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British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

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Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#231

Post by tudorconstantin »

raesene9 wrote: post #149
tudorconstantin wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in outsourcing for 9 years in Romanian companies as a software developer. I had the impression that the goal was to have the customer satisfied, not to fulfill a contract (as long as the customer was also reasonable, of course) and for pragmatic reasons: a happy customer pays you longer. My longest project was for 4 years, with the same customer. And my former employer keeps working on that project, 2 yea…

I wouldn't say that an outsourcing company wants to do a bad job, of course they don't, but things that are often invisible in the product (like security or reliability) will likely get less focus in a cost sensitive environment. For example, completing a full security development lifecycle can add 10%+ to the costs of the final product. that's not a cost that a company will incur unless they have to. In a bid for wo…

Back in the 2012 I asked one of the department managers: are the customers willing to pay for automated QA tests? and he said "they usually do, because I give them the price per project and tell them 'in this price X it's included automated testing for the functionality. We can lower the price if you don't want the automated test suite".

I liked the approach and I think the same could go with security. Include an external security audit in the initial project price.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#232

Post by CamTin »

gonzo wrote: post #137
mtkd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the middle of some major rail cancellations a couple of months back over 2 days - on the 3rd day many of the assets were out of place around the country - they were clearly trying to solve it manually and the impact escalated over the day even though most of the original problems had cleared it's got to be a great problem to work on - and must be pretty rewarding to watch when you get it right

Remember on 9/11/2001 when the US FAA declared a nation-wide ground stop, and rerouted all inbound international flights to other countries (e.g. Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellow_Ribbon )?

Do you have some airline/IT ops stories about that day and the aftermath? If so, I (and I'm sure others) would be delighted to hear about them.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#233

Post by davidf18 »

davidf18 wrote: post #196
taway_1212 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty funny how in this thread IBM is conflated with decent quality IT outsourcing and Poland with poor quality, while IBM's outsourcing is done out of Poland (among other countries). https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/32469.wss

IBM has the resources and infrastructure others firms don't have. It can afford to pay higher rates for the top IT people and it has the software and management and the backup in the US to ensure that projects are performed properly. But as a rule, Poland, India, ...other cheaper locales don't offer the quality of the US, Israel, ....look to the places where the world's top software/computer chip design/hardware is b…

If you're going to down vote, please state the reason. The truth is that tiny Israel has more high tech software/hardware than any other nation except the US. There is definitely a difference in software quality.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#234

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

justinclift wrote: post #219
ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a distinction between spam email and a personalized targeted sales email. Mine was most definitely not spam.

Ahhh. That's a misconception on your part. There is literally no difference between any kind of sales email, and spam. All sales email to people that haven't opted-in previously, is spam. 100% of it. Thankfully, some countries have even introduced laws against it. That's the reason for the FOAD response.

This may be your opinion but this is not a fact.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#235

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

yourapostasy wrote: post #214
nasalgoat wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I receive about 10-20 unsolicited sales emails a day that are "personalized", which I promptly delete. If I am looking for a product, I will look for it. As far as I'm concerned, your emails are spam.

> I am looking for a product, I will look for it. Note that this attitude is what pushes some sales teams away from reaching out to line management, and towards C-level-targeted sales. If you hate "golf-cart sales" outcomes where a C-level forces a solution down your throat, then learning how to communicate with sales people will richly pay off. It is part of managing upwards, by short-circuiting sales warm approache…

Great observation.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#236

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

justinclift wrote: post #221
yourapostasy wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am looking for a product, I will look for it. Note that this attitude is what pushes some sales teams away from reaching out to line management, and towards C-level-targeted sales. If you hate "golf-cart sales" outcomes where a C-level forces a solution down your throat, then learning how to communicate with sales people will richly pay off. It is part of managing upwards, by short-circuiting sales warm approache…

In an ideal world, spammers wouldn't exist. Or at least C-level people who respond non-negatively, thus encouraging them to keep on doing it. :( If people wonder why spam is a problem, it's pretty much because enough idiots respond to keep it worthwhile.

You're conflating real sales emails and spam again and really seem to hate sales people. How are the people who respond idiots for actually being happy to hear about a product or service that solves their problem and signing up.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#237

Post by hinkley »

devonkim wrote: post #212
StavrosK wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that not only is it good to not assign blame in postmortems, but it's also accurate: The culprit usually is the checks and balances, as mistakes will happen, and the goal should be to have failsafes and detection. I'm reminded of airplane accidents: Whenever you hear of an airplane accident, it's always some amazingly crazy series of things going exactly wrong to get the plane to crash. We have a tendency…

One other important point is that the very term "root cause" is extremely harmful in that it presumes a primary failure and already seeds the idea of one bad actor and, by proxy, blame. Systems today are too complex to blame upon one or two things - we operate in a very complicated, "complected" world both in our software and in many organizations. While there are always technical causes for larger technical failures…

I don't recall ever having a manager use the term root cause analysis in the way you are implying. Usually we are looking for the cheapest or most effective process change that will prevent that class of problem happening again.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#238

Post by hinkley »

mancerayder wrote: post #63

In the tech-related (but now fully mainstream, unlike a few years ago) news these days, there are a number of recurring themes. 1. Massive security breaches affecting major corporations, governments, and so on. 2. Massive IT outages, affecting corporations, governments and so forth. It doesn't take a lot of incidents to mark them as 'massive' since things are strongly centralized in this world. Meanwhile, in the last…

Don't manufacturers face the same sorts of issues with supply chains? I mean, if there's a train wreck or an ice storm, the people who needed those deliveries are pretty much screwed.

I think we like to pretend that this is a problem unique to informatics.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#239

Post by hinkley »

madeofpalk wrote: post #210
mancerayder wrote: post #63

In the tech-related (but now fully mainstream, unlike a few years ago) news these days, there are a number of recurring themes. 1. Massive security breaches affecting major corporations, governments, and so on. 2. Massive IT outages, affecting corporations, governments and so forth. It doesn't take a lot of incidents to mark them as 'massive' since things are strongly centralized in this world. Meanwhile, in the last…

> never have I seen such a strong push towards offshoring As I've been working in the airline IT industry, I've observed that the reality is more nuanced. Core booking and ticketing systems are 'outsourced' to solutions from Amadeus and Sabre. This makes sense not only for many strategic reasons (easier to have airline alliances when the airlines are all on the one system), but also because airlines are in the busine…

Airlines are logistics companies that fly planes. They have to have a functioning plane at the right location - and only the right location - at the right time, or they bleed money.

It baffles me that they ever thought outsourcing part of that logistics was a good idea. But then I've worked at tech companies that tried to outsource their IT departments too.

Re: British Airways: All flights cancelled amid IT crash

#240

Post by madeofpalk »

hinkley wrote: post #239
madeofpalk wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> never have I seen such a strong push towards offshoring As I've been working in the airline IT industry, I've observed that the reality is more nuanced. Core booking and ticketing systems are 'outsourced' to solutions from Amadeus and Sabre. This makes sense not only for many strategic reasons (easier to have airline alliances when the airlines are all on the one system), but also because airlines are in the busine…

Airlines are logistics companies that fly planes. They have to have a functioning plane at the right location - and only the right location - at the right time, or they bleed money. It baffles me that they ever thought outsourcing part of that logistics was a good idea. But then I've worked at tech companies that tried to outsource their IT departments too.

Retailers are in the business of selling things, yet 'outsource' their Point of Sales systems. This is just the same thing.
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