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Ask Slashdot: How Transparent Should Companies Be When Operational Technology Failures Happen?
New submitter supernova87a writes: Last week, Southwest Airlines had an epic crash of IT systems across their entire business when "a router failure caused the airlines' systems to crash [...] and all backups failed, causing flight delays and cancellations nationwide and costing the company probably $10 million in lost bookings alone." Huge numbers of passengers, crew, and airplanes were stranded as not only reservations systems, but scheduling, dispatch, and other critical operational systems had to be rebooted over the course of 12 hours. Passenger delays, which directly attributable to this incident, continued to trickle down all the way from Wednesday to Sunday as the airline recovered. Aside from the technical issues of what happened, what should a public-facing company's obligation be to discuss what happened in full detail? Would publicly talking about the sequence of events before and after failure help restore faith in their operations? Perhaps not aiming for Google's level of admirable disclosure (as in this 18-minute cloud computing outage where a full post-mortem was given), should companies aim to discuss more openly what happened and how they recovered from system failures?
The companies understand one thing: profit.
That's not true. Companies and the people that run them understand more than just profit. I defy you to find a single person in a company who cannot comprehend something other than profit. To claim that profit is all they can understand is absurdly untrue. But there is a nugget of truth in what you say. What is true is that companies and some (not all) of those who run them have a strong tendency to focus on profits excessively, particularly short term profits. They do this to the detriment of all else including the long term health of the company sometimes. It's too glib to say that companies only understand profit but it is fair to say that companies tend to focus on it too hard at times and make bad decisions as a result.
A well managed company has to consider things like the health of their community, the well being of their suppliers, the trust of their customers, etc. All these things sooner or later will impact profits so if company focuses excessively on near term profits then in the long term they will likely be worse off and so will all those who depend on the company - customers, suppliers, community, shareholders and employees.
You haven't worked in enterprise IT for long, have you? An embarrassment like this will make them flog their existing staff harder, insist on more metrics to measure performance, more boxes on the audit form to tick, more mandatory unpaid overtime. But little chance they'll actually spend more money on the IT cost center.