BA systems down globally
Discussion
Vaud said:
Munter said:
Sounds like this might be a press release in a similar concept to a Ferrari F1 car having an electrical problem. Because a piston broke free and cut through the wiring loom.
I thought that was a Renault turbo?Munter said:
Vaud said:
Munter said:
Sounds like this might be a press release in a similar concept to a Ferrari F1 car having an electrical problem. Because a piston broke free and cut through the wiring loom.
I thought that was a Renault turbo?
babatunde said:
couple of things,
I wrote my Masters Thesis (1997) on how outsourcing a company's core competency is a shortcut to failure and how for many companies IT is their core competency. Outsource your cleaners if you must but outsourcing IT in a logistics company is as stupid as outsourcing R&D
Spent many a year designing, building and working in Server rooms and NO I repeat NO proper server room has a single UPS.
When building Racks the redundant power supplies on each individual server will be plugged into a different power source, which are attached to separate UPS's, anything less than this is unacceptable. Redundency is designed into Servers, and the whole Server Room environment is designed around redundancy
SO either it was true amateur hour or they are lying.
Hi there, I wrote my Masters Thesis (1997) on how outsourcing a company's core competency is a shortcut to failure and how for many companies IT is their core competency. Outsource your cleaners if you must but outsourcing IT in a logistics company is as stupid as outsourcing R&D
Spent many a year designing, building and working in Server rooms and NO I repeat NO proper server room has a single UPS.
When building Racks the redundant power supplies on each individual server will be plugged into a different power source, which are attached to separate UPS's, anything less than this is unacceptable. Redundency is designed into Servers, and the whole Server Room environment is designed around redundancy
SO either it was true amateur hour or they are lying.
Sorry, but I think this is wrong.
Many companies, unless they are actually, you know, technology companies, do not have core competency as being 'IT'.
If you are Merck, your raison d'aitre is pharmaceuticals; you make drugs. If you are Halliburton you specialise in doing what it takes to support energy companies in the field. If you're Rio Tinto, you scour the globe for its resources and then you dig it out.
Of course all of these companies have an army of technologists that may range from those who keep the infrastructure ticking over to those up the value stack who develop and define the business focused systems that either revenue generate, service sustain, fashion insight and decisioning etc. and yes that technology is the lifeblood of the firm. Of course.
But it's not their core competency.
Why not? Because none of these firms, let alone a BA (which is merely a transport company for pet animals, freight and unhappy human beings), can genuinely state that they are so competent at technology and it's their core skill and it gives them a dominant and impregnable edge in their marketplace. I doubt a single member of the ticket buying public looks across all the offers on lastminute.com and differentiates whether an IAG group company, or Continental, or Emirates, or Michael O'Leary or Air Canada....is the right partner to fly with because their tech has made them such a compelling flying offering.
Sure when it goes wrong - if a patching routine has been poorly handled, if there has been vast incompetence demonstrated at any point from between C-suite to the guy who just sticks it in the hole in the data centre or if indeed this is just about some daisy chained mini APCs that were in the wrong place (duh!) - then yeah it cripples the firm. But it just then reinforces that 'IT' is not BA's core competency. It's merely something that sustains it.
I recently listened to a bulge bracket CEO the other day talk about how he reckoned his firm was now perceived as actually "...a technology company with a balance sheet attached." How wrong is that? Just because a bank for instance may have tens of thousands of "techies" with annual change spend in the billions doesn't give them core competency in it. Google has something like 65,000 staff. And save for a few working in the support, back office functions (HR, Treasury etc) the majority of people there are dedicated to its product sets. Most Wall St and euro systemic banks have headcount much, much higher for starters. Google has market cap multiples of any Bank, and if that door ever opened has more than enough cash to buy a few outright. Technology, now that's a core competency to a Google. Or a Salesforce. Or a Juniper.
But not a Bank, and not a transport company. Because they don't do it well enough. And they certainly don't make their bread and butter from it....
