Whether National Australia Bank's management really mean it, is doubtful, but one morsel of aspiration (you wouldn't call it guidance) offered up yesterday by management in the investor briefing on the 2009 full year profit was the suggestion that the bank was "work[ing] to bring our ROE from where it is now back towards the norms that the industry enjoyed prior to the crisis."That means aiming to restore the return on equity (based on the "cash" profit preferred by banks) from the current level of 10.9 per cent to somewhere around 20 per cent or better. (Not that NAB reported profits close to "industry norms" much over recent years as it dealt with a larger remedial task than its peers.)A few other crumbs of guidance were on offer from NAB (through its managing director, Cameron Clyne) at the briefing. A couple were on costs, where NAB plans "one more year of accelerated cost take-out … and then we will begin to pull that to a close."Investment budgets will be maintained, he said, consistent with the 2009 spend of a little more than $400 million.Of this the "infrastructure cash spend" during the period was $160 million."We're still looking to accommodate our bank re-platforming within our current spend rate," Clyne said, "so we're not expecting a significant jump up in the level of investments, nor are we expecting it to fall.""Re-platforming" must be internal talk for the task of shifting the bank's core information processing systems from legacy systems onto a flashier system sourced from Oracle.External indicators of this huge piece of work in progress are few, though NAB reiterated yesterday that so far the only products operating on the Oracle platform were those for the niche UBank brand introduced late last year. And even then UBank's products crossed to the new platform only in recent months.