BA IT cretins strike again!

[SteveCroydon]

More untested changes to ba.com today.
Try getting into Mangle My Booking!!
Where’s the top line of links gone? It comes and goes.
Speed-wise – running like a three-legged dog.
Probably more stuff-ups that I haven’t fallen across yet.

[SteveCroydon]

Oh I forgot:
“Sorry there seems to be a technical problem”
“ba.com is busy at the moment, please try again later”

[NorthernLass]

Mangle My Booking – classic 😂

[gritts]

The Holiday Finder function finds you a holiday but when you go through to book it you get ‘We are sorry there is nothing available for the criteria you have entered.’ However you try, you end up with this message. And no holiday booking.

[SteveCroydon]

@NorthernLass I coined Mangle My Booking many years ago. My mates at BA LHR-T1 loved it. They used it in meetings, much to the annoyance of BA-cloned managers.

[JDB]

SteveCroydon wrote:

Oh I forgot:
“Sorry there seems to be a technical problem”
“ba.com is busy at the moment, please try again later”

You often criticise BA (and now IB) IT which is fair enough, criticising the hapless staff perhaps less so. However, it’s very easy to criticise but what is the solution?

Outside Sabre based airlines, network airlines worldwide (and not just legacy ones) have fairly terrible IT. If it were just a question of money/resource, even BA would have fixed the system – bad IT costs money. Even the ME or Asian airlines with much greater resource have poor systems. The Chinese airlines went a third IT route and they are generally far worse than BA. Big IT consultancies and clever minnows have been asked for help/advice. None has a solution. Big European legacy banks are in the same bind.

Nobody dares contemplate the big bang solution. Switchover is seen as a huge obstacle in view of the sheer number of (particularly) SITA messages constantly being exchanged.

[cin3]

Why would SITA volume be any more of an issue than anything else in a fresh build to fix all the legacy issues?

[JDB]

cin3 wrote:

Why would SITA volume be any more of an issue than anything else in a fresh build to fix all the legacy issues?

It’s just one of many issues but something specific highlighted by those who are looking at this. The constant ongoing system changes/updates don’t really affect the beating heart in the way a complete switchover would.

A particular issue (and not exclusive to BA) is the number of legacy systems from Dan Air to BCal, BMI etc as well as the BABS system being a latecomer to Amadeus seemingly an issue, although Amadeus founder airlines are r seemingly better off. It appears also that while banks can choose to update systems during very quiet times when very few transactions are taking place, there is essentially no quiet time for global airlines.

With the benefit of hindsight these airlines went in the wrong direction many years ago and they don’t know how to start again. The US airlines went for the you don’t get fired for buying IBM approach!

[Ihar]

Having worked in telecoms for some decades, I can tell you that not only is it possible to migrate complex systems to new ones but it is “business as usual”. Elon Musk (love or hate him) managed to beat NASA and Boeing at their own game….

What’s needed is different thinking and a different approach. Maybe a 5 year project, but do-able – and deliverable in nice chunky increments. The only problem is I’d want more money than Sean Doyle gets as head of the project.

[JDB]

Ihar wrote:

Having worked in telecoms for some decades, I can tell you that not only is it possible to migrate complex systems to new ones but it is “business as usual”. Elon Musk (love or hate him) managed to beat NASA and Boeing at their own game….

What’s needed is different thinking and a different approach. Maybe a 5 year project, but do-able – and deliverable in nice chunky increments. The only problem is I’d want more money than Sean Doyle gets as head of the project.

@lhar – so why is no airline doing it? Most non-US airlines have similar problems to BA. Same with legacy banks – really terrible IT for 2024 yet after the TSB fiasco who is going to authorise the migration to a shiny new system? There is an interesting business call 10X.

You mention different thinking and a different approach yet so many different organisations in the aviation and banking sectors and big consultancies haven’t come up with a solution despite massive incentives. I’m sure BA/IAG would gladly pay you more than Sean Doyle for a few years if you really had a solution, but those who have made similar assertions to you have run away and/or admitted defeat when they actually have all the facts.

[masaccio]

My most recent experiences with LATAM are that their IT doesn’t suck. Snappy website with lots 9f capabilities. This all seemed to happen when they consolidated everything behind latamairlines.com rather than having regional sites.

[Sam]

IAG was hiring for an IT transformation programme earlier in the year which i believe was to fix some of these issues

[JDB]

masaccio wrote:

My most recent experiences with LATAM are that their IT doesn’t suck. Snappy website with lots 9f capabilities. This all seemed to happen when they consolidated everything behind latamairlines.com rather than having regional sites.

LATAM is a Sabre based airline as is Aerolíneas. They are fine IT wise, it’s all the rest that are stuffed! LATAM only emerged from bankruptcy last autumn and AR would be bust but for endless state support (although new plans for privatisation are on the table) so it’s not all plain sailing.

[strickers]

The problem with IT in most organisations is that it doesn’t generate revenue. This leads to the head of the IT department being fairly low down in the management structure and consequently securing funding becomes problematic. There are lots of excuses as to why BA outwardly make such a poor job of it but there comes a point in a business of this size to treat it as a priority. Sticking plasters holding diverse systems together will only come unstuck as the business grows.

