Third World IT?

I was fascinated watching the business anchor of BBC interview a robot dressed as a woman last Thursday evening. Her answers sounded like it had been crafted by a PR person, and it was. Her handler said they wanted to make sure she doesn’t flub her first live interview on international television.

If the robot wasn’t ready to field questions, they shouldn’t have prematurely exposed “her”. Unless they only wanted to show how close to a real woman they made “her” look.

We have robots doing a lot of everyday things, from cleaning the house and serving dinner, but the BBC robot interview could have set a historic first. At least she didn’t sound like a nervous bank executive trying to explain why depositors can’t get to their accounts the usual electronic ways.

Speaking robots aren’t all that unusual. We have been to science fairs where we can “converse” with such robots. Then there is Siri… the unseen Apple concierge who is always ready to help us with little tasks. Siri even helped my grandson do his math homework.

Then there is IBM’s Watson… reputed to have won chess games against some of the world’s greatest chess players and answer questions to win, the Jeopardy television game show.  More and more we hear of artificial intelligence or computer systems including robots that have been programmed to perform particular tasks based on a storehouse of knowledge it had been fed.

Great as the prospects of living in an information age may seem to be, our migration to that realm had not been painless. Just last week, depositors of BPI were inconvenienced by a claimed glitch in the bank’s computer system.

Human error had been blamed for the problem… a case of someone supposedly inputting batches of data twice. I suspect they had a bigger problem. How come some people got credited millions of pesos and they have never transacted in that kind of money ever?

I thought that probably BPI had not invested enough in new technology and the old system they have cannot handle their volume of business now. But the head of their IT Group said that ironically, it is their investment in new technology that worked to their disadvantage… made it faster to spread the human error throughout their system.

“If we did not invest in technology, we would have been able to recover faster,” the BPI IT head said in an e-mail shared with me. He called that statement ironic. As a layman, my gut feel tells me something is wrong… we are not being told everything and the IT guy probably doesn’t know the full story himself.

Think about it… the whole world today depends on some computer somewhere to function normally. Sure, computer glitches happen, sometimes with catastrophic effect. But by and large, day to day human activities like banking are not disrupted for as long as the BPI episode had disrupted our lives.

Computer systems assure us we can send a man to the space station and back safely… or manage air traffic in busy airports all over the world day in and day out without a serious breakdown. And now we are being told a simple bank bookkeeping task is too difficult to be done error free in a country with just one time zone? Talk of third world IT!

We have all become well acquainted with computers in today’s digital world to have basic performance expectations. All the banks in the world must be using a system that caught human errors before these propagate in the system.

And when the system goes down, there is every expectation it can be put back up quickly. People and machines and programs should see to that.

But the time it took BPI to get their system back on line is disappointing as it is inconvenient. One of its high officials said, it is because they are big. Really? BPI is not really that big by world or even regional standards.

I wonder if it is because like many of our institutions, strict adherence to protocols and quality standards of operations often give way to puede na or worse, bahala na. Some computer people say BPI may have suffered change management failure. As of close of business hours last Friday, my branch couldn’t give me a print out of my account.

Glitches like this happen abroad too. The Royal Bank of Scotland had a similar glitch in 2012 blamed on software problems. The bank was fined by the regulator for the inconvenience caused to the bank customers.

“Modern banking depends on effective, reliable and resilient IT systems,” a BBC report quotes Tracey McDermott, director of enforcement and financial crime at the Financial Conduct Authority or FCA.

“The banks’ failures meant millions of customers were unable to carry out the banking transactions which keep businesses and people’s everyday lives moving. The problems arose due to failures at many levels within the RBS Group to identify and manage the risks which can flow from disruptive IT incidents and the result was that RBS customers were left exposed to these risks,” she added.

Hopefully the BSP will get to the bottom of the problem. It will test the mettle of newly appointed Governor Nesting Espenilla.

Will Gov. Nesting be more forgiving of BPI than he was with RCBC? RCBC’s case is also failure of management but didn’t inconvenience so many Filipinos. We know BPI is part of a powerful conglomerate which makes Gov. Espenilla’s response that more revealing of what we can expect from him.

Malang

Another day, another good friend passes on to eternity. I feel sad to hear of the death of artist Malang. I consider him one of the best Filipino artists of our time. He should have been a national artist and I still wonder why the honor eluded him in his lifetime.

Malang and his son Steve Santos helped us do our external publication when I was in Petron. For someone as noted as he was, Malang was the easiest to work with, humble and even self-effacing.

I was telling him years after we had worked together that I am sorry I didn’t keep his sketches or drafts because I can’t afford to buy any of his paintings. I kidded him that “buhay ka pa ang mahal mahal na ng paintings mo.” He would smile and say, sabi ko na kasi punta ka lang sa West and get what you want. I never took him up on the offer out of hiya.

It broke my heart to see him in a wheelchair at the Shang Mall some years ago during an art exhibit. My condolences to Malang’s family. We will all miss him.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco