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by kris_lujanovic 1093 days ago
As someone who worked in finance I call b.s.

When you need to do any infrastructure change not to mention data manipulation it takes million signatures and meetings. Like 13 meetings to deal with one ex employee corporate cloud folder.

Unless they end up in court. Then somehow million things happen on their own in their benefit.

4 comments

As someone who has done support for finance's IT departments, the "this was broken for years and no-one noticed" idea sounds bang-on. I've watched the millions of signatures and meetings, but none of that matters when someone screws up the implementation (but not badly enough that anyone cares to complain).
Seconding this. You can have all the meetings you want, but at the end of the day the core competency of bank management is managing money and not managing IT, and banks suck at managing IT when it isn’t directly in the critical path of cash flow, and even then they get it wrong more often than anyone wants to admit.
So many people want to be "the person who orders the thing be done" and not "the person who does the thing".

Dysfunctional organizations have (somebody-else-is-doing-it / im-doing-it) ratios that get way out of control. There's also (talking-about-doing-it / doing-it), where dysfunctional orgs lose the ability to experiment.

That was part of a legal case or publicly reported failure?
Also backups.

This is just corporate "The IT dept ate my homework."

It's a ridiculous excuse, "punished" with a trivial fine.

Backing up the email database is probably a bad idea for an org like this, because they have data that isn’t allowed to be backed up.

I had a customer that got accidentally sent confidential data to the wrong email address and it was backed up for multiple months. In the end we left it in there but they considered deleting all the backups that contained this email.

That is a good reason for having short lived backups and an archiving solution with retention policies emails.

Yes it takes a million meetings, but at the end of the day it's just one IT guy making the change.

It's exponentially expensive to eliminate the base-rate of a "whoops", and not everyone has NASA-level money to waste on IT.

JP Morgan does, though.

They likely spend all of it on the million meetings full of people who wouldn't actually be executing the change, next to none of it on the team and infrastructure where the change will be made, and then fire the team who made the change.

Maybe not everyone, but if JPM doesn't then who does?
JP Morgan and other similarly acting agents in finance have become literal economic cancer tumors, attracting undue angiogenesis and convincing the body that excision is fatal all while leading it to its demise.

We haven't figured out how to cure cancer in humans because we turn a blind eye to it when we create it ourselves.