And why do we hear a lot of this glossy corporate voodoo espoused all the time? Because at most of the top FTSE, DAX, DOW listed firms, there's a McKinsey engagement with the C-suite and the latest DVD is played and the heads nod in wonderment. And on the technology front, everyone talks the same corporate robo-speak. About 4-5 years ago, every large firm and his donkey was talking about the 'rise of the CDO' and how 'our new data strategy is going to evolve, enhance and grow our firm'. Data scientists were going to 'help our firm through magic manipulation of all that customer, client and corporate data and lead us to breakout economics!' A few years later these firms have that much vaunted 'BigData' team - marketing con - which in reality is just a bunch of ex team leaders of the old in-house Oracle or MSSQL gang who used to be based in the lower floors of HQ wrestling with putting in a large Hadoop cluster. And messing it up. Data science my arse.
Now every middling to senior exec is busy rebranding him or herself as a 'transformational leader' and bandying around BS bingo, talking of "disruption", "machine learning", "digital first", blah blah blah, and everyone, and I mean everyone, has to have A. Big. Innovation. Strategy.
And at the nexus of all this transmission are the McKinseys of this world, playing a new DVD, with nodding C-suiters lapping up what everyone else is, and not realising they aren't doing anything differential.
This thread has some really interesting posts in it, and has been on the whole a good read - not sure if I agree with the bulk of it, but if I may be allowed to continue there are some others things I wanted to add into the mix/respond to....
1) BA, or more succinctly IAG, looks to be a classic example of a failing organisation. Alex Cruz in one way is right - customers in the airline game generally chase price. But on everything else he's then, in my mind, wrong. If you want to run an airline in 2017, and offer the best fares and most bums per Dreamliner, and maximise your routes, fine. It's a competitive game out there, dontcha know. Who does that best? The low cost American carriers, Ryanair etc. But BA with an inherently higher cost base is dragging itself to the floor trying to compete with that. Me spending £10 on a crap M&S sandwich so I can fly from Gatwick to Spain with BA doesn't make sense. If you're going to treat me to poor pitch, no free food, and lousy cabin service, then I might as well pay less. easyJet will take me to the same place. BA lose.
So, they should focus on where they can win. Be that flag carrier. Be that premium brand you used to be. If people aren't using your Club Europe product enough, it's because people think it's crap. Many people will pay their hundreds to fly to a 4hr destination if they get a nice experience. But all BA have done is gradually butcher their premier services to the point that people don't see any value at all. BA just aren't listening to what customers really want, and what they expect of BA. Not any other airline, but of BA. If you have money and are so inclined a petrolhead will always desire and find the money for Aston Martin over a Ford, if they were the two choices. Cost isn't the factor, perceived value is. But by variety of that measure, if M&S starting having two fairly similar looking Ham, Cheese & Pickle sandwiches in their range, next to each other, one with normal branding at £2.50 and the other with 'premium' written all over it sold for £7.50, that rich petrolhead would probably have a giggle and say, "£7.50, for that? You're having a laugh!"
BA should stop thinking their competition is with the low costs, and build their proposition around what people want of a luxury airline. Size accordingly, then win. And if they can't see straight dealing with their frontline business strategy - cos it's all over the place at the moment - then you can only shudder to think what short termist, visionless decisions they may be making for all the things you don't see, like technology, or staff, or maintenance...
2) outsourcing can work. Does it fail often? Of course. But if you've ever been cradle to grave on a deal that puts a significant part of an estate, could be anything, buildings, an ops centre, some tech, to a third party, and see the decision making, the reasoning at genesis, and then at the other end of the term the hard realities of the service challenges in year 3....then I never look at the outsourcers as the issue, I look at the middle to senior management of the firm who didn't do enough to strike the right deal that balanced the relationship and ceded responsibility, authority and ownership in a 'mess for less' setup.
