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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.
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.
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.
"The food on their flights is terrible even by airline standards"
They are just trying to give an authentic British food experience!
Slightly reduced bonus? 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 who didn't properly train or leave adequate documentation of the intricacies of the system when they left 5 months ago. If anything, an extra large bonus should be coming for getting rid of that level of incompetence.
Thirty four characters live here.
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.
I still think it was BA who was bad here
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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.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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."