In a recent call to staff, Mr Ron van Kemenade, Group Chief Operating Officer, Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) admitted that IT service levels for customers had been degraded with more service outages and all performance indicators pointing in the wrong direction. He said the current Lloyds IT infrastructure was like a house that hadn’t been looked after for many years after with bad plumbing, a leaky roof and doors that were falling of their hinges.
Ironically, in its latest presentation, Lloyds said it wanted to be a ‘digital and technology leader’.
How’s that possible when its own house is creaking at the seams and ready to collapse at any moment.
Mr van Kemenade said the big theme in Q3 would be to turn around the appalling service levels. In fact, service levels are so bad there’s been a clamp down on IT changes for the past few weeks. It’s been a labelled as a ‘Service Reset’. That’s the understatement of the year!
In a recent presentation he said:
“…we should acknowledge that over the past weeks and months, slowly but steadily, our service towards our customers has degraded. We have seen more outages and less service level performance and all indicators point in the wrong way”. [BTU bold]
Mr van Kemenade is ultimately responsible for delivering that service to customers and staff.
And then a member of staff asked a brilliant question:
“Ron, you had just mentioned that there has been a degradation in service performance recently. Do you take responsibility for this due to the huge amount of change or restructuring and reduction of staff in key departments?”
Mr van Kemenade accepted no responsibility but instead did what all politicians do: he blamed all his predecessors for, in this case, not investing in the business. Mr Charlie Nunn has been CEO of Lloyds since August 2021.
He said:
“Yeah, so what happens in the domain of tech operations and payments, I always take accountability, right? For the positives and for the areas where we don’t perform, that’s one. Secondly, we have done a full root cause analysis on every single incident. And there is no relationship whatsoever to the changes we’ve made to the organisation recently. It’s not because of the amount of change. There are loads of reasons. And the best analogy is probably, this is the result of probably 10 to15 years underinvestment in the currency of our stack, in deployment patterns and keeping them consistent, in continuously educating people who play an important role in the deployment and maintenance of our servers and services. And if you don’t maintain your home over the period of 10 to 15 years, sooner or later, the doors are going to creak, the roof will be leaky, and the plumbing will start showing signs of deterioration…”.
If it’s not because of the amount of change, why would you, effectively, put in place a change freeze? You wouldn’t.
In his response to the question, Mr van Kemenade is saying that it’s nothing to do with him or the changes he’s implemented. But he is the man in charge. We believe, as do many of his own staff, that the current service level problems are directly related to the organisational changes [Platform 2.0 and 3.0] he introduced. Service levels have deteriorated because of poor quality deployments. A lot of experienced staff have left Lloyds and deployments are now being done by hard pressed staff in the UK and inexperienced staff in India. Moreover, what’s also clear, unless you’ve got your head buried in the sand, is that the Lloyds IT infrastructure can’t take the amount of change that’s being demanded by senior executives. Something’s got to give. And, this time, it’s service levels for customers.
We’d like to hear from members in GCOO about what’s causing the problems and how they might be fixed.
Members with any questions on this Newsletter should contact the Union’s Advice Team on 01234 262868 (choose Option 1).
MEMBERS SHOULD PASS THIS NEWSLETTER ON TO THEIR COLLEAGUES SO THEY TOO CAN BENEFIT FROM THE ONLY INDEPENDENT TRADE UNION IN LLOYDS AND HALIFAX