[TGLoyalty]

The real problem with IT at companies like BA is that systems were added as they as and when they needed capabilities without being fully integrated so you have lots of disparate systems all needing to be changed whenever an update/replacement needs to be done.

It’s also highly likely these old systems are being kept alive by an IT team that has no real knowledge of how to do much else but keep it going and now you’re trying to replace a number of legacy systems which are creaking at the seams while carrying out many more transactions than were ever imagined when it was first commissioned.

The cost of getting it wrong is also so great decision inertia kicks in and ofcourse the cost is now even more extortionate than it was 20 years ago

Coming from someone at a company that is using systems up to 40 years ago and replacing systems commissioned only 15 years ago because they don’t actually do what we wanted them to do.

[JDB]

@TGloyalty – you have perfectly summarised the nightmare so many companies find themselves trapped in, with no amount of money providing any good exit, so huge sums of money are spent maintaining legacy systems. BA is very much not alone, but just a fairly public example. I would hazard a guess that a few HfP readers make a good living out of supporting ancient systems that neither the originals providers nor any cheaper younger IT staff can.

[ekposh]

Called yesterday and today to try and get an Avios booking ticketed – both times greeted by lovely people who inform me “our systems are down”. Unless they came up and went back down, that’s at least 24 hours of outage.

Not sure what it impacts but I assume it won’t make those ticketing queues any smaller.

[jj]

strickers wrote:

The problem with IT in most organisations is that it doesn’t generate revenue. This leads to the head of the IT department being fairly low down in the management structure and consequently securing funding becomes problematic.

Nope. Most boards are very aware that good IT drives both revenue and operational efficiency. The problem is not cash or prioritisation but delivery.

In my view, the problem is that the UK’s education system simply doesn’t deliver enough people with the right skills. Businesses cycle helplessly between onshoring, nearshoring, offshoring and oursourcing in a vain attempt to find high quality people who can consistently deliver well-architected, robust solutions. None of these work: UK resources are too scarce and, frankly, not good enough; out/off/near resources are too hard to manage, disappear when the project ends, and often fail to understand the UK market or working culture.

We’ve tried every kind of delivery: waterfall to agile; time-bound to feature-bound; managed estates to software-as-a-service; imperative code, functional code, declarative code, no-code. None of it works. Why? Because there are far too few genuinely talented and motivated people working in the field, so we muddle along with mediocrity and sticking plasters.

Many of the few bright IT people thrown out by our education system want to work for investment banks or for IT companies where their skills are at the heart of the corporate mission. The rest of industry and government is on the back foot, and it shows.

[jj]

[duplicated post]

[Ihar]

JDB wrote:

@lhar – so why is no airline doing it? Most non-US airlines have similar problems to BA. Same with legacy banks – really terrible IT for 2024 yet after the TSB fiasco who is going to authorise the migration to a shiny new system? There is an interesting business call 10X.

You mention different thinking and a different approach yet so many different organisations in the aviation and banking sectors and big consultancies haven’t come up with a solution despite massive incentives. I’m sure BA/IAG would gladly pay you more than Sean Doyle for a few years if you really had a solution, but those who have made similar assertions to you have run away and/or admitted defeat when they actually have all the facts.

Well first, I’m not aviation IT expert, but IT is IT. I’m not going to deliver the magic beans here for free, but as an example look at Fintech. Still have to deal with all existing (legacy) banking systems, and offer the same banking services, but deliver them better, quicker, cheaper. Encapsulation/abstraction of existing systems should provide opportunities for step-change rather than “big bang”.

[masaccio]

I don’t buy the volume of talent argument @jj. I work with around 1,000 UK-based world-class software developers who are all UK-based. But we pay them exceptionally well: probably 50-100% more in total benefits (salary plus RSUs) than most IT people. I don’t think any of them would get out of bed for what the likes of BA will pay and whatever miserable benefits they offer.

[jj]

@masaccio, I think you just proved my point about the UK’s IT skills shortage, if you have to pay 50% more than the market normally to attract world-class talent.

What do you think would happen if everyone paid the same rates as you? There simply isn’t enough talent to go around.

[TooPoorToBeHere]

It is 200% down to quality and style of management.

IT systems are very large and complex and have to be constantly tended by people with a deep understanding of them if they are to function well.

This means devs are close to ops, releases are frequent, people stay with the org for years.

All absolute anathema to business managers and accountants who want silo walls, a value-in-a-spreadsheet for everything, fungible employees who can be swapped out constantly, a change management process lasting weeks, and set-in-stone releases and dates.

[moose]

Locked out of BA.com today. Doesn’t recognise me. Reset password but still doesn’t recognise me. Received an email saying Account Unlocked but it isn’t. I thought BA had fixed their poor IT but it seems they haven’t.

[memesweeper]

JDB wrote:

you have perfectly summarised the nightmare so many companies find themselves trapped in, with no amount of money providing any good exit

It’s called ‘technical debt’, and it must be proactively managed over time or it overwhelms everything.

Yes, skills are an issue, but they are available for the right price. The right price is high (as, quite frankly, is using SABRE).

These issues are fixable, even for organisations that operate 24/7. It’s hard, it’s expensive, and the answer won’t come from one of the big 4, nor an offshore bodyshop.