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British Airways CEO Won't Resign, Says Outsourcing Not To Blame For IT Failure (bbc.com)
British Airways CEO Alex Cruz insisted he would not resign on Monday as he sought to draw a line under three days of chaos at the UK flag carrier after IT problems left tens of thousands of passenger stranded. In an interview -- the first since a global computer outage all but shut the airline down -- Cruz said he doesn't think "it would make much of use for me to resign." Separately, he also denied an outsourcing deal was to blame for the IT problems that hit on Saturday, causing the airline to cancel almost all its services over the weekend. From a report: A leaked staff email revealed Mr Cruz had told staff not to comment on the system failure. When asked about the email he told the BBC the tone was clear: "Stop moaning and come and help us." The airline is now close to full operational capacity after the problems resulted in mass flight cancellations at Heathrow and Gatwick over the bank holiday weekend. Questions remain about how a power problem could have had such impact, said the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones. One theory was that returning systems were unusable as the data had become unsynchronised. [...] Cruz told the BBC a power surge, had "only lasted a few minutes," but the back-up system had not worked properly. He said the IT failure was not due to technical staff being outsourced from the UK to India.
He confirmed the issue was not his fault, and not that of the new guys maintaining the system... It was obviously an issue of the old people
And who decided to replace "the old people" with an outsourcing firm featuring inadequately-trained personnel?
He's the CEO. The buck stops on his desk, no matter what.
Early estimates peg this at a fraction of a percent of yearly net profit
The numbers I've seen quoted are closer to 10% of their annual profit.
That's not a trivial sum.
Businesses can and do have contingency plans to work without computers. It's absolutely possible with a little foresight and planning. I used to work in an industrial complex which was highly automated. But for every bit of process, there was an accompanying card with all the details filled out in ink. The card would be physically passed around the plant to hand over responsibility and document every part of the process. For each place the card passed through, local log books would record every addition to the card, and they details would also be entered into the computer. You might think this redundant, but it provided three important things: (1) audit - we could check that the computer details matched the card and that the local logs matched the card and the computer, to trace any discrepancies in the case of entry errors (2) physical accountability and traceability and (3) the ability to run the entire plant without any network connectivity; the details of the processes could be entered retrospectively. An airline can certainly mitigate a lot of what went wrong. Physically print out the passenger lists to permit check in and boarding. Most people book the flights well in advance; you can cope with most passengers with ease, even moving them between flights, if you have a backup paper system in place. Physically cross them off with the date and time you did it, then add them to a list that the gate staff can use. Card payment isn't an issue--most people already paid in advance; for those that didn't you can probably take the payment, physically document it and enter it into the system at a later time. It's absolutely doable, and any company who cares about surviving should have a system in place. The plant I worked at did this for legal and financial reasons. If a computer outage costs millions of pounds an hour, then you make sure it's covered. BA's outage likely cost much more than that.