you are mostly correct. to the other postie, the “problem: did not originate in NZ, it was all onshore. one of the biggest issues with this was an sccm task sequence that was configured to “install on all platforms”, rather than configured for say x86 xp only (well the target pc’s were all x86 xp). the advert was triggered and targetted the all system container. the rest is now history…

nothing wrong with my connection mate, I had/have no problems with any other site, just yours, not that I have bothered to check again today, because, well, I think your just spamming, chest beating, or ma……g I wont use that word else Renai will get peeved, but yeah. what I read yesterday is nothing more than any of the tens of other rumours that have been flying around by this blog, other blogs or media speculation, all up no facts by anyone, therefore I have no interest.

I’ll have more on the situation, too…and yes…at myITforum.com, we *do* know.

http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/2012/08/06/sccm-task-sequence-blew-up-australias-commbank/

Just proves yet again – you can’t fix stupid.

http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/2012/08/06/sccm-task-sequence-blew-up-australias-commbank/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=sccm-task-sequence-blew-up-australias-commbank

http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/2012/08/06/sccm-task-sequence-blew-up-australias-commbank/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=sccm-task-sequence-blew-up-australias-commbank

Hiring out a crew of highly trained Indian expats in the silicon valley isn’t a comparison – they still cost as much as non-outsourced employees! This means that to secure lower costs skilled workers are the first point of fail, and quality assurance the second. India has the sheer population to be able to supply a level of tech trained low skilled workers at lower cost.

There’s a bit of socio-cultural research been done around this particular “racism” in the corporate world – I’ll summarise below:

Whilst there are other available centers – Phillipines is an up and coming tech center for example, Indian education standards in the last years have focussed highly on tech literacy, so they’re a natural choice for the IT industry. Unfortunately, this means that you’ve got a huge pool of medium skilled workers that you can throw in mass at a task. The problem with this comes up in the business cultural differences between historical low population English business culture (Yes america, your system is English too) and the high population Asian business culture.

What do I mean by that? Take the following statement from an Australian Worker :
” Ah, that’s my fault. I wrote the code incorrectly and the system has gone down”
This sort of language isn’t present in an Asian based “Collectivist” culture. As an Indian, the prevailing culture is that you succeed, or fail, as a team – Individualist culture in a western economy, such as admission of guilt, is a powerful tool – after admitting something has gone wrong, it’s an assumption that you will be allowed to try again to fix it, and that your team is not to blame. In a team based culture, one person’s failure is the team’s failure, and as such you’ll go to great lengths to avoid pinning the blame on an individual:

“The team overlooked some key issues and we’re researching how best to resolve it” sounds like weasel words to an Australian company, and with no one to blame, there’s no one with high pressure on to fix it. To cultures that pride themselves getting ahead at the expense of others, this makes working with a differently cultured team difficult, and is part of the reason why Indian outsource suppliers get a terrible rap from these countries. It’s not always that they’re doing the task poorly, but there’s less risk for the individual to check work is perfect – you can always hide behind the team and “share” the blame.

TL; DR:
Somewhere in New Zealand, a tech worker is writing up a resume.

Your comment about Indian people is not acceptable, we work hard and have enough technical knowledge thats why we rule silicon valley!! You can churn out figures , how many Indians are working in US and doing great…lot of big inventions in the area of computers come from India people.

What has happened with this Ausi bank was a task sequence sent to s wrong collection. Windows patches can not be installed where they are not needed.

That poor sccm admin made a collection with wrong query which added all workstations and servers to the target collection where the task sequence ( to format) the disk was sent.

The reaction time, redeployment, resources and the time that HP has taken to rebuild, reimage, redeploy is just amazing. Thinkg about it.

All those servers, from Metro to regional areas, all restored within a week. We are talking about full rebuilds here on not only workstations, but servers that take days.

If anything, HP should be proud, and CBA should think twice before shooting whoever at HP, because at the end of the day, if CBAs IT was controlled and managed by another company, could they have completed this, regardless of “well it shouldn’t of happened in the first place”.

A true test, and good save/win, and a serious eye opener to any other IT company.

Dear management – when your engineers try and highlight these risks to you – I suggest you listen and take it seriously. :)

Bob

The sad part is that the user error originated in New Zealand.. One might question why this function was being performed across the pond? Well HP has a penny pinching policy of near shoring core IT services functions to low-cost regions. Its pretty sad that CommBank would allow staff from it’s (supposed) Tier 1 IT Services provider in a different country to bring down circa-70% of its key IT infrastructure!

… And to think this is the same IT Services provider that manages the Australian Taxation Departments core IT infrastructure services for the next 4 years. Lets hope our taxation details are safe!