Today, in Ohrid, the 4th International IT Forum hosted by the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia attended by thirty four IT specialists from fifteen central banks was wrapped up. In the past three days, the Forum participants shared their knowledge and experiences on various aspects of the development and maintenance of applications and IT services through presentations and open debate. Among other things, attention was paid not only to the best practices in the process of development and standardization of software solutions used in central banks, but also to the key factors for ensuring high quality of management of their life span and their maintenance. Some of the discussions put an emphasis on payment processing systems, applications development planning process and project prioritization, managing applications access rights, storing data in central banking institutions and their management, introduction of large database management software and IT-platform for business data analysis.
In order to compare national practices, representatives of all central banks that took part in the Forum had their own presentations showing their experiences and further plans for improving the application development process, with particular emphasis on the agile methodology for applications development using Scrum. Each presentation was followed by a fruitful and thorough discussion of the IT specialists where the participants not only compared the presentations and their own experiences, but also initiated suggestions for possible solutions that will contribute to further improvement of the development and maintenance of applications and IT services in the central banks in general.
The NBRM representatives presented the process of application development projects planning and managing in our central bank. In the following discussion, it was noted, inter alia, that the NBRM has a highly developed application planning and developing process and its shared experiences can be used by other central banks.
Within the forum discussions, the participants acquired, analytically and comparatively, experiences in the development and maintenance of outsourced v.s. in-house developed applications and IT services. It was noted that the decision on whether the applications should be outsourced or in-house developed depends primarily on the market in the domicile country of the central bank, and for countries without broad market such as Macedonia, there are a number of factors that indicate preference of in-house developed applications and IT services (produced, developed and maintained by central bank’s IT teams). Several speakers have suggested that application development projects largely depend on people and their motivation, which further urges central banks to invest not only in their IT infrastructure, but also to strengthen the staff capacity in this area. In this context, the discussions supported the NBRM efforts made through this IT forum, which is unique in this part of Europe, to contribute to raising the level of knowledge among IT specialists in the central banks.
At the Forum wrap-up, all participants shared the view that it has achieved its goal, i.e. that shared experiences, opinions and conclusions on a number of issues would contribute to improving the development and maintenance of applications and IT services in the central banks whose representatives participated in the three-day discussions, and at the same time will establish future communication for new open issues in this area.