-
we need to get together and form an “IT Doing IT Group”
Anything is possible for a price 😉
And what about the ‘On Business’ website being down for months? There is no way to search flight availability with business points but to call the ([painful) call centre.
In the last 24 hours I get message that my account was ‘blocked’ for security reasons. Have spent an hour resetting passwords that comply with the password policy yet got rejected time and time again. Had to clear cache and cookies a few times. Was able to finally login and make a booking but just get a message that my booking cannot be displayed on my EC page.
Worst airline system I have seen.
(BTW- I am a Gold Guest List member in BA which means I used them a lot. Their systems are rubbish.
“need to appoint a couple of failed, smarmy ex-ministers to our board before any large corporate”
Tony Bliar is available. ( at a cost ( huge)).
Furthermore, in an accountant-led entity/society, as is mostly the case in Anglo countries, it is very unlikely that the skills and experience can be generated and retained – because they will always be optimised-away for short-term financial benefit (“accountant-led”) to hit some pressing short-term financial requirement.
“Staff with years of experience understanding the innards of your enormously complex infrastructure” are expensive, and offshore people with questionable qualifications and no ability to communicate in English, never mind work outside of their silo walls, are cheap. Stress the entity by demanding it reduce its costs and it will cheerfully dispose of all of the former.
Unfortunately this retired bean-counter gets upset with such generalisations. Yes there are financial constraints and yes there are some accountants, who give the rest of us a bad name, who see cost-cutting and off-shoring as a way of resolving things but there are some of us who disagree with that methodology. Invest in systems which have multiple redundancy built in so if one part goes down, others can take up the slack.
This accountant recognises that failing to plan is planning to fail and IT spending is a necessary evil as so much of modern business requires it to work without fail. Not just to record in absurd detail what you are doing but also for the business to be effective at what it does.
It’s the same idiocy of the call-centre where you have to press 1 for this, press 2 for that, press 3 to go to another menu, press 5 if you’ve lost the will to live and press 4 to hear this all again. And that’s before you get through to someone who has a script of answer this if caller asks that. Give me a number to call where someone answers immediately and is empowered to make a decision without trying to fob you off.
The best run organisations recognise that people in different departments have different skills and view things from different perspectives so encourage people to talk to each other rather than working in silos. And therefore avoid the generalisations of “oh its the bean-counters. Or the useless HR, or the daft sales team giving everything away for nothing.
The best IT systems are those that can grow with the organisation and change and adapt as the organisation changes. Which means constant development and maintenance and replacment when necessary. Those systems rarely fall over and people dont notice as the change is gradual and constant.
BA does not appear to have done this for a while as can be seen in the frayed furniture in the lounges, let alone the website. They got rid of the IT department and outsourced everything. Hence the disaster when something outside of their control also goes wrong as in the NATS IT snafu.
At least BA is beginning to see the folly of their ways which is good but it just makes everything much more difficult and expensive to correct.
It’s the same with not giving people decent payrises every year. Eventually staff goodwill fails and people leave to get a better salary. Or they go on strike.
It’s good news that BA has started to invest in another IT department. The trouble is that so far the efforts seem to be re-designing that which was OK to start with and worse doing it badly hence the changes to MMB and the sudden reversal a few hours later.
The thing is BA still gets loads of business and that’s a good thing because I would prefer to see BA get better rather than fail altogether.
http://www.hotelsandcars.ba.com is still stuffed. You get a “not secure connection” message from FireFox.
If you do actually get in then there’s still no hotels search tab, only Cars and Activities.Thanks @Richie but that takes you into the same stuffed-up http://www.hotelsandcars.ba.com website, with only Cars and Activities showing.
Can anyone get into this website and book hotels with Avios or to earn 15 Avios per £1 spent?
What a shambolic and amateurish outfit BA’s IT people are. It’s a good job they don’t write the flight control software for Airbus or Boeing. If they did, planes would be falling out of the sky umpteen times a day – “sorry pilot, there was a problem with your request. Please call the overloaded call centre”.
Thanks @Richie but that takes you into the same stuffed-up http://www.hotelsandcars.ba.com website, with only Cars and Activities showing.
Can anyone get into this website and book hotels with Avios or to earn 15 Avios per £1 spent?
You can’t. It’s now a 10:1 ratio.
Hi JDB,
I’m well aware about BABS/Amadeus/Sabre etc. I have friends who worked at BA for 30+ years. Even after many years running on Amadeus, it still didn’t offer half the functionality of the old IBM mainframe-based BABS.
I know other airlines have inadequate IT – that’s not an excuse.
Throwing 100’s of people at such projects doesn’t work. A small core team of the best people who know how the system works is the best solution. Cut out endless subcontractors/out-sourcing/consultants/etc and get some technically competent people and hang on to them. A few good individuals, not endless “bums on seats” from large companies with huge overheads and mark-ups on everything that moves!
