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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.
I remember when people would say that "X happened in Y with outcome Z", but here we don't get to know anything of what went wrong?
Not telling me in detail means I am highly unlikely to fly with them as they are seen as untrustworthy with something to hide.
Having a foreign IT staff isn't the issue, having an incompetent IT staff that is not able to manage the system and deal with issues like this is. If you are firing people who are able to do this and bringing in people who are barely able to hold stuff together because it lowers the salaries you pay then it is your own fault.
Be careful. You might get what you wish for. With all the scary anti-privacy laws, the UK is definitely heading in the "right" direction.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Dear British Airways Upper Management,
This is your fault. To avoid another incident, you will bring in the operations IT managers, who are quite frankly, much smarter than you. Then sit down and shut the fuck up and listen to the solutions that these managers already know about, and which will easily fix the problem.
It would be best if all fools, MBAs, accountants and other technical illiterates were excluded from that meeting. A lawyer or too, on the other hand, may be quite helpful.
Hint. The solutions cost money. Guess why they were never implemented. Bonus question! Guess how expensive an unplanned failure is going to be.
Cheers!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If you use the "A is bad, hence B must be good" fallacy to make your point for A, you look about as stupid as someone who tries to use it as a point for B.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, first, Something Bad happened. Then, everybody tried to figure out What Went Wrong, but nobody could, because anybody who could find their ass with both hands had been laid off and their jobs outsourced to a faraway land where everything has to be microscopically explained, perhaps starting with "Well, hydrogen is one proton and one electron" and build from there. Then, The Suits started screaming for blood, but nobody they were screaming at was even competent enough to come up with a cogent response beyond "We're looking into it". Then, the Uber-PHB said "It's not because we shipped all our jobs to the lowest bidder, and It's Not My Fault".
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" -- or a combination of stupidity and greed.
Cruz thinks he can get people to pay BA prices while slashing costs back beyond budget airline levels. He had form on this with Iberia. Meals cut, added extras cut on long haul flights, crew on zero hour contracts who aren't being paid with cancelled flights and all the IT staff within Britain being fired. No staff give a shit, and why should they?
Fuck you Alex. I hope this kills BA off.
Please do the needful and let me put my point.
Time to resign.
Oh, and insource. Your data is your most precious resource.
Both do not have a communist economy. However, Venezuela is struggling today under a leader who has problems with democracy and North Korea is owned by Kim Jon Un and his useless clan. Communism is an economic model where in essence everything is owned by everyone, money does not exist and people are sharing things. While this concept is totally utopian it has also nothing to do with any country which claimed to be communist. However, countries like the the German Democratic Republic or the Democratic Republic of Kongo were/are both named democratic, but they were both dictatorships.
Also "communism now" was mentioned as a joke.
The *failure* wasnt a fault of the outsourcing - the problematic *recovery* almost certainly is a fault of the outsourcing. His statement doesnt cover both of those...
Power failures happen. Hacks happen. It is the way you handle them that matters. BA's behavior was horrible. They should have had a fall-back paper based system. It would have been slow, error prone, and required them to rush-hire a lot of temps, but they could have muddled through without stranding tens of thousands of people. Also, it would have saved them money. The cost of the paper-pushing temps would have been far less than the cost of all the refunds for cancelled flights.
To blame Venezuela's problems on oil is to ignore the incredible mismanagement going on in the country. Price controls as a method of controlling the economy were discredited decades ago, and cause shortages. That is one reason Venezuela is having trouble. Another is because they close down any business that is doing well.....for example, if a grocery store is full of food, they close it down because obviously the store was hoarding food, keeping it from the people. Another reason is because they nationalized the oil, and they didn't really know how to run oil wells, so their production dropped. And yes, the price of oil dropped, which has hurt them (but it's hurt Norway and Russia too, and neither one is having the troubles of Venezuela). You can also add corruption: the daughter of Hugo Chavez is the richest person in Venezuela.
Venezuela's problem have nothing to do with socialism: it's poor mismanagement in so many areas of government.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Venezuela is struggling today because its economy is based on oil, and oil prices are low.
Absolute rubbish. Venezuela was in trouble at $100/bbl. Has been in trouble since Chavez, but Chavez was better at keeping his house in order. I'm sure Maduro would like to blame oil prices but the real problem is his corrupt out of control government. But I'm sure he and his buddies eat very well.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.