ASX CHESS – A Whale of a Problem

Last week, in a mass beaching, some 230 whales stranded themselves on the picturesque Ocean Beach, near Strahan in Tasmania. After frantic efforts by volunteers, some 30 whales were saved and towed back out to sea, with the hope that they would not turn around and come back to be with their pod and certain death.?The other 200 or so whales died or had to be euthanized.

Another Stranded Whale

Meanwhile, at the same time, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) was dealing with its own beached behemoth – the Chess Replacement program, which was stranded in mid-August after finding itself in trouble, before it had even got out of the harbour.

Unlike Tasmania, however, where ‘volunteers’ rush to help the dying whales, it was the massed ranks of yet another set of ?expensive consultants who were attempting a rescue while feeding off the ASX shareholders’ largess.

Why had this wallowing whale beached?

Like the stranded whales, we do not really know why the Chess Replacement program was going in the wrong direction and ran up the beach – ending up stuck on the sand!

The only clue was from?ASX management

“ASX and Digital Asset, our application software provider, have identified that more development is required than previously anticipated to meet ASX’s scalability and resilience requirements for the application. This is contributing to delays to the delivery of the remaining technical components of the application.”

Roughly translated – Chess Replacement is as slow as a wet weekend on Skegness Sands.

After putting their heads together, the ASX agreed with its regulators, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) and the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), that the very best thing to do was to ….. have yet another independent inquiry from yet another consultancy.

And so, for the past six weeks or so, a new set of consultants(Accenture) have been burning the midnight (whale) oil, and even more shareholders’ money, in working out to get the capricious colossus out to sea again.

The options for re-floating Chess Replacement, it turns out, are not too dissimilar to the problems faced by those trying to save the Tasmanian whales.

The first option is to pretend that there is, in fact, no problem and that if we wait around long enough there will be a huge tide that will pick up the whale ?and carry it out to sea where it will float away majestically for the next 30 years or so.

Unfortunately, the ASX Board and management have tried that very option in the past (a number of times) and no one has bought it, so time for another tack.

The next option is pretty final – Kill the Whale (sorry Chess).

But of course, none of the crew are going to go for that option straight away, as it?involves humiliation and egg all over collective faces.?This is despite the fact that the program has about the same chance of surviving as the lucky 30 whales in Tasmania (i.e., 30/230 or about 13%). And, of course, no consultancy worth its salt is going to recommend throwing themselves out of a job.

So, while coming around to the inevitable, ?it is worth one last desperate throw of the dice and to take the tried and tested?option – throw lots of (shareholders’) money at the problem!?Who cares if the ‘budget’ has already been blown by $200 million –Full Steam Ahead, ?Mr Scott!

But how do we throw away even more money? No worries, consultancies will work that out for you.

So, if Chess is really slow just how do we give it more oomph?

Easy, put it on the CLOUD!?

When Chess is up on the Cloud we can throw as much money as we like at it.

Now it turns out that one of the ASX’s major suppliers, VMWARE, are ‘experts’ on the Cloud and even, would you believe, have a version that runs, would you again believe, an ‘enterprise blockchain’.?And, by happenstance,?it turns out that Accenture, the last-minute consultancy, also sell Cloud and Blockchain services. A mere coincidence?

So, all that needs to be done is to take all the tons of slow code that has been written over the past few years, throw away the bits not needed, like the original blockchain, and ‘port’ it to the Cloud.?Yeah, that might take a few extra months/years to put in place but it will be worth it, honestly!

Will it actually work??

Maybe/maybe not but it does kick the problem down the road and at the very least, will give some more rats time to leave the stinking ship.

A Cloud, particularly a “private cloud”, will indeed allow much more computing power (which means money) to be thrown at the problem and if the core problem really is the sluggish (not so) ‘smart contracts’ written by the original program partner (Digital Asset) then it will help move the huge carcass – a bit.

But in order to move this near-cadaver back out to sea to continue its long and dangerous migration it will take more than a few buckets of water And all of the things that were not done before, such as engaging all interested parties in plans to prevent such a beaching (i.e., a ‘risk management plan’), will have to be put in place.

And while the dogged consultants attempt to heave the huge body onto a blanket to drag it back out to sea, people on the shore (from the regulators and the media) will cheer our brave saviors on – because no one likes a funeral.

Prediction: the solution proposed for re-floating Chess will be a blizzard of buzzwords! Heavy on hype, but light on detail. In other words, just like the first solution for Chess Replacement but with different words and many, many more dollars.