Reply to post: IT outsourcing

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

IT outsourcing

I used to work at BA - not in IT, but in an area that worked with IT day in and day out.

I, and many others left as the airline and capabilities that we loved gradually got ruined.

Most of the IT guys and gals were offered generous packages to leave. Three "global suppliers" were chosen, and all work had to be given to them. They would pitch for it, and cheapest nearly always won. Unsurprisingly the good IT people took the packages, and the less good stayed (some good stayed also, but not enough).

SIP / CAP / CAP2 / FICO / FLY - etc. are all complex systems, and when experience leaves then the support level goes down considerably. I think they have probably cut too much, the senior management don't have enough knowledge of IT to know when one cut is too much. The IT guys were resistant to change so the head was cut off the snake, then lots of yes people remained, and this is where we end up (as well as the complete outages of the website recently).

To say that this is unrelated to the removal of most of the people who knew how these systems worked is disingenuous. Two data centres, with back up power, so I fail to understand how one power surge could take out both of them independently - sounds more like a failed update / upgrade by inexperienced staff - and then a lack of experienced staff around to fix it.

Such a shame.

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