IBM criticism brings more blues to TSB tech issues
Oh say it isn’t true Big Blue. IBM has brought more misery to TSB and its massive tech overhaul issues by saying the go-live criteria wasn’t ready.
April angst lingers
As reported in April, TSB’s migration to new systems caused chaos with online and mobile banking. For over five days customers could not bank remotely and reported multiple problems with their accounts and transactions.
In an IBM report on TSB’s IT problems, published by the UK government’s Select Committee today (21 June), the revelations are not happy reading for the bank.
IBM says it has not seen evidence of the application of a rigorous set of go-live criteria to prove production readiness.
It would expect “world class design rigour, test discipline, comprehensive operational proving, cut-over trial runs and operational support set-up”.
But in its view there were a limited number of services (e.g. mortgage origination, ATM and head office functions) that were launched on the new platform and a broader set of services to about 2,000 TSB Partners as customers.
According to IBM, it has not seen evidence of technical information available to TSB, e.g. architectures, configuration and design documents, monitoring information, test outcomes etc.
Along with that, performance testing did not provide the required evidence of capacity and the lack of active-active test environments have materialised risk due to issues with global load balancing (GLB) across data centres.
A TSB spokesperson says: “The IBM document contained a preliminary work plan with very early hypotheses based on observations to date, that were produced after only three days of engagement with TSB, almost eight weeks ago. The content is therefore now very much out of date. The hypotheses were not final, nor were they a validated view of what went wrong or of the actions that have subsequently been taken. Without this context, this document could be misinterpreted to the detriment of TSB’s customers.”
That said, the report has been published and been made public. You can read it here.
