Global financial services firm Citigroup has announced a
continued
streamlining of its technology spending, in
association with restructuring which will see the loss of around
17,000 jobs worldwide.
Simplification and standardisation of the group’s IT systems
were critical to increasing efficiency and driving down costs as
well as decreasing time to market, the firm said.
It said it was planning to consolidate datacentres and limit the
number of software vendors to operate at scale.
It also plans to standardise how the company develops, deploys
and runs applications – a move which could bode ill for the
development team it inherited when the firm
bought online bank Egg earlier this year.
In 2004, Egg used
agile programming techniques to upgrade its
Money Manager product in three months.
Citigroup also said it planned to consolidate certain
back-office, middle-office and corporate functions at the business,
regional and headquarters levels to eliminate duplication of
effort. More than 9,500 jobs would be moved to lower-cost
locations, both domestically and internationally, with about
two-thirds going through attrition, it said.
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