The broken ATM

I was visiting a bank a few years ago and as I stood in the office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), I was looking from his office window at a larger room next to his office. I could see people sitting behind control desks and observing a very large screen in front of them like a movie; see in Figure 4.8.

I asked the CIO what this room was and what these people were doing there. He told me this room was the management center of all the ATMs in the country. Problems with these machines can be very different, as ATMs have several components, such as paper, cash, sensors, and a camera, that can go wrong. The CIO told me that there is a service level agreement with all the banks in the country to monitor, fix problems, and keep thousands of these machines up and running 24/7 with minimum downtime.

Figure 4.8: The "cinema" used to monitor the ATM operations across a country

I asked whether he knew that you can bring a lot of efficiency and automation to...