How much is good process management worth?
Just spotted this article on a $45M processing error made by ANZ Bank. Evidently, an ETL process was accidentally run twice. According to the bank’s spokesman:
I think what’s happened is the tape containing all of these transactions was run twice. We are just trying to get the bottom of why that’s happened but we suspect there’s some sort of human error involved.
This absolutely floors me, for several reasons. I find it hard to fathom that a mission critical process:
- Was being run manually.
- Did not prevent human error from effecting the overall system.
Now, I realize that bank transactions are inherently more complicated, as they move things closer to real-time processing. Also, I do give credit to ANZ for addressing the problems quickly, I am sure they are much chagrined and are looking at things very closely to see how this happened. Still, this is a big deal.
The next time you are thinking about the costs around a project to improve ETL, automation, or information quality, think about how much it is worth to your organization avoid embarrassment like this.
BTW, it might seem like I am picking on non-US organizations lately, please let me assure you that this isn’t the case. I it might just be that this gets written about more internationally.
technorati tags:information quality, data quality, etl, automation