Of course everyone has experienced the gold standard proffered by the sales team, and the subsequent bronze standard offered by the "team in Pune". But this is consequence of poorly skilled and out of depth middle managers in U.K. based firms who thought they knew how to make the deal and sell it to their Board. Companies like TCS aren't idiots. If you pay for Gold you get Gold. But if you pay for Bronze, then do the math. The idiots are on the other side of the table.
On top of that companies like the Tata Group are pretty sharp outfits. Aside from the fact that if Chandra wanted to, his group could just bid, hostile, and take over IAG, easily, then you also have a conglomerate that runs two national treasures - Jaguar and Land Rover - better and more profitably and to greater obvious customer satisfaction than they ever were before. Frankly, it took a properly run organisation to manage assets we (as a nation) were watching being pushed into the dirt. So by the looks of things Chandra and the Tata Group could probably run BA better than it is now. Vistala certainly gives Chandra the leeway to cheekily ask Willie Walsh if he could do with the help.
So putting this together I don't think a general tarnish of "outsourcing to India = bad" is strictly true. Look at the people who didn't really know what they are doing on the customer side of the equation. India has something like double the size of the UKs whole population (old people, students, new borns and all) who work in their service industry, that in turn serves a significant amount of the West. This image that they are all 'yes boss, yes boss' nod nod but never do, does great disservice to the vast proportion who are actually highly capable, and sometimes have skill sets we are starting to lack. You might be pulling your hair out talking to the guy on the phone who's nominally taken your job and can't see why he need to reboot this server before this one or some such commodity activity, but - and make sure your badge lets you in - take a wander through a trading floor Downtown or in the City and those three or four Indian chaps standing around the 8 screen setup aren't fixing the screens or trying to work out why the macro isn't working for the quant.....they are the flaming quants. And they can code blindfold that infrastructure guy back into his cubicle on level 1.
3) if the figures are right, then whilst £90+m is a lot of money in the scheme of things, as an outsourcing deal, it's dwarfed by a lot that's out there. Lloyds just nodded over a £1.3b, 1800 man deal a couple of months back and in that sector even bigger have been afoot. Whilst its not clear what the terms of the BA 'deal' were and what teams, or functions it contained, it's not clear if this was an infrastructure outsource, the plumbing guys, or this was for all tech, etc. The parameters aren't clear. I guess the actual data or comms rooms are BA property, and these sites have just scaled to use over decades of building IT patterns, but I'd be surprised if data centre staff per se were necessarily part of the deal and then shipped out. With teams like DC staff you'd expect them to be TUPE'd and retained because it's all nooks and crannies that you can't quarterback from a few thousand miles away. But I'm sure someone will know differently.
However, what I will challenge is this thinking that technology in a company - all of it - everything through the stack - is this solid singular mass of treasure. No, like anything in a value chain there is commodity activity, important nonetheless but it's production line and then there's the activity that differentiates you from your market competition. And the technology activity closer to the latter is always crucial to maintain in any firm. Development teams that code the platforms and interfaces that customers interact with I'd argue can't be outsourced. Programme and project management structures and governance can't be outsourced. But the guys who run helpdesks, and manage boxes, keep the network humming and firewalls updated in the change window, honestly, that's commodity. Yes, if they mess it up, internal or external staff, everyone knows the pain, but in the tech value chain a lot of stuff is production line, uptime, keeping the lights on.
And it's that tranche of work that's not where perceived value lies to a shareholder, it's not a core competency and it's a commodity that if you can get done more cheaply and efficiently, then so you should. But strike the right relationship deal that works in all scenarios, good and bad.
