Financial news in Flanders : clients of Argenta bank are unable to use their banking app or the online banking portal after a software upgrade. The problem did not last for a couple of minutes (which would have been quite bad) , no it has been going on for days. Can you imagine?

The explications given by their CEO in today's Flemish financial newspaper "De Tijd" just make no sense at all. He has no clue what is going on and even bringing  so-called datacenter specialists as Oracle and HP to the table doesn't help. Of course is doesn't. It is never their technology that fails, of course not...

It is such a strange phenomenon. 

The banks do their stuff always right. They consistenly claim to know and do things better than anybody else. Why are they so convinced? Because their technology choices are the ones they get presented in the top right hand corner of any more or less appropriate Gartner quadrant? With grateful thanks to the generous sponsors of those quadrants.

And still....suddenly things happen and total chaos rules. War rooms get stuffed with IT-specialists and department heads and possibly representatives of the so-called datacenter specialists...Mandays, manweeks, manmonths are spent arguing, finding the needle in the haystack and correcting everything that went wrong. In the best case there is no penalties to be expected, maybe just some indemnification claims of a few ungrateful customers. So, who cares?

Then, after a while, when everything has been sorted out, they all go back to business and wait for the next incident to happen.

Why is it , that those guys never learn? How come that systematically banks just listen to the Gartners, IBM's and Oracles of this world and ignore the REAL specialists in different fields? Because the first ones are big and the latter ones are small?

Unless there comes a fundamental  change of mentality into board rooms of large institutions "no one got ever fired for buying IBM or Oracle or for following Gartner's recommendations", this type of incidents will continue to feature in the papers.

Of course, it is so much easier and less risky (in terms of career planning, I mean) to follow "the trends" than to step up, listen to the real niche technology specialists and leave the technological comfort highway of the big players in favour of the exciting paths created by relative newcomers.

I'm already looking forward to the next incident...