Graeme Gibson wrote:
Well, I agree completely with PS. I felt that there was just a hint of
"look the other way while I cover my arse" in the tone of the complaint
by the Air NZ chief. Somewhere in there he knows that ultimately he,
and his board, are responsible for keeping their airline running.. and
pointing the finger and blustering; "Well, the single-point-of-failure
(IBM) we signed off on just should not have failed!!" is him trying to
dodge that responsibility issue. Even if they had entirely in-house IT
they should still be planning how to function while it's out of action.
As RS has pointed out, being totally unable to operate what is
essentially just a glorified bus service without their computers makes
'em look like amateurs. Every organisation needs to consider what
they'll do, when, not if, an extended computer outage hits them.
To be fair to Air NZ, it's a bit more complicated than that.
Computerization is one of the things that makes airlines seem like a
glorified bus service. For example, before you fly you need to know:
- who is on the flight
- who has luggage on the aircraft, and cross reference that with the
passengers
- how much the loaded aircraft weighs
- that passengers, luggage and freight are loaded so that the aircraft
is within centre of gravity limits.
Simple enough when the computer does it, but it becomes time consuming
if you have to do it manually.
I'm sure they have manual procedures, but they have an additional
problem - if they wait until the computer comes back, they can resume
using the computer immediately. Once they switch to manual processing
the computer information becomes out of date, and they probably have to
continue manual processing even after the system is available. It might
be more difficult to go back to automated processing than it was to go
manual in the first place. So the switch to manual would be a costly
decision in itself, and you wouldn't do it if you were expecting the
system to be back soon.
--
Andrew Rowley
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