Ten, fifteen years ago or whenever it was, people were big cheese if they'd could throw down in the interview that MCSE qualification. Or look at me, I'm a CCIE and aren't I rare. But products get ubiquitous, labour arbritage as Vaud says kicks in over time, your skill set where you think you are worth top dollar, well I don't need you anymore because we're looking at self healing networks or some such IT witchcraft. The regeneration of the industry happens so fast. But those lamenting that CIOs these days don't get the fact 'you need me, and all my contractor mates, because we know where the hardcoded IP addresses are but you'll see the hard way when I take my package and you have to call me back in', fail to realise that things will carry on and won't go back to how it used to be.
Diageo. The worlds biggest and most successful drinks company. Or last time I checked. Do they actually make a single bottle all their brands pour their concoctions into? No, I doubt it. They're a drinks company, not a bottle maker. Bottles are made to specific parameters in a variety of territories and delivered to their bottling plants, and then off they go.
This BA cockup could very well be just a simple power issue or whatever that is. A balls up, hard to believe, but there it is. But if it isn't and just a deeper manifestation of a great institution on the decline, then amongst many things I could certainly see the argument for them choosing the right technology partner that will run a non-unionised department, where all the tech stack is managed in one place allowing seamless integration to getting things delivered, and will own that investment for changing the old into the new. And BA just focus on what they should be considering their core competency: running the best planes, with the most qualified pilots, the friendliest cabin staff, with the best lounge locations at the top airports, and delivering the best product set - First, Club, Traveller - and aim to be the premium carrier of choice.
Focus insanely on what customers want and you invariably find out there a correlation with shareholders ultimate happiness. The money comes in and everyone's happy. But a company that has it round the other way, and BA looks like that, tends to pick up these €150m disasters more and more often.
I'm surprised we don't have more large companies suffering major IT outages. I work for one of the big Pharma companies and up until a few years ago we were still using windows 2000 as our main OS. We went from 200 to Vista FFS!
Now we're on Windows 7 and we've gone the Office 365/OneDrive/Sharepoint route and things are a lot better from a day to day email/word processor perspective. However all of our bespoke regulatory and operational systems are still woeful, we have document management systems, legal and operational databases and regulatory submission systems that are creaking along on the edge of failure. Everyday we get emails explaining why some vital system will be off line for the next 24 hours whilst an issue is dealt with.
Now we're on Windows 7 and we've gone the Office 365/OneDrive/Sharepoint route and things are a lot better from a day to day email/word processor perspective. However all of our bespoke regulatory and operational systems are still woeful, we have document management systems, legal and operational databases and regulatory submission systems that are creaking along on the edge of failure. Everyday we get emails explaining why some vital system will be off line for the next 24 hours whilst an issue is dealt with.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4565236/IT...
"Single bungling IT engineer to blame for BA's £150million global meltdown 'after turning power supply back on too quickly'"
"The IT engineer involved is reportedly from contractor CBRE Global Workplace Solutions, who are helping the airline with its investigation."
"It appears that alternative power sources including batteries and a diesel generator may also have failed."
"BA's emergency procedures say that the power would then be restored 'gradually' with its other data centre at Heathrow - Comet House - taking 'up the slack'.
But a source told the Telegraph that power 'resumed in an uncontrolled fashion', damaging servers containing all sorts of data about flights, passengers and even flight paths."
"Single bungling IT engineer to blame for BA's £150million global meltdown 'after turning power supply back on too quickly'"
"The IT engineer involved is reportedly from contractor CBRE Global Workplace Solutions, who are helping the airline with its investigation."
"It appears that alternative power sources including batteries and a diesel generator may also have failed."
"BA's emergency procedures say that the power would then be restored 'gradually' with its other data centre at Heathrow - Comet House - taking 'up the slack'.
But a source told the Telegraph that power 'resumed in an uncontrolled fashion', damaging servers containing all sorts of data about flights, passengers and even flight paths."
[quote=tigerkoi]Part 1[/tigerkoi]It appears to me that BA are trying to build a market of one time fliers, based on reputation. Everyone will try BA once, and then not go back.
