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.

Comments

Country of origin isn't the issue

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Country of origin isn't the issue

[Opportunist]

“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When
you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay
too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you
bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The
common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a
lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well
to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will
have enough to pay for something better.”

  John Ruskin

An open letter to BA upper management

[gestalt_n_pepper]

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!

Re:Capitalism is at fault

[prefec2]

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.

Re:Capitalism is at fault

[phantomfive]

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.