Paul Wallis's Blog Posts Tagged 'Business_Monitoring' (34)

In addressing, “Cyber Security and Global Interdependence”, Dave Clemente of Chatham House discusses the ‘security implications emerging at the intersection of cyberspace and infrastructure’.  One of his conclusions is that,

“Meeting these security challenges requires better shared understanding of what is critical between those who protect an organization and those who set its strategic…

On New Year’s Eve 2012, late afternoon, customers of three of the UK’s largest banks were unable to withdraw cash or use internet banking - some complaining that account balances were incorrectly showing ‘00.00’.

There can’t be many worse times for such a “glitch” to occur, and the (further) damage to those banks’ reputations must have been considerable. The financial cost was also considerable with, for example, Lloyds Bank setting aside £125 million to “compensate…

During July we attended the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, for the formation and launch of the Financial Stability Board’s (FSB) Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) Private Sector Preparatory Group.

The group was created by the FSB in response to a call from the leaders of the G20 countries to proceed with development of a, “unique identification system for parties to financial transactions.” […

 “Assets will always fail at some point, and with any asset failure there is a chain of consequential loss which is triggered by an originating event.”

Last year, I discussed the vulnerability of the modern city to interruptions in the various critical supply flows that keep it going.

When key flows – water, electricity, natural gas or sewage – are…

Legal Risks on the Radar, is an annual survey, published in the U.S. by Corporate Board Member and FTI Consulting.

The 2012 report researches attitudes to current legal issues among ‘two critical governance groups’: public company directors and corporate general counsel (GC).

Amongst other things, the survey finds that the growth of digital business, and connectivity, has caused many in these groups to recognise the increasing importance of understanding the…

Over at the FSClub Blog, Chris Skinner summarises a discussion he had with a senior manager in finance about bank operations.  He writes,

“...most firms struggle with enterprise management.

It is down to the very nature of fragmented structures, legacy systems, merged and acquired operations, that make the enterprise view hard.

Hard but achievable, so why is it not…

The citizens of both California and Japan live in the shadow of ‘The Big One’ – earthquakes of catastrophic and devastating power that will inevitably occur, one day.

 

Before these events, numerous ‘foreshocks’ will take place, smaller earthquakes, associated in time and space with the ‘mainshock’.

 

Unless things change, the finance sector will one day suffer its own ‘Big One’ – a combination of events that will cause…

As I walked away from the bank HQ 6 years ago, Han Solo’s famous Star Wars quote came to mind,

“I got a bad feeling about this”

During the meeting I’d just attended, a manager from the bank had explained how some transactions with other financial institutions occurred.  The transactions were very valuable, worth millions of pounds, and happened regularly.  To paraphrase,

“...basically, traders transact deals, each using their own…

Last week, in “Systems Thinking, Safety and Risk Management”, IBM Fellow Irving Wladawsky-Berger discussed a round table breakfast about, ‘Protecting Financial Markets in the Age of the Cloud’

“...Several participants cited the sharp rise in volume and speed of high-frequency trading over the past decade as an example of a current practice that is…

Strike!...Everybody Out!

It’s hard to imagine a group of people less likely to go on strike than the floor traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.  But, a few weeks ago, brokers in the Eurodollar options pit did just that.

They were protesting because they were unable to participate in the pricing of ‘block trades’ in Eurodollar futures, believing the system is ‘…

The Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC) is a specialist armed police force, which looks after all of the UK's nuclear assets and resources, both nationally and internationally. 

Recently, I asked Paul Stone, Deputy CIO at CNC, why he, and his colleague Mark Verrier (CIO), had decided to become OBASHI accredited, and use the OBASHI Methodology, and software.

Paul’s reply is,

“OBASHI is a straightforward methodology with simple diagrams and…

In the LinkedIn ‘Data Governance and Data Quality’ group, Gary W. Griffin asks for opinions on this,

Data Governance could be enhanced by clearly specifying data value chains and explaining how the Information Supply Chain connects the data value chains.

The concept of governance is one which is long established within the Oil and…

The dubious events at brokerage MF Global demonstrate yet again how vulnerable investors are in today’s data flow-reliant financial markets.

During late 2011, MF Global had been losing money on its currency market bets, and, to stay afloat, it delved into customer accounts and used customer money in attempts to cover its precarious financial position.

The attempts failed and the company had to file for bankruptcy.

According to the liquidator’s…

In my last blog about data flow and the development of ‘autonomous vehicles’, I argued that,

“...while the dream of a safer, and more efficient, road transportation system is worthy, it won’t be happening on a large-scale anytime soon...

 

...computers aren’t yet intelligent enough to reliably make safe, on-time decisions about everyday driving…

For some years now, technologists have been developing ‘autonomous vehicles’ - cars which will be driven by computers, without direct human intervention.

Google, for example, is a pioneer in the industry.  In road trials, the company’s computer controlled cars have racked up 200,000 miles without any accidents.

Real-time flows of data will be critical to the operation of such vehicles in a…

Over at Forbes.com, Dan Woods argues that,

“In every dimension, CIOs are facing an increased pace of change at the same time they are losing control over the computing environment. The number of assets they must manage is exploding. Consumerization, virtualization, cloud computing, software as a service, mobility are all increasing the complexity of the job of managing IT by orders of magnitude.”

In “The Coming Crisis of IT Management”, he…

Chateau Margaux 1983 is one of the many things I love about France.

My wife lived in France for a while so I’ve picked up her appreciation of the culture, food and language.

The French have a great way with language; they seem to find a way to say in a word that which takes a sentence in English. “Impasse” is one. I hate that word. I get a constant feeling of déjà vu (see what I mean) every time I hear it. It reminds me of a million meetings I was involved in…

During the last 15 months, here at OBASHI Think we have written a few blogs about IT in today’s data flow reliant finance industry.  For example,

Data flow disasters can sting

If a data flow is interrupted or compromised, it can cause chaos in the financial markets.

 …

Researchers at Ruhr University, Germany, recently informed Amazon Web Services (AWS) of security holes in the AWS cloud architecture, enabling AWS to fix them before any “customers have been impacted”.

The research team believes similar flaws exist in many other cloud services, potentially enabling, ‘attackers to gain administrative…

Yesterday, the International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), a global finance industry watchdog, published a report on High Frequency Trading (HFT), and other high-tech trading practices.

The report is a response to the financial ‘flash crash’ of 2010 (and numerous subsequent ‘mini flash-crashes’) in which HFT clearly played some…