Management/directors who don’t know their keyboards from a hole in the ground are a waste of space and money. You can’t manage something that you don’t understand.
With the Internet everybody thinks they can write code and work with computers – NO!
If I had written code like this or managed such a project, I would expect to be fired. I would also have fired people working for me who produced such garbage.
BA wouldn’t want to speak to me or deal with me. The truth would hurt and we know what the PLC directors fraternity are like. You stuff up in company A, leave with an undeserved payout and your colleagues at Company B then take you on. Repeat ad infinitum.As an actual developer I can tell you this 100% true.
Big companies hire contractors to do this kind of work. Contractors cheap out and either outsource it out the country to a team that can’t communicate effectively in the client’s language, or cheap out by getting developers straight out of Uni with no work experience (who claim they know what they’re doing because “CS degrees whatever”), or both.
CEOs like it because it works out cheap on paper, but you end up with so many problems on the way that it’s not worth it. Meanwhile the real good developers aren’t getting hired, because they mostly have degrees in other fields or none at all. If good developers were hired and retained in-house, they could substantially reduce the cost of rewriting their IT system, and still have better product at the end, because the team is closer to management who can communicate with them.
The skillset of a developer is not really down to getting a degree, it comes down to work experience and a very string problem-solving mindset. If you don’t have it you don’t have it.
It basically boils down to CEOs not understanding IT at all, and just taking a contractor’s word for it.
As an actual developer I can tell you this 100% true.
…
It basically boils down to CEOs not understanding IT at all, and just taking a contractor’s word for it.
As a consultant/contractor, who has launched several successful digital ventures, and bailed out a few failed ones, I object to your tarnishing everyone with the same brush. There are some large agencies/consultancies which often, it seems, try and get the work done at the lowest price and deliver a poor product. But there are many consultants, contractors and agencies capable of delivering great products (as there are many great in house teams doing the same, and indeed good examples of in house teams collaborating with agencies and contractors). The issue is trying to build digital systems as cheaply as possible and/or maximising profit at the expense of the client. Once that mindset is in place, it doesn’t matter who is on the job, you have a very high risk of getting rubbish.
Your point about qualifications is well made. I’m in my career following a change in my thirties, I have no academic qualifications to back up what I do (I have a few vocational ones though).
Today’s excuse from BA when I try and log in:
We’re sorry, but ba.com is very busy at the moment, and couldn’t deal with your request. Please do try again – if it still doesn’t work, it may be better to try again at another time.
makes a change from “your account is down for maintenance…”
[Quote] The risks are deemed to to be unmanageably high and the spectre of TSB looms large. The financial and reputational costs to TSB were huge. [/quote]
When Lloyds Banking Group were forced to divest some of their assets as punishment for taking government bail out money, Lloyds TSB Scotland (later TSB) signed a 5 year IT outsourcing deal whereby LBG would provide their core banking systems. When Banco Sabadel acquired TSB they decided to migrate TSB off of LBG infrastructure onto theirs. They undertook no parallel running, no dry runs, no test migrations. They just cut over on a weekend. Hence the utter disaster and subsequent fines by the FCA.
It was simply arrogance by Sabadel and a lack of courage from TSB Management who were all warned of the risks.
As a consultant/contractor, who has launched several successful digital ventures, and bailed out a few failed ones, I object to your tarnishing everyone with the same brush. There are some large agencies/consultancies which often, it seems, try and get the work done at the lowest price and deliver a poor product. But there are many consultants, contractors and agencies capable of delivering great products (as there are many great in house teams doing the same, and indeed good examples of in house teams collaborating with agencies and contractors). The issue is trying to build digital systems as cheaply as possible and/or maximising profit at the expense of the client. Once that mindset is in place, it doesn’t matter who is on the job, you have a very high risk of getting rubbish.
Sorry I didn’t mean to tar all contractors. My point was against the types of contractors used by a lot of the big companies and orgs (both gov and non-gov). It just seems that they take on certain types of contractors because of the way they present things to upper management, who have no understanding of IT. Whereas the good contractors get ignored because they can’t do the bizspeak or they are too realistic/pessimistic about pricing and timescales etc.
And TSB is a case in point: LBG gave them a working system, and Sabadell were just too arrogant to assume the whole switchover would just work without any testing. I’m just completeing a switchover of a fairly small line-of-business API in a relatively small business, and we were testing various parts of it for weeks before cut-over.
So IAG get burned by that and think: oh no, we can’t touch the IT systems because it’ll all go kaput. Instead we’ll just keep running the same mainframes for decades. No, get a good in-house team, or a good contractor who you can talk to, and build up the systems properly.
Really is ridiculous.
I try login, I get “We’re processing your details” for a while.
I refresh, I get the Login Interstitial page, with “Loading, please wait…”
I refresh again, I get “Error 403 – You don’t have enough permissions to proceed further”
I type in ba.com again, I’m back to Login Interstitial.
Another few refreshes: “An error (502 Bad Gateway) has occurred in response to this request.”
