Maxwell stands by her decision to outsource to IBM at the time but is adamant we will see a lot less of them.

Would she do it again? Well that depends on the company and the situation, as "I never say never in my life".

"I would certainly look carefully at deal with one vendor," she said. "For the decision made at the time it was probably the right vendor to chose and we did a reasonable contractual arrangement with them."

Maxwell may have no regrets, but she is also cognizant of the "vibrant" local tier-2 outsourcing industry that has flourished over the past decade.

"A good healthy competitive environment has come up and Australian businesses don't only want to deal with a tier-1," she said.

As for any dissatisfaction experienced by Westpac and its staff as a result of the contract, Maxwell said often there is a lot of selective memory loss when going to an outsourcer as the same complaints are made against internal IT.

"When you have internal people who are not necessarily concerned with commercial contracts you can do heroic things," she said. "People work all night to get something done and you don't have that flexibility when you are an outsourcing organization. You do have to be more consistent with your planning."

"You should never outsource a problem but often you outsource something that is working less optimally than it should and the outsourcer then has the problem."

Interestingly, Maxwell's offsider during the Westpac days was Jerry Gross, who when appointed executive vice president and CIO of Washington Mutual in June 2001 walked into a 10-year, $US533 million outsourcing deal with IBM Global Services dating back to 1996.

Gross, who had just completed he tenure as Westpac's group executive of technology, operations, and e-commerce where he inked the bank's mega outsourcing deal with IBM, told CIO magazine he would never again sign a long-term outsourcing contract.

"It's too difficult to maintain accountability and maintain passion," Gross said.

"I went through a fairly exhaustive process to find out what people's perceptions were of the services we were providing to them as customers, both internal and external," Gross said.

He found that IT's service levels were less than satisfying. For instance, it took up to a month to deploy a new computer for an employee. Another red flag: calls to the help desk weren't getting answered in acceptable time. As a result, IT was getting a bad name.