The project to unify the UK’s National Health Service patient records under one system was proudly announced as the largest non-military IT project in the world. After 18 months the price had risen to £319 million, and when the contractor tried to raise it further to £389million, the contract was rescinded – though Fujitsu still received most of its fee, despite not delivering the service promised. The attempt to create a national unified database for 385 magistrates in the UK? The initial contract was signed for £146 million. The UK Department of Transport’s attempt to unify its human resources and financial systems in a single national centre? Branded as an exhibition of “stupendous incompetence” by the Public Accounts Committee. The fact that large-scale IT projects are fraught with risks and dangers, both those that are unexpected and those that flow directly from the incompetence of the managers who are supposed to be responsible for the design and implementation of the systems, should not come as news. It seems clear that – except for the last part (though the reason for making the change was to save the fee that was being paid by TSB to Lloyds, which managed the legacy system that supported the online functions – that paragraph could have been written about the TSB failure. Initial triggering, followed by a quick response by the company to say that they are working on it the company then says that it has a solution that will be implemented and the problem will be fixed it then seems that the problem is more complicated than first thought, and a range of interventions do not work, and it is then reported, either by news sources or by the bank itself in an effort to deflect responsibility, that actually the cause of the meltdown was not within the system, but because of human error by an outsourcing company that had been tasked with managing the IT system (and who had undoubtedly won that contract on the basis of lowest cost….).” “Similarly to the bank IT failure in South Korea that left 30 million customers affected for over a week in 2011, such stories seem to have a natural trajectory. “Warnings that the underlying support systems behind global internet banking are reaching the functional limits of their operational complexity were seen when problems with RBS and NatWest computer systems left up to 12 million people without access to their money in June last year, and there were similar problems with Lloyds Banking Group (which includes Halifax and Bank of Scotland) in October.
“The scenario that I have been using as an example of the truly ‘Wicked Problem’ in my own work for the last couple of years is the breakdown of global banking IT systems, which – at one stroke –would leave vast areas of the population to survive purely on the money that they happened to be carrying at the time. In fact, in an article I wrote in January 2013, looking at what I thought might be the ‘mega-crisis’ of the near future, this was exactly the situation that I chose to focus on, saying: The idea of the catastrophic failure of banking IT systems is nothing new. The migration was scheduled to take place between 16:00 hrs on April 24 and 18:00 hrs on April 26 but, four weeks later, many customers said they were still experiencing problems and the bank admitted that it had received 40,000 complaints.įor the leaders of the TSB Bank, after the transition from one data management system to another failed miserably, leaving millions of on-line customers without basic services, the few weeks must have seemed like a never-ending nightmare from which they keep feeling that they are about to awaken, but then become dragged back into.
The problems began when the bank started to migrate data from its five million customers from the former owner, Lloyds’ system to a new one. David Rubens looks at the issue from an organisational resilience perspective. TSB bank in the UK has been experiencing severe computer issues, with customers unable to log into their online accounts or use the bank’s app and struggling to log in or make online payments.
TSB Bank IT failure: Déjà vu all over again
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