As a semi-frequent flier (silver card built up on mostly internal flights with occasional TATL - all in economy) I'm now open to competition for those internal flights. Sadly I live west of Heathrow, so alternative airports are not easy for me, but if I lived in London I would be considering the low cost airlines from other airports instead. They've driven away their loyal customers, which is crazy.
As a semi-frequent flier (silver card built up on mostly internal flights with occasional TATL - all in economy) I'm now open to competition for those internal flights. Sadly I live west of Heathrow, so alternative airports are not easy for me, but if I lived in London I would be considering the low cost airlines from other airports instead. They've driven away their loyal customers, which is crazy.
Puggit said:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4565236/IT...
"Single bungling IT engineer to blame for BA's £150million global meltdown 'after turning power supply back on too quickly'"
"The IT engineer involved is reportedly from contractor CBRE Global Workplace Solutions, who are helping the airline with its investigation."
"It appears that alternative power sources including batteries and a diesel generator may also have failed."
"BA's emergency procedures say that the power would then be restored 'gradually' with its other data centre at Heathrow - Comet House - taking 'up the slack'.
But a source told the Telegraph that power 'resumed in an uncontrolled fashion', damaging servers containing all sorts of data about flights, passengers and even flight paths."
That still doesn't make any sense. Outages can happen, even with some pretty tight controls in place, but if BAs systems had any sort of resilience, the outage would have been minutes, not days."Single bungling IT engineer to blame for BA's £150million global meltdown 'after turning power supply back on too quickly'"
"The IT engineer involved is reportedly from contractor CBRE Global Workplace Solutions, who are helping the airline with its investigation."
"It appears that alternative power sources including batteries and a diesel generator may also have failed."
"BA's emergency procedures say that the power would then be restored 'gradually' with its other data centre at Heathrow - Comet House - taking 'up the slack'.
But a source told the Telegraph that power 'resumed in an uncontrolled fashion', damaging servers containing all sorts of data about flights, passengers and even flight paths."
anonymous said:
[redacted]
Thank you, most kind.You are right with your statements and I chime with the thinking.
The reason for Willie Walsh coming out with almost effusive praise of Alex Cruz and team lies in his management structure and the history of its construction.
If you can wade through the IAG Capital Markets presentation (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9MzE0ODgzfENoaWxkSUQ9LTF8VHlwZT0z&t=1&cb=635840650671533945) which is where senior ExCo talk to and field q&a from Investment Banking Analysts, then these for me are the key lifts:
1) You have Romero as IAG Chairman, Walsh as Group CEO and Chavarri as Group CFO. Classic top tier layout for governance of a multinational, umbrella conglomerate. Underneath Walsh you have the four passenger CEOs for Vueling, Iberia, Aer Lingus and BA; the Cargo CEO, Embleton; Crawley who runs Avios; and then you have four other main roles - General Counsel, normal, you need your lawyer at the top table; a Chief of Staff, Julia Simpson, the CoS role is an corporate Americanism and has been en vogue since about 2010 when McKinsey walked the boardroom floors of Western corps and said, "...you need a Chief of Staff". Some of these people at some firms are real grey eminences, but too often most are senior picks for those who just get through the admin and have the business management sorted out for the exec away day; then there is a Director of Strategy; and finally there's Zabala who is head of GDS, Global Delivery Services.
2) GDS, according to the 2015 Analysts Pack was set up to accommodate, as is currently the fashion, things that were shared service functions - the newish IT and operations, Group Treasury, HR etc and then also a Digital Transformation pot. This is sort of familiar. Not many corporates actually have a full on classic CIO at the top table. It's rare. More often and there was a flurry in banking around five years ago of a Head of Operations & Technology role, where the thinking was IT could transform the business (automation, business process transformation etc) if the underlying ops teams were bonded. That became a powerful role, and helped lead the CIO position from being the nerdy ex systems guys to being business influencers. But they've never been actual COOs, which tend to reign supreme in most industry sectors, and they are now steadily falling under a COO structure. A lot of COOs these days are branding themselves as having multiple strings to their bow which include their stated wonderful regard for the power of technology if yielded correctly from their power base in the centre....
