Hierarchy Stifles Agility
If you read the ANZ auditor concerns, you’ll see that one of the issues is ANZ’s IT controls.
Read it as it is and it sounds like ANZ’s IT is so complex that it’s too difficult to audit. And I’m sure it is.
As a matter of fact, CBA and NAB have the same auditor concerns too.
However, this footnote is written for the financial individual whose IT skills may just stop at Excel.
But, if you’re an IT professional (eg. database administrator) and in particular with some experience in reporting analytics, you’ll realise that this statement is a euphemism for saying ‘Their IT system sucks and we don’t know how to audit it’.
You can have complex data but still be able to wrangle it so that auditors can understand what’s going on. For example, you don’t see these auditor concerns in Microsoft’s or Google’s annual reports.
A Company For The Old School
Banks are structured for bankers – not for techies. What this means is that ANZ structures its IT department based on how it would structure its administrative departments — hierarchical and slow.
A quick look on Glassdoor shows you that ANZ is a good place to work if you like the culture but its IT execution could do better. The IT decision-making can be slow at times.
I’ve never worked at ANZ nor do I know anyone. I’m just making a conjecture based on what my dev colleagues who have worked for other banks have told me.
I’m using the heuristic that most big companies will try to emulate each other in some way or as Warren Buffett calls it — The Institutional Imperative.
Having both worked in administrative and IT departments, I can tell you that admin is slow while IT is agile. Admins like to discuss policies to the nth degree, so any sort of IT improvements take too long to implement.
In my experience, it’s fast to fix up IT errors when the initial interpretation is wrong but admin managers want everything perfect on the first go.
Ultimately, this means ANZ’s IT is complex not because it’s inherently super confusing since most banking data is transactional, but because decisions take too long to implement that you eventually mix legacy data with current data.
In other words, slow decisions lead to technical debt which is something administration managers don’t get.
Where’s the flexibility?
What I read often in the news is the fight between working from home and coming into the office. This doesn’t just affect the IT staff but also the back office staff.
ANZ staff want to make it a right rather than a privilege and I agree with them. I’ve worked for a manager who called work from home a privilege, and this motivated me to get out of her department.
Tech staff just like remote working. There are probably exceptions but I’ve met at least a hundred or so IT professionals and most enjoy remote working.
What does this mean?
It means that top talent avoids companies that don’t offer the perks they want.
I don’t work for ANZ, so I don’t know what their arrangements are but if their IT systems are shocking then I’m going to predict that the top talent doesn’t stay and could be partly due to flexibility conflict.
This is conjecture but if work from home is a fight in many large firms then statistically it should be so at ANZ too.
Finally, working for a while has taught me that if you have both customer-facing and back-office staff, then you can’t make your whole organisation equitable.
The reason is that specialty industries can and will offer their staff unique perks. For example, at Atlassian, everyone can work from home at their own choosing.
Unfortunately, if you have equal blanket treatment for all staff, then those who can find better perks elsewhere will tend to leave.
So, staff turnover usually results in poorly maintained IT systems — I know. I’ve had to take over system administration by other developers.
Conclusions
All of this is just one small aspect of the bigger picture. A complicated IT system doesn’t indicate a bad company, it just means that it’s harder to paint a true picture of what the company is because the numbers you see in annual reports are aggregations of transactions.
I don’t think I’m in the position to fix ANZ’s or any banks’ IT systems because that’s too complex, but I know from past experience that poor IT implementation can stem from an overly hierarchical system that leads to slow decision-making and loss of talent.
