So who did BA outsource their IT to?

[MrMarkyMark]

A picture from happier times, TCS obviously discussing future doings at BA

[tomtomagain]

He rebuffed a claim from the GMB that the situation had been worsened by the outsourcing of IT jobs to India. “I can confirm that all the parties involved around this particular event have not been involved in any type of outsourcing in any foreign country. They have all been local issues around a local data centre who has been managed and fixed by local resources,” he said.

I was listening to the CEO defending his stance on off-shoring the technical expertise within his company and the thing that struck me is his very careful choice of wording.

Local Resources

Not "My team", "our IT staff" but a "Local Resource".

When I last worked in a hugely out-sourced UK company ( retailer, sells clothes and sandwiches, is always disappointing the markets ) a "local resource" was usually someone from an off-shore service provider on a visa.

So it's entirely possible that the roles have been outsourced and that is was the cause of the problem or at least delayed the resolution.

[SandyD]

Didn't RBS / Natwest give the exact same reason when they crashed a couple of times... security update ... no backout plan... electric surge ??

[MrMarkyMark]

Didn't RBS / Natwest give the exact same reason when they crashed a couple of times... security update ... no backout plan... electric surge ??

Funny......


TCS were involved there too

[SandyD]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_R...ystem_problems

A software update was applied on 19 June 2012 to RBS's CA-7 software[2] which controls its payment processing system. It later emerged that the update was corrupted by RBS technical staff.[3][4] Customers' wages, payments and other transactions were disrupted.[4][5] Some customers were unable to withdraw cash using ATMs or to see bank account details.[3][6] Others faced fines for late payment of bills because the system could not process direct debits.[5]
Stephen Hester, CEO of the RBS Group, said that the problem was caused by a software upgrade.[7] Unite union leaders criticised Hester's management of the episode, but Hester denied that the outsourcing of IT services to India was a factor in the problem, saying that the bank's IT services were mostly based in Edinburgh.[8] A spokesman for the RBS group said that the problem had occurred in the UK.[9]

Total lie re the IT in Edinburgh

[BrilloPad]

I was part of the transfer of systems from Churchill to Direct Line (ie RBS). Whilst I totally agree with your assessment, it was ironic that I would have put faith in Churchill's systems in the event of a major outage (prior to RBS taking everything back to the Stone Age).

Other big companies I have worked for had recovery that was known to fail. One of them at least had thought through what might have to happen. It was FMCG manufacture and would involve moving the product out into the car park and marking things with post-it notes. This is the one I advised not to go to SAP. A few years later they duly migrated to SAP and suffered a major outage, so major the company had to be bought out.

The point however is even though there will be problems, you should be able to have partial and increasing functionality. I was at Standard Chartered when the IRA blew up Dashwood House in the City. It took us a couple of weeks to restore the services from destroyed infrastructure but the business carried on right from the start. What seems to be lacking at BA is people managing the situation. You could argue that (like their aircraft and their Quick Reference Manuals) there should have been multiple redundancy and carefully developed recovery procedures to cover all likely scenarios but in the absence of such basic professionalism I would be looking for under-resourcing and haphazard outsourcing as the fatal management flaw here, leading to inability to intervene and hand hold the systems back into some sort of functioning. I do hope and pray that one day the IT boss will get sacked for taking bonuses through big risks, and big risks that backfire on innocent customers.

I remember the Bishopsgate bomb. UBS lost windows both in their main site and their DR site....

[cojak]

We aren't the only ones pondering this.

Electronics Weekly is having a good laugh as well.

Mystery surrounds BA outage

[scooterscot]

It's not WD anymore, it all moved down to Swanwick (near Fareham) about 10 yrs ago. Let's hope they didn't outsource that lot to TCS...

Nice refectory they have themselves Swanwick..

[eek]

We aren't the only ones pondering this.

Electronics Weekly is having a good laugh as well.

Mystery surrounds BA outage

Not sure the final paragraph of that report is correct

These statements do not rule out the possible explanation that experienced UK-based staff have been sacked and replaced by inexperienced contractors.

As I've never seen a UK firm sack a team and replace them with contractors - we have, however, probably all seen teams replaced with on-shored resources though....

[Pip in a Poke]

As a supporter of the Plain English Campaign, may I request that the title of this thread be renamed to "So, to whom did BA outsource their IT?" ?