3) back to the IAG GDS structure, I read Zabala's position as a verbatim COO, and his head of Group IT is Bill Francis. So the lines of revenue generation and business don't have IT under them in their channel, but it's likely that Francis will have a subordinate faceoff to all the business lines. Dotted line management structures all over the place and generally pretty common.
4) Bill Francis is not to my understanding an IT guy with depth. From a cursory look he's more a BA longtermer who's done a number of roles, has managed to impress Walsh along the way with the odd bit of wetwork (butchering the cabin crews c.2010) and then been able to say he's a 'transformer' (!!) and been landed with the gig of playing with Tech.
5) if you read the 2015 report what stands out for me is how out of depth the GDS people are compared to the passenger and cargo CEOs in describing their business structure, challenges and areas of opportunity. The CEOs talk crisply, and their tone tells you they know their field inside out and know how to run an airline shop, and understand all levels. But from the way Francis talks and his shop language he strikes me as not the sort of guy you'd give the top (CIO) role to in a bigger firm. He's probably two or three grades off that. He's just not a technologist and either with dealing with the full scale BPO outfits, a standard outsourcer like TCS or probably shooting the breeze with the internal top talent he just isn't that grade. Yes he can trot out the words Cloud, and Agile etc and do the buzzwords, but so can anyone. He's not a died in the wool senior technology veteran.
6) in the above report Francis blythely talks about "...primarily an offshore outsource piece...will be at fixed price...number of people working on it is slightly irrelevant to us. We just want the service and cost at the right place.....". In and around that when he talks of taking teams down from 59 to 12 people here and there, it's just smacks of small picture, small fry cost cutting. These are just edge nibblers not technologists who understand that doing this game properly and understanding it will actually allow you to realise the savings as well as deliver on business promise.
And.....7) Walsh is patently a smart guy. His public image is edgy, and he's not the most admired captain of industry out there, but he's no dum dum. He understand the intricacies of running airline operations better than anyone. He's not some Peter Principle guy who actually doesn't know what a baggage handler does. He gets every level of his operation. But when you see what actually drives him, his statements as to how everything is focused on capacity balanced by unit cost, unit revenue or ROI, and that's its, and he will deliver that, and execute, and that's what his management structure is geared to do at all cost....then you can see what the problem for BA (IAG) is. Not once in that corporate statement does anyone talk about driving great customer propositions, gaining market share by delivering best product and winning base, by concentrating on what customers look for and need.
This is a firm that is so far removed from understanding how to win in a competing market by doing that old trick - give the people what they want. They are full of management wonks who play with KPIs and are thinking of which OLI will gain the right NPS score.
Guys like Juan Trippe are rare in any industry. Businessmen with visionary goals and ambitions who singularly take good companies into great ones. They are rare birds. But there are a few modern ones around. However UK PLC (start local) is stuffed of such management mediocrity - management, not leadership, that many good companies will never become great. And many mighty ones might just fall.
clonmult said:
Puggit said:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4565236/IT...
"Single bungling IT engineer to blame for BA's £150million global meltdown 'after turning power supply back on too quickly'"
"The IT engineer involved is reportedly from contractor CBRE Global Workplace Solutions, who are helping the airline with its investigation."
"It appears that alternative power sources including batteries and a diesel generator may also have failed."
"BA's emergency procedures say that the power would then be restored 'gradually' with its other data centre at Heathrow - Comet House - taking 'up the slack'.
But a source told the Telegraph that power 'resumed in an uncontrolled fashion', damaging servers containing all sorts of data about flights, passengers and even flight paths."
