Royal Pain

[Jim Rootham]

>    What's the scoop with the Royal Banks recent "computer glitch" ?
>We know that they dance with the devil, as demonstrated by their recen
>(disasterous) investment in SCO. What OSs do they employ for their key
>systems ? M$ fer sure, UN*X likely, but what OS was being upgraded when
>the ship went down ? They have been remarkably "tight lipped" regarding
>the specifics of the problem, could that be 'cause one of their fat
>friends threatned to XPlode ?

Almost certainly a Big Blue Box.  MS on the desktop, HP for small scale
(relatively) servers.  IBM for mainstream processing, I am assuming, I
never worked in that part of RBC.

My interpretation of the tea leaves is that it was an application upgrade
that failed.  COBOL programme at a guess.  There was an inadequate test suite.
That got fixed relatively quickly.  There was a system design problem in that
the data validation was time sensitive so that once they lost a days processing
time processing required manual intervention.  There are not enough hands to
manually process.  This caused further delays and meant the next days
processing
also required manual intervention.  They eventually got out of the loop by
being
able to deal with the weekend load by hand.
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