A big picture look at bank IT woes

The Economist has decided to weigh in with a big-picture view of the banking industry's IT spending. No other industry spends as much on technology, "about $500 billion globally," the magazine says, presumably an annual figure. We tend to write about the details more than the big macro view, so it's interesting to read pieces such as these.

It's fair to say that the esteemed publication is not impressed with the pace of innovation. "Corporate IT systems--collections of computers, applications and databases--always tend to be messy, but those of banks are particularly bad. They were the first to adopt computers: Decades-old mainframes are still in use."

I'm sure IBM would have issues with such conclusions. It returns eventually to an old point: "Others think that IT played an even more fundamental role in the crisis. Because things are so interconnected, largely thanks to technology, a problem in one part of the system can quickly lead to problems elsewhere." I'm not sure better systems would have prevented the collapse. Just as I'm not convinced that the current risk management investment has made the system that much safer. 

For more:
- here's the article

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