Commonwealth Bank has reduced the number of major computer crashes it endures from 10 in 2011 to just seven during the last financial year. Five years ago, the bank and its customers were suffering the effects of 70 Severity 1 crashes (classed as a computer failure for which there is no obvious workaround) a year.While the bank's track record has improved, it's still not faultless. Last month the bank suffered a significant internal crash. Ian Narev, CBA's CEO, said yesterday that that this was the result of a "routine software upgrade". He said the problem was quickly identified, and, although it required a manual fix, customer disruption had been minimal. The bank was still working through the implications of the crash, he said.Last year, CBA invested a further A$368 million in its core computer system revamp, though day-to-day technology expenses are starting to fall. The bank said that information technology services' expenses decreased by three per cent to $1.16 billion during the last financial year. The figures also show that the bank's desktop computing costs fell to $105 million during the last 12 months - $7 million less than the bank spent on postage for the year. The reduced IT spending has not, however, impacted on its ability to innovate. Five years ago it was managing to introduce 1200 system changes each month - over the last year that increased to 3000 changes per month, signalling a much more agile and responsive IT workforce now benefitting from access to the $1.1 billion core systems platform, which is almost complete and which has stripped the bank of most of its legacy applications.The bank also plans to move to Google enterprise applications (replacing Microsoft apps), the Financial Review reported.