Finally!! Westpac Bank has admitted that outsourcing IT security was one of the blunders committed when it signed a ten year deal with IBM. The company admitted that it had made a ’small blunder’ by outsourcing security as a part of its big outsourcing plans and this resulted in the bank struggling to get security and staffing levels back on track. The most difficult part of the deal was to outsource its employees to IBM.
As per David Backley, Information security officer and CIO, Westpac:
In 2000, when we outsourced to IBM Global Services over 10 years, we made a small blunder in that we outsourced the security team and we were left with one person in-house who now works for the National Australia Bank (NAB); he was the guardian of information security at Westpac. This didn’t work so well as we struggled to get IBM to understand, so the battle continued for a while.
The real challenge was in moving the security team to work with an external contract. This proved a hard nut to crack. This created the need for forming a security team to assess with IBM GSA as to what was required at the bank and as a result of this over the past three years both the companies have been able to achieve the right mix.
I wondered why Westpac treated transferring of employees as a trivial issue as human resource is considered to be the heart of any company. Why didn’t the company give a serious thoughts to outsourcing otherwise it would have never faced such situation which it termed as a ’small blunder’.
