BA boss flimsy excuse

[JohnD]

After the catastrophic failure,

"BA chief executive Alex Cruz says he will not resign and that flight disruption had nothing to do with cutting costs.

He told the BBC a power surge, had "only lasted a few minutes", but the back-up system had not worked properly.

He said the IT failure was not due to technical staff being outsourced from the UK to India."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40083778


Having worked on very large business-critical systems I find his excuse very unconvincing.

Perhaps he is hoping that deputy heads will roll.

11 Apr 2017
"As you stare at the dead British Airways website, remember the hundreds of tech staff it laid off
Advance check-in is down too. If only there was a team that could fix it..."
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/11/british_airways_website_down/

15 June 2016
Hundreds of staff at British Airways are to lose their jobs after an Indian firm was hired to manage its computer systems.

The airline has begun flying in staff from India to replace UK workers after signing a contract with Tata Consultancy Services to provide IT support, the GMB union claims.
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/...ta-Consultancy-Services-provide-services.html

 

[noseall]

Globalization eh. Doncha just love greedy bastads.

 

[rules&rulers]

If in doubt,keep to the first reason/excuse

 

[EddieM]

Not sure what's being alluded to here, if indeed anything is being alluded to. The replacement TCS staff are less competent than the UK staff they replaced ?

 

[Doggit]

Whilst indian support staff are atrocious as telephone support staff, they are good programmers, so I'm not inclined to support the "failure due to outsourcing" theory. It could have been a power failure that was excerbated because they hadn't tested the redundancy systems, as you've got to take a real time risk to see if the implement properly, but the reported power surge is unlikely, as they should have been using battery backup systsem that would regulate the power supply, and kick in if the power went down.

I'm inclined to consider they got hit by a ransomware virus in the same way that the NHS had; more likely scrimped on keeping their operating system up to date.

 

[JohnD]

good programmers

I don't think the quality of the programming is relevant to this failure.

I will speculate that the in-house team who were chucked on the scrap heap might have had an average on ten years experience of all aspects of building, changing and recovering the system, and the disaster recovery procedure. It might even have been 20 years, and there will have been a sprinkling of people with special knowledge.

The only reason they were chucked out was to save money and run the business on the cheap.

I wonder if BA would be happy to throw out all their experienced engineers and get in hundred of new ones who had never worked on the particular model of jet that BA uses.