Commonwealth Bank IT supremo Michael Harte is facing a computing challenge from an unexpected quarter - the bank's risk department.Speaking at an AIIA financial sector seminar on Friday, Andrew Matuszczak, senior executive manager for risk solutions at the CBA, outlined a couple of projects now underway at the bank where computer system development isn't being tackled by specialist IT staff, but by people in the bank's business units."We are trying to remove development, and have set up tools to allow us to define requirements without IT," said Matuszczak. He said that there were two projects now underway - one in risk management and one in financial risk.Matuszczak said that while he believed CBA chief information officer Michael Harte was an agile thinker, the traditional waterfall approach of painstakingly fleshing out systems' requirements and then developing a computer system to match was a very slow process that was out of step with the pace of development and reform that banks now needed to deal with.He said that given the pace of innovation generally in society, with the advent of devices such as smartphones and tablet computers able to change market requirements rapidly, and the rising tide of new regulations banks have to deal with, it was not sensible to wait for a clearly defined business requirement to emerge before developing a new application. "Developing for the business requirement will give you what you had yesterday on a new platform - that's not innovation."We have a huge demand to get things implemented without solid business requirements," said Matuszczak . He said that currently banks were presented with a new requirement by a regulator, which was then taken to IT, which implemented a waterfall process to get a compliant system developed.That he said was no longer fast enough."[Instead] we need to think of the tools like a Swiss Army knife" which was able to get the job done as and when it was needed, rather than wait for an entire code factory to grind into action."We have built a new platform based around the business which allows self-generated code to be developed by the user," he said. After that, it is run through a governance process and if it passes muster is then made available for use.  This approach bears many of the hallmarks of the so-called Agile approach to systems development that has been championed in Australia by Suncorp as an alternative to the more traditional - and slower - waterfall approach.