Bank of Queensland will go looking for a new technology platform in early 2014, following a review of its 10-year contract with Hewlett Packard.Speaking at FST Media's Future of Banking conference in Sydney yesterday, BoQ's chief information officer, Julie Bale, said that where the bank had originally outsourced 100 per cent of its information technology requirements to HP that had "now fractured down to 40 per cent".Bale said that as part of its technology review the bank planned to "tidy up its backyard", which was currently crowded with 84 separate technology vendors. The bank is also currently finalising its end-user technology strategy and plans to introduce more straight-through processing following a nine-month due diligence program.Bale said BoQ needed a complete technology overhaul, as it had "not had a lot of investment for the last eight years."Bale joined the bank in late 2012 from ING Direct. The bank's coffers are at least a little fuller than when she joined. BoQ announced last month that it had returned to profitability thanks to a reduction in bad debtsBale has also reworked the structure of the technology group, making it less hierarchical and flatter in order to encourage greater accountability.Speaking as a member of a panel discussing key IT priorities for financial sector organisations, Bale said that the greatest technology challenge facing the sector was banks' ability to respond to demands for new services - from both consumers and internal bank customers - noting that "current lifecycles are not going to cut it." Rajat Taneja, chief information officer for Zurich in Asia Pacific, reinforced Bale's call for much snappier development cycles in the sector, saying there was no longer a tolerance for major programs delivered once every 16 to 18 months.He said financial organisations needed to "think three years ahead but deliver every three weeks", delivering new features rather than entire new products.However, St George Bank's chief information officer, Dhiren Kulkarni, said there was a need to balance rapid roll out and consumer fatigue, saying: "We don't want to bombard people daily, weekly or monthly - so we are doing it quarterly", which, he said, was in line with release cycles at Google and Apple.