Bespoke software faults costly for finance firms

Mission critical, bespoke software is prone to failure at UK banks or financial institutions, and costs some as much as $10,000 (£4,900) an hour, according to research.

The Vanson Bourne study, sponsored by Managed Objects, surveyed 103 IT managers from insurance and banking companies in the UK.

The majority of respondents said that over half of their software is bespoke and requires additional staff to manage. Some 56 per cent said they had six people and 38 per cent had more than 15 to manage such custom applications.

Despite such heavy management, 57 per cent of those surveyed said each outage caused by bespoke software failing cost $10,000 an hour. Over three-quarters said they've had such an outage in the past year, while 23 per cent said they have had over six such outages over the same period.

"We're not sure how to interpret that $10,000, but believe they're talking about salaries," said Jim White, business technologist for Managed Objects. "I can't believe it reflects loss of business...this is human cost, the cost to business is much bigger but hard to estimate."

The most common cause of outages was application changes. This is disturbing because nearly a third of financial organisations make 50 such changes every week.

"Making that number of changes, even with just one per cent chance of going wrong, you'll have problems every fortnight," White said. "Software is more problematic than hardware, we see that across sectors... It reflects the high quality of hardware, while software leaves something to be desired."

Because of the trouble with software, many sectors simply opt for packaged applications. "I think wherever possible today, organisations would take packaged software," he said. "It's higher quality and lower cost... not many people would make their own email package these days, but homegrown tends to be for core competencies."

Despite the trouble it causes, financial organisations clearly see value in bespoke software. "These guys have enough money that if packages were available [they could afford them], so [the fact] that they keep buying it is proof of competitive advantage," White said. But he added: "It varies across sectors how much competitive advantage you get from software."

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