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

Re:Capitalism is at fault

[ColdWetDog]

Um, no. This is an interesting fallacy that I see all of the time - 'go back to paper'. Let's face it - the ONLY way you can run a modern airline, hospital, utility or whatnot is with a computerized system. When it goes tits up, you go tits up until you can get backups on line. Just finding the requisite paper products (and manual credit card imprinters - I'm going to bet that half the BA employees have never even seen one) could take days.

Can you imagine trying to hire and train 5000 temps to fill out complicated forms while the rest of the staff has complete meltdowns?

Fat chance.

Now, BA should have been able to handle anything short of force majour with backups and redundant systems. The power supply theory is laughable. But paper isn't going to solve the problems on any sort of reasonable time scale.

Re:Capitalism is at fault

[aix tom]

Businesses can and do have contingency plans to work without computers. It's absolutely possible with a little foresight and planning.

Foresight, planning *and* training. I work for a Retailer with about 20 branches. What we do, we disconnect every branch from central IT once a year for a day (granted, on one of the slower days), so that they know how to handle the backup procedures.

Re:What happened to identifying the source of erro

[hey!]

Oh, there's incompetence here, but it's not the India that's the problem.

In my experience India has an incredible number of talented, capable people, but like talented capable people everywhere they cost more than ignoramuses. But even a country of a billion people has a finite pool of top-notch talent. On the other hand India does have an almost limitless supply of subpar talent, and Indian businessmen are enterprising to a fault. If a Western CEO jis willing to shell out good money for sub-par people, there's a killing to be made.

So who, exactly, is the fool in this scenario?

The British Airways debacle was an instance of a catastrophic failure being brought on by an unusually but statistically predictable event. Therefore, the new vendor the CEO brought in wasn't up to the job he hired them for. That's the CEO's fault, end of story.

The real problem is that people who are good at IT operations make their job look too easy. A fool looking at the lack of drama in a well-run data center is apt to mistake that for the job being easy.