: »

I am persuaded by this account, which is NOT posted on The Register but on another completely non-IT forum.

Source at the end .... Text in quotations is from the (RBS) source. In italics, my comments.

"CA7 was updated to a new level last weekend. It was causing problems with the schedules on Monday so was backed out on Tuesday. The backout caused the "queue" of jobs for that batch to be unexpectedly deleted. "

For the amount of disruption caused it had to of been more than just the queue of jobs that got deleted.

I had understood that they deleted the whole schedule that defines the 1800+ jobs that are run. So they weren't able to just rerun the jobs in the queue, they had to recreate the entire workflow, and then reprocess the backlog.

Note that CA7 has nothing to do with the actual data processing, it is the scheduler that transfers the information between systems (that were working fine) and tells them to process jobs. So DR and backup/restore wouldn't of helped as all the data was already there, it's just that there was nothing defined to deal with it.

I have no idea how they are going to sort out the mess of charges that would have been applied automatically when accounts got overdrawn, this problem still has a long way to run.

Debt_Free_Chick

WendellG wrote: »

I have no idea how they are going to sort out the mess of charges that would have been applied automatically when accounts got overdrawn, this problem still has a long way to run.

Agree - I think we may see significant disruption for some time yet

c_smith

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3727561/Brits-bank-data-sold-for-pennies-by-Indian-call-centres.html

Here's what happens when the banks outsource to Indian call centres. You get fraud on a grand scale! If you pay peanuts you encourage corruption.

alanq

c_smith wrote: »

If you pay peanuts you encourage corruption.

Whereas high remuneration ensures competence and honesty? News reports would suggest otherwise!

Fiddlestick

alanq wrote: »

Whereas high remuneration ensures competence and honesty? News reports would suggest otherwise!

I think the key is fair renumeration rather than "high" renumeration.

It reduces the temptation to give into corruption and illegal activities.

darkvader

Fiddlestick wrote: »

I think the key is fair renumeration rather than "high" renumeration.

It reduces the temptation to give into corruption and illegal activities.

That's what we used to believe but there are a few well paid, well educated British bred MPs and Bankers who have now put this belief to bed

DV