I’m no longer a software risk consultant; I start at the Board for Actuarial Standards at the beginning of May. Consulting has been fun, but it’s time to move on.

In my November newsletter I discussed how an error that appears small at the time it occurs can have a big result down the line. Gordon Bagot replied as follows:

I too have come across this problem with a former client. A currency exchange rate was wrongly transferred from one electronic data file to another, manually, and with numbers transposed. The whole firm used the transposed number, in all their systems, until I was asked to do some consultancy work where I used my own source of exchange rates. The firm argued with me, delayed payment too, until I spent the time trying to resolve the problem with one of the client’s staff. Result, I was right, client wrong, no apology,but I did get payment then more promptly.

There is so much in the way of statistical analyses done, on which quite major investment decisions are made, that I can’t understand why time, money, resources is not allocated to ensure data is 100% correct as is possible.

I do hope items such as this are noted by your clients.

Me too!

My November newsletter has just gone out.

It’s official! I’m an unusual person. Just 16% of IT workers are women.

Seriously, though, it appears that the proportion of women in IT is actually falling, as more leave the field than join it.

Widespread delays to the London Underground this week were caused by one of the Tube’s infrastructure operators installing new software.

The new software was loaded over the weekend, presumably to minimise any disruption.  There’s no indication of what actually went wrong, or whether it could have been prevented by better (or more, or any) testing.

A misplaced decimal point has cost Clerical Medical £17m. Apparently a wrong decimal point was input to some unit pricing data in 2002.

A white paper from Lepus Consulting on The Management of Spreadsheet Use in Financial Services. Despite the title, it considers only investment banks. It’s mainly anecdotal evidence from a survey (no numbers), with a short guide to best practice.

Another web-based spreadsheet. I don’t know how it compares to Google’s.

Apparently it’s possible to use them to hack into ATMs, as well as to annoy your fellow passengers.

Laptops can contain confidential information, and are inherently less secure than large machines: it is easier to take physical possession of them.

Nationwide building society recently had one stolen that contained customer information; and 3 laptops containing police payroll information were stolen from LogicaCMG, the UK IT services firm.

You have to wonder whether it was absolutely necessary for this information to be on the laptops in the first place. It appears that it may not have been, as Nationwide are saying that the employee who had the laptop stolen may not have been complying with the firm’s security policy. Of course, it’s one thing to have a policy and another for it to be complied with.