Ruthless, Shameless and Ignorant

Speaking at the inaugural FutureChina Global Forum Meeting organised by Business China, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew volunteered his characteristic wisdom about businessmen: "The Taiwanese are ruthless, Hong Kongers are shameless and Singaporeans are ignorant. People who are ignorant are not corrupt and reliable."

We are not sure which category foreign import DBS Chief Piyush Gupta falls under, but "ignorant" and "reliable" are questionable words that come to mind when reading his opaque apology about the "outdated procedure" that crashed the bank's IT system. The only informational input in his rambling letter was that the outage was triggered in the course of repairing "a component within the disk storage subsystem connected to our mainframe." Hello, the repair work was done by expensive IBM, not some struggling IT vendor from Sim Lim Square - latter would have been more straight forward in telling you whether it was a hardware or software problem. When the press asked IBM how its engineers could have applied a wrong or outdated procedure in this Internet age, the IT services giant simply declined further comment. Oh, they did admit that it "has taken steps to better train staff on current procedures by bringing in experts for its global team." Translation: We currently have a bunch of clowns servicing the DBS account. Strangely, Gupta remains adamant the whole debacle has nothing to do with DBS' decision to outsource its sensitive IT operations to IBM, specifically the IBM Asia-Pacific team, with which it had recently signed a fresh two-year contract to overhaul DBS' computer systems, supposedly "designed to further strengthen its resilience and and minimise the risk of service disruptions".

Could it be that the problem is not technical in nature, but has something to do with the third "c" word in Lee Kuan Yew's descriptive about dealings with Singapore businessmen? Maybe this is a call for the CAD after all.