31–40 of 255 posts
Yes it would probably take 5+ years to develop and roll out, but they can't keep maintaining these 50 year old mainframes that cost them tens of millions a year in downtime.
The main KPI for BA's IT function is the percentage of jobs they have moved "nearshore" (to Krakow). Not that I think this is the Krakow workers' fault, mind you; rather this (and the string of similar IT incidents recently at BA) seems to fit the pattern of upper management focusing on driving down costs to the exclusion of everything else.
Krakow is a big tech center, is in the EU, and it's not obvious why moving jobs there would have anything to do with a drop in quality.
One customer was told that the root cause was a "lightning strike on a datacentre", although it sounds pretty unlikely (there are storms today in the UK but surely there'd be a DR plan?)
The main KPI for BA's IT function is the percentage of jobs they have moved "nearshore" (to Krakow). Not that I think this is the Krakow workers' fault, mind you; rather this (and the string of similar IT incidents recently at BA) seems to fit the pattern of upper management focusing on driving down costs to the exclusion of everything else.
One customer was told that the root cause was a "lightning strike on a datacentre", although it sounds pretty unlikely (there are storms today in the UK but surely there'd be a DR plan?)
Surely they have multiple datacentres as redundancy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely they have multiple datacentres as redundancy.
The two data centres are geographically very close to each other, straddling the runway.
The fix is more expensive than any major airline has been willing to spend thus far.
One customer was told that the root cause was a "lightning strike on a datacentre", although it sounds pretty unlikely (there are storms today in the UK but surely there'd be a DR plan?)
They do have DR plans, but the reality is that whole thing is a huge distributed system with parts from different vendors, in different locations, etc, with decades of legacy. A power outage the reboots a whole datacenter would screw any major airline for at least half a day. Thus far, nobody has found the economics of a modern, truly HA setup worth the cost. Outsiders greatly underestimate the complexity too. Think…
Most of the loss here is not from lost bookings; a lot of people who prefer BA will probably just wait and book once the systems are restored.
It's going to be from secondary losses -- lawsuits, ding to the reputation and so on.
These numbers are estimatable, even for low-margin businesses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Krakow is a big tech center, is in the EU, and it's not obvious why moving jobs there would have anything to do with a drop in quality.
It's not about Krakow per se. But when a company works towards specific targets like "90/10 supplier offshore ratio", rather than metrics based on quality or efficiency, I don't think quality comes first.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do have DR plans, but the reality is that whole thing is a huge distributed system with parts from different vendors, in different locations, etc, with decades of legacy. A power outage the reboots a whole datacenter would screw any major airline for at least half a day. Thus far, nobody has found the economics of a modern, truly HA setup worth the cost. Outsiders greatly underestimate the complexity too. Think…
> If it were a high margin business, perhaps things would be different. It's not. Most of the loss here is not from lost bookings; a lot of people who prefer BA will probably just wait and book once the systems are restored. It's going to be from secondary losses -- lawsuits, ding to the reputation and so on. These numbers are estimatable, even for low-margin businesses.
To give you some idea, ITA Software was bought by Google for $700 million. They were some of the best and brightest minds in this space, on par with any Silicon Valley darling. They successfully wrote a modern replacement for one popular airline function...shopping. They failed, however, at delivering a modern reservation system, despite tons of money and talent invested.
Airlines should band together and form working group to redevelop the old system in modern open source tech. Yes it would probably take 5+ years to develop and roll out, but they can't keep maintaining these 50 year old mainframes that cost them tens of millions a year in downtime.