That still doesn't make any sense. Outages can happen, even with some pretty tight controls in place, but if BAs systems had any sort of resilience, the outage would have been minutes, not days."Single bungling IT engineer to blame for BA's £150million global meltdown 'after turning power supply back on too quickly'"
"The IT engineer involved is reportedly from contractor CBRE Global Workplace Solutions, who are helping the airline with its investigation."
"It appears that alternative power sources including batteries and a diesel generator may also have failed."
"BA's emergency procedures say that the power would then be restored 'gradually' with its other data centre at Heathrow - Comet House - taking 'up the slack'.
But a source told the Telegraph that power 'resumed in an uncontrolled fashion', damaging servers containing all sorts of data about flights, passengers and even flight paths."
RTB said:
I'm surprised we don't have more large companies suffering major IT outages. I work for one of the big Pharma companies and up until a few years ago we were still using windows 2000 as our main OS. We went from 200 to Vista FFS!
Now we're on Windows 7 and we've gone the Office 365/OneDrive/Sharepoint route and things are a lot better from a day to day email/word processor perspective. However all of our bespoke regulatory and operational systems are still woeful, we have document management systems, legal and operational databases and regulatory submission systems that are creaking along on the edge of failure. Everyday we get emails explaining why some vital system will be off line for the next 24 hours whilst an issue is dealt with.
My employers are maybe not quite normal with regards IT, we're a technology company who offers a range of hosting services .... 5 years back we were on XP, but since then we've gone full on bringing everything up to date, now on W10 with Office 365/OneDrive/Sharepoint & Yammer. Not totally sold on O365 to be honest.Now we're on Windows 7 and we've gone the Office 365/OneDrive/Sharepoint route and things are a lot better from a day to day email/word processor perspective. However all of our bespoke regulatory and operational systems are still woeful, we have document management systems, legal and operational databases and regulatory submission systems that are creaking along on the edge of failure. Everyday we get emails explaining why some vital system will be off line for the next 24 hours whilst an issue is dealt with.
Most of the systems that I know of have full resilience across data centers, the legacy systems are in the process of being retired, and the majority of servers are on various flavours of Unix (Solaris or Red Hat, most now been moved to the latter). I've been involved in DR tests that showed systems failing over from one DC to another without any loss of data.
Puggit said:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4565236/IT...
"Single bungling IT engineer to blame for BA's £150million global meltdown 'after turning power supply back on too quickly'"
"The IT engineer involved is reportedly from contractor CBRE Global Workplace Solutions, who are helping the airline with its investigation."
"It appears that alternative power sources including batteries and a diesel generator may also have failed."
"BA's emergency procedures say that the power would then be restored 'gradually' with its other data centre at Heathrow - Comet House - taking 'up the slack'.
But a source told the Telegraph that power 'resumed in an uncontrolled fashion', damaging servers containing all sorts of data about flights, passengers and even flight paths."
So by their own admission:-"Single bungling IT engineer to blame for BA's £150million global meltdown 'after turning power supply back on too quickly'"
"The IT engineer involved is reportedly from contractor CBRE Global Workplace Solutions, who are helping the airline with its investigation."
"It appears that alternative power sources including batteries and a diesel generator may also have failed."
"BA's emergency procedures say that the power would then be restored 'gradually' with its other data centre at Heathrow - Comet House - taking 'up the slack'.
But a source told the Telegraph that power 'resumed in an uncontrolled fashion', damaging servers containing all sorts of data about flights, passengers and even flight paths."
1. ONE person who doesn't work for BA can mess up the whole system.
2. None of their backup power systems work!
3. Power up cycle is extremely fragile.
tigerqoi said:
tons of sensible points
I dont want to quote your whole post but I think you are totally wrong. The reason that people book with BA isn't because of their planes or because they use x engine and y plane or because they own an airport (which they dont), it's because they have integrated (electronically) their sales customer process and customer services systems so well with travel agents and travel hubs.They are an IT company with a licence to fly planes. Banks are an IT company with a banking licence. and so on. If you think outsourcing your core competency to a company that has no experience doing that then you will for a time see a cost benefit but after a while you will find the likes of Ryanair, Easyjet and every other new entry airline eating into your business because the IT part just becomes a commodity and you have no USP. And once you have no USP then you are competing on price which is a race to bottom.
