Banking on IT by Katherine Coombs

Short and Sweet

Well, I have a new hard drive.  Actually, a minor correction.  I have a refurbished warranty replacement to fill the void left by what was a relatively new hard drive.  If laptop drives died as regularly, I’d have torpedoed my machine out the window long ago.  But, I shall focus on the positive and state for the record that all data now exists in two places, if not three, and that’s a very good thing.

Secondly, I am loving this London summer and have been in salad overdrive of late.  Hot smoked trout and vermicelli salad with chilli oil and lime juice dressing.  Duck and green mango salad.  Chicken and coriander salad.  Tuna tartare with green been and mint salad.  Thai beef salad, for which you absolutely must use kaffir lime leaves.  Tricky to find, but there are a few shops near Chinatown that stock them.  If that fails you can head out to Wing Yip in Croydon, buy in bulk and then freeze the leaves.

And finally to finish with an IT-related thought (other than the HDD saga.  Fingers crossed I never need post about such things again).  I attended three IT Exec briefings in the last week, and at all three the dread phrase “IT and the business” was bandied about.  Who is this mystical – and evidently difficult-to-please – “the business”?  I support one business unit – Savings – but what I do isn’t about “IT and the Savings business”.  Try getting anything done in isolation.  Of course you couldn’t – I liaise with risk, security, finance, marketing, comms, legal, IT, internet banking, telephony etc etc to implement any Savings changes.  We collectively form “the organisation“, whose processes and technology (and sometimes people, too) cross multiple business units.  Including IT.  “There are no IT projects; there are only business projects.  Likewise there are no business projects; there are only IT projects.”  Business + Technology = Business Technology.