Does nobody realize the website is completely borked??
As an actual developer I can tell you this 100% true.
…
It basically boils down to CEOs not understanding IT at all, and just taking a contractor’s word for it.
As a consultant/contractor, who has launched several successful digital ventures, and bailed out a few failed ones, I object to your tarnishing everyone with the same brush. There are some large agencies/consultancies which often, it seems, try and get the work done at the lowest price and deliver a poor product. But there are many consultants, contractors and agencies capable of delivering great products (as there are many great in house teams doing the same, and indeed good examples of in house teams collaborating with agencies and contractors). The issue is trying to build digital systems as cheaply as possible and/or maximising profit at the expense of the client. Once that mindset is in place, it doesn’t matter who is on the job, you have a very high risk of getting rubbish.
Your point about qualifications is well made. I’m in my career following a change in my thirties, I have no academic qualifications to back up what I do (I have a few vocational ones though).
Today’s excuse from BA when I try and log in:
We’re sorry, but ba.com is very busy at the moment, and couldn’t deal with your request. Please do try again – if it still doesn’t work, it may be better to try again at another time.
makes a change from “your account is down for maintenance…”
I’ve been watching this thread for a while. You make some excellent points and couldn’t agree more with both of you about qualifications. Attitude and behaviours are the two most important things about software dev. Once someone has learnt one language well, if they have the right attitude and can do kind of behaviour, they can easily master another. But trying to understand someone else’s legacy mess? That’s a challenge even for the best devs, cheap sub cos will just throw bums on seats at it.
The most important question any CEO needs to answer before they outsource IT, is what do you want from it? If it’s simply lower cost, the contract is doomed. (I’m an IT project manager / consultant)
Since I started this thread “Poxy BA Websites Stuffed Again” I’ve found out that http://www.hotelsandcars.ba.com doesn’t handle the hotels anymore. Another new and inadequate BA website has appears: http://www.rewards.ba.com
This shows Cars, Hotels, Activities and Wine. It then flies off to different existing websites depending upon which tab you select.
However rewards.ba.com now handles standalone hotel bookings which can earn/redeem Avios. The earning rate seems to have been reduced to 10 per £1.
Previously hotelsandcars used the same underlying engine as Amex Travel – same layout and quirks. It now seems that rewards.ba.com does its own thing. The hotel selection appears to be greatly reduced, the map is tiny and won’t zoom properly/at all and the hotel pictures won’t enlarge and are postage stamp size. If youask for “Paris” is doesn’t show anything beyond arrondissements 1-4.
Another fine piece of BA IT!
Also getting to this website directly seems almost impossible, everything on ba.com wants to take you to BAH to book a hotel.
It is also necessary to sign in to this new website, even if clicking through from somewhere else. So we now have to sign in separately to:
ba.com
hotelsandcars.ba.com
rewards.ba.com
pgt.shopping.ba.com
shopping.ba.com
And for God’s sake make sure you sign-out from each one separately, otherwise the site is left open and logged-in for you or who knows who to stumble across later.
A COMPLETE AND UTTER SHAMBLES FROM A BUNCH OF AMATEURS!Add thewineflyer.co.uk to the list above.
At the moment booking any redemption flight is failing with “Internal Server Error Received from IAGL API ASSOCIATE – getAssociateDetails. Please Refer Response Code and Description for more details in server log”.
Just more garbage from an amateurish IT outfit and another good reason for a clear out from board level downwards (not just in IT).NOW 19Sept22 12:30
Once again this piece of BA shITe is failing continually when trying to see Avios flight availability for any destination.
The very helpful message – “Internal Server Error Received from IAGL API ASSOCIATE – getAssociateDetails. Please Refer Response Code and Description for more details in server log” is being returned.
I’m an IT man, but very helpful for a BAEC member wanting to book flights.
Once again just yet another reason to sack to lot of them from the IT director downwards and quite frankly other senior directors of this shambolic outfit.19 Sept 23 1345
BA website will not let me log on! Tried different browsers.I’ve been having issues on and off all day too.
Even if you could see availability, I dont think you’d be able to book anything. Call centre agent unable to book anything either. Very annoying
ok – not just me then, I get a little nervous after having my avios cleared out a few years ago.
one the one hand i am happy to see it’s not just me having a problem today
Wow — I got a new flavour 503 this afternoon…
Sorry
Internal Server Error Received from IAGL API COUPONS – getCouponDetails. Please Refer Response Code and Description for more details in server log.To BA IT cretin morons strike again.
This week the ba.com sign in changed, so there’s no bar with the BAEC summary. Further down the page it’s a constant “sorry we can’t retrieve your membership details”.
There are pages that show “Login” in the top right corner when you are still logged-in and logging-out still seems to leave you really logged-in.
Now rewards.ba.com is completely stuffed. You login (well you enter your details) and the basic home page fails to load with at least four errors.
What a bunch of useless idiots. Time to print a LOT of P45’s.
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