New here? Start at Part 1: https://reconstruction.dunin7.com/p/part-1-of-13-0214
Previously: First Harbor Bank and Ironline Industrial each kept a record of the night, and the two records contradict each other on every transfer. First Harbor Bank hired Joan, an investigator. She called both records diaries, not evidence.
Monday. Joan’s first question is the oldest one in banking: what was NIGHTSHIFT allowed to do?
Ben has the answer ready. A PDF, signed in April by the CFO, by Ben, and by the vendor. The agent’s limits. Page three: no more than $25 million a night to any one client.
Joan reads it. Then: “What limit was NIGHTSHIFT actually running that night?”
Silence. Then Omar, the engineer who looks after NIGHTSHIFT, opens a laptop and finds the configuration file.
limit_per_client: 400000000
Four hundred million. Last changed Thursday, 22:10. The file keeps the current value. It does not keep the previous one, or who changed it, or why.
“Could have been a change request,” says Omar. “Could have been the vendor’s Wednesday patch resetting it. Could have been me.”
“Was it you?”
“I don’t think so.”
Joan writes on the whiteboard: AUTHORITY AT 02:14 — UNKNOWN.
“We have the signed limits,” says Ben.
“You have what you intended in April,” says Joan. “I need what was true at two in the morning on Friday. Those are two different documents.”
“And only one of them exists.”
Next Monday, Part 4: Joan asks the vendor to run NIGHTSHIFT again, with Thursday’s inputs, and watch what it does. They can’t.
This week: Wednesday, the lesson from this part. Friday, a question to ask at your own company. Next Monday, Part 4.
First Harbor Bank, Ironline Industrial, NIGHTSHIFT, DAYBOOK, Ruth, Ben, Omar and Joan are fiction. The problem is not.
I build tools for this problem through my company, DUNIN7.