[LINK] Westpac innovation gets through the Gates

[richard@auscoms.com.au]

Say *what*???

Savings started to emerge when we burned $900 million including a
never-completely-audited amount of government funding?? Westpac went through its
CS87/88/89/90 nightmare in 1992?? (1998 minus six years according to the
article). 





____________________Reply Separator____________________
Subject:    Re: [LINK] Westpac innovation gets through the Gates
Author: "Bernard Robertson-Dunn" <brd@dynamite.com.au>
Date:       17/02/00 15:53

Ralph Seberry wrote:
> 
> brd wrote:
> > I don't want to denigrate the current Westpac IT staff, but does
> > anyone remember the CS90 debacle?
> 
> CS90 was mentioned in several software engineering journals recently.
> The upshot of one article was that senior managers listened to
> consultants and ignored warning messages from their own IT staff.

>From Australia's Business Review Weekly magazine, November 30, 1998.

  http://www.brw.com.au/content/301198/brw26.htm

<quote> 

> Savings from Westpac's technology restructuring of the late 1980s
> (which has been continually upgraded) started to show about six years
> ago. That was the time Westpac was going through its CS90 IT nightmare,
> when the bank's dream of an all-encompassing banking system cost it
> what has been estimated at $900 million.

</quote> 

Westpac - one of the world's best. (At what?)

Re the comment "senior managers listened to consultants and ignored warning
messages from their own IT staff". This is at the heart of most IT
failures. Senior managers (and politicians) don't know how to cope with
Information Systems and don't like the advice given by their own people.
Consultants, political advisers, outsourcers and vendors in general, work
to different agenda. Senior managers cannot discriminate between good and
bad predictions and so go with what they would like to believe.

We are seeing the same effect in the areas of HDTV, DSL, CDMA, e-commerce,
censorship, the cost of GST compliance, in fact anything that is being done
for the first time. Unfortunately, many things are being done for the first
time these days, not the least of which is the commercialisation of the
Internet.

-- 
It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience. But a
corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.
-- Henry David Thoreau

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd@dynamite.com.au