No one is expecting BA to build planes, just the same as they dont expect BA IT dept to build their own computers, but the people you put into those roles need to be top of their game.
I would guess that BA are already in a race to the bottom as everything they do is now managed/owned or outsourced to a third party and so the companies that they outsourced to are now offering those same services to any new player in the market thus competing with BA.
It is also interesting to see zero failures in the many years prior to big outsourcing deals and then a rash of issues post handover. The two are linked absolutely no doubt.
Hopefully the supervisory board will insist on an independent and detailed forensic analysis.
The CIO will probably welcome it, ironically, if the root cause is in anyway cost related as it would strengthen their hand for investment.
Probably time to get out of two data centres on the same flightpath and sell some (probably valuable) real estate?
The CIO will probably welcome it, ironically, if the root cause is in anyway cost related as it would strengthen their hand for investment.
Probably time to get out of two data centres on the same flightpath and sell some (probably valuable) real estate?
Ace-T said:
Makes it sound like it was getting a bit dirty in the DC so a guy was sent in too hoover and couldnt find a socket so unplugged something....I'm with you on 'Really?'
Great post. This one part really stuck out for me.
I don't know what the reason is, but I can identify some of the symptoms. On one project, we were subcontracted by a UK company to design a machine for a German customer. Getting info to complete the job from the UK to help deliver was like getting blood from a stone, yet the Germans would bend over backwards to help. It was clear that the UK co attitude was "you took on the job, you must deliver" but he Germans realise that if they spend time to help us, ultimately they get a better result.
The second one is similar. A colleague was working for a German company and came to part of his job where he could save a lot of effort if he had a cheap tool. He asked his manager if they could get one, the manager checked the request was reasonable and a few days later it was in his hand. By contrast where I worked with him in the UK the workshop manager was asked to put together a proposal for refitting an area with a 40k budget, so he got the specs and quotes only to be met with "Ah, we can't afford it now, what can you do for £500?"
It just seems that UK management has a mentality of scrimping to get by on the minimum rather than seeing themselves as facilitators to help others do their jobs in the most efficient way
tigerkoi said:
Guys like Juan Trippe are rare in any industry. Businessmen with visionary goals and ambitions who singularly take good companies into great ones. They are rare birds. But there are a few modern ones around. However UK PLC (start local) is stuffed of such management mediocrity - management, not leadership, that many good companies will never become great. And many mighty ones might just fall.
I commented on another thread about how a friend was asked by a German colleague when he was working out there why the Brits were so good at doing the job, but so bad at running the company.I don't know what the reason is, but I can identify some of the symptoms. On one project, we were subcontracted by a UK company to design a machine for a German customer. Getting info to complete the job from the UK to help deliver was like getting blood from a stone, yet the Germans would bend over backwards to help. It was clear that the UK co attitude was "you took on the job, you must deliver" but he Germans realise that if they spend time to help us, ultimately they get a better result.
The second one is similar. A colleague was working for a German company and came to part of his job where he could save a lot of effort if he had a cheap tool. He asked his manager if they could get one, the manager checked the request was reasonable and a few days later it was in his hand. By contrast where I worked with him in the UK the workshop manager was asked to put together a proposal for refitting an area with a 40k budget, so he got the specs and quotes only to be met with "Ah, we can't afford it now, what can you do for £500?"
It just seems that UK management has a mentality of scrimping to get by on the minimum rather than seeing themselves as facilitators to help others do their jobs in the most efficient way
paolow said:
Ace-T said:
Makes it sound like it was getting a bit dirty in the DC so a guy was sent in too hoover and couldnt find a socket so unplugged something....I'm with you on 'Really?'
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