In the days when it was dominant enough to get away with it, IBM Corp. used to throw sand in the eyes of the media and its customers with some breathtaking declarations of strategy. My personal favorite was something called Systems Application Architecture, or SAA, which for a few years was taken seriously by people both inside and outside IBM.


In a nutshell, the SAA strategy was as follows: "IBM knows it makes several virtually incompatible families of computers running totally different operating systems, each with their own sets of applications. However this should not bother you, our customer, since SAA is a master plan which will enable you to hook them all together and use all of your IBM computers as if they were a single seamless whole."


SAA implied that behind the mass of apparently unconnected developments in different parts of the corporate empire, there was in fact a master plan that was so vast and so mind-blowing that no one could be told more about it.


After following the Russian Central Bank's plans to develop a nationwide payments system for more than three years now, I can only assume that it too is playing the master-plan game.


As anyone even accidentally connected with Russian banking knows, clearing funds between banks here can take a long time. The lack of an adequate central payments system is one of the major barriers to the development of the Russian banking system and acts as a brake on the development of the entire economy.


Back in 1991 the Central Bank began approaching the main Western hardware vendors to establish pilot payment-system projects in different regions of Russia.


The idea was to invite several vendors to install systems on the understanding that the one which proved best would roll out to cover the whole country. These sites now include Moscow, Irkutsk, St. Petersburg, Volgograd, Tula, Perm and Penza.


The Central Bank has never been short of a master plan. In 1991 it had planned a three-tier federation-wide system in which 80 regional clearing systems were connected to 43 interregional centers which were all connected to Moscow. The middle tier has since been scaled down to between eight and 12 interregional centers with some clearing operations delegated to the regions.


To the outside observer, the Central Bank is today no closer to a nationwide clearing system than it was in 1991. The only difference is that it has now invited virtually every major hardware supplier to set up one of these pilot sites, and has also started the testing of all the main database platforms.


None of the companies supplying the equipment has provided any clue on how all their pilot systems could be linked together someday in the future.


Right now nobody seems to know the answer to quite basic questions about this system. Is it designed for large payments or small payments? What will be its relationship be to the international interbank fund transfer system, SWIFT? Just when does the Central Bank plan to have a system in place? 1995? 1996? 2000?


Does in fact the Central Bank possess any road map to its future -- the master plan -- at all? Is it possible that no one really knows what to do after the Central Bank's specialists have finished playing around with the impressive selection of hardware now installed across the country?


In recognition of the importance of a central payments system, the World Bank has allocated up to $200 million in loans to the Central Bank to help it bring some order to the situation. However, after three years of negotiation, the two parties have not reached any agreement on how to proceed.


IBM Corp.'s SAA master plan never happened. The computer industry changed, IBM lost its dominant position and the question of SAA ceased to be of much interest. For Russia to modernize its economy, a working central payments system is essential. Ultimately customers had choices other than IBM, but there is only one Central Bank of Russia.


Robert Farish is the editor of Computer Business Russia


Fax: (+7 095) 198-6207, Internet e-mail: farish@glas.apc.org