UltraRant

I found an article in last Friday's Computerworld (August 21, 2015), a Norwegian newspaper for nerds like me. It had a very interesting 4 page article about SAS IT. Here are some of the highlights:

Apparently SAS sold it's IT department in 2003 so it could do outsourcing to consultants and partners. Nothing strange there, it was the fashion at the time. After being almost bankrupt in 2012, SAS decided to hire Norwegian's IT chef Hans-Petter Aanby. He had a three-year mission to clean up, improve quality and reduce costs significantly.

The first he did was getting new agreements with the consultant companies and all who delivered to SAS. He also got rid of about 70% of all IT staff (reduced from 211 to 60) and centralized all SAS IT to Stockholm. He also changed out all servers in the server park. IT was a hugely expensive monster in SAS and creating more costs than reducing them.

For the system cleanup, he had to get some people out of retirement: SAS had over 1200 operations systems, the oldest being from 1972. The number of systems has now been reduced from 1200 to 800 and should go even further down to 600.

One of the things he focuses on is quality control. He acknowledges that SAS has been quite naive in trusting (outsourcing) partners and that those partners have strongly underestimated the complexity of running an airline, also from an IT point of view. A big problem was, for example, that the systems were 'introvert', meaning not going crazy in case an error popped up, resulting in SAS IT staff missing out on a lot of errors and thus on quality control. This is one of the things he gradually changes. He recommends to stay very strict and very closely involved to all development carried out by third parties. Also, look a bit further ahead than just the initial (cheap) offer to get a job done.

Despite his job not being done yet, Aanby pointed SAS in the right direction. The idea is that the company will now complete this project in the next year(s).


Anyway, if the above is true it absolutely makes sense why we also have and had bad experiences with SAS IT. I seriously hope we will see some improvements in the next year(s), although I don't expect much from a company that barely has any IT staff left to run 600 systems...

FlyingMoose

To me this summaries to the problem being SK's management blindly following outsourcing trends because there is short term gain on the balance sheets while ignoring the predictable long term implications and failures. This is where a competent CIO should have prevented that. I recall from one of the Swedish posts they just hired a new CIO, I recall it was the previous CIO for systembolaget. As much as I hate that company, at least their website and systems seem to work and there is hope for SK.

I certainly hope his focus will be on in-sourcing and reducing number of systems to a 2 digit count along with introducing modern development practices.

livious

My wife and I were just noting that we have seen fewer and fewer IT problems related to SAS. Perhaps this is due to the changes being made? Either way, I am glad to see something published on the topic and we can likely all attest that the IT was in shambles for quite some time. There is still a ways to go, but at least they are aware of the situation and trying to make improvements👍.

With that being said, I shall now go light myself on fire after giving moderate praise to SAS IT. The end of the world must be coming😀

fassy

Hmmm, what I see so far:
+ the website is more stable since about 18 month or so. Before that it was total disaster
+ all the country sites have been aligned. flysas.com, sas.se,sas.no and sas.dk have been setup different and behaved differently before
+ EuroBonus login rarely fails, was soooo broken 2 years ago.
+ the iPhone/Android app has finally reached a level where I'm just happy, does what it should do and rarely has problems.
- Still not possible to use the booking engine for more than a simple r/t or one way ticket. Even there the options for connecting is really poor...
- booking seats, booking meals, etc are a total miss. Do they even test what they deploy to the live system?
- still no good way to easy way to restrict searches for both regular tickets as for awards tickets to Plus or C. Will always default to Y

baby steps... but improving.

oliver2002

The fact that they switched everything (RM/CRS/DCS) to Altea fixed most of the operational bugs, no rocket science there. That switch necessitated the update of the front ends in reservation (NDP (New Distribution Platform) became Altea CM, EDISS (Effective Dialog In Station and Sales), 'Fastlane' became Amadeus e-retail ) and OLCI, where this time they went with standard out of the box stuff. Eurobonus got a makeover with some tools from Aimia (aka Aeroplan)

Operationally, they have switched the entire cockpit related stuff to the LHS LIDO suite. An example: http://www.lhsystems.com/media/news/...a-systems.html But it still flogs RODOS.

Anyway, my point is SAS went for new coherent business software to streamline their operations. I doubt it was the CIO alone.

UltraRant

As often, I am seriously impressed by your in-depth knowledge of things. Can I ask you: do you work in aviation (or related) for a living?

And thanks for the additional information. As said, according to the article the man was hired as CIO for 3 years to do a proper clean up. It didn't read how big his mandate was exactly, but it looked like carte blanche.

livious

Unless Oliver has changed jobs since we last met, he does not work in the aviation industry. However, he is an amazing source of accurate information👍

FlyingMoose

Agreed, number of total downtime and times it didn't function at all have decreased substantially.

Don't forget the language selection button! The first thing just about any foreign visitor would need doesn't work. When you select a different language it explicitly states "Your selection will be saved for your next visit", this is an absolute lie and hasn't worked for the past decade. Very frustrating, similar to websites making language assumptions based on source IP.

This needs fixing, along with being able to specify specific flights you want to take even on other partner airlines.

Specifically frustrating on the meal part as the default meal is inedible.

I have no to zero issues with seat booking. Always book the same seat during booking and it always sticks.

Cash and points tickets removed every need to book award tickets and the search engine for those works the same as for regular tickets. Just a shame the ticket type is restricted to SK's own network.

oliver2002

Never worked for anything aviation related, 15+ years with my current employer in the chemical industry , just take my hobby seriously

UltraRant

Deutsche Gruendlichkeit ad litteram.

jrcplus

Very interesting. Thanks @UltraRant for posting the article summary and starting this thread. And yes, SAS IT definitely seems to be improving lately.

Tango Alpha

Thanks for posting and making resume. Interesting.

Personally I haven’t encountered significant improvements on SAS IT.

Still big down time on web site, problems with time out “Your session has timed out. Start over” and then it is impossible to start over, and then there is this year old message “for the time being it is not possible to cancel/modify your booking online, please contact SAs customer service.” And for years it has been impossible to retrieve a booking, which was made without the EB-number, and get it connected to your profile. Please call SAS service Center”...

klmml

My latest bugbear when trying to check seat assignments in MMB:

"Your request could not be processed because the system is already processing a request from you. If you were trying to confirm a booking, please review your trip list to check whether your trip has been confirmed. (3002)"

I can't wait for the "new digital platform with a new design and new functionality"... but for now I'd settle for being able to check my seat assignments.

Amexpat

I've also noticed that there have been less problems with their IT the last year or so, with one major exception.

When my EBG card expired, I got three new cards with the old expiration date and was told by some reps that I had to get my new card from Diners even though I had cancelled my co-branded card in 2011. I finally got someone in the know to call me (in response to an email sent to Eivind Roald) and was told that other EB users have had the same problem and the IT supplier for the card had not been able to find the root cause of the problem. By coincidence, I got the correct EBG card the same day, so I guess that problem was solved.

FlyingMoose

The new issue appears to be priorities. The amount of money, time and effort invested to develop the new "my maps" addition to the App, instead of taking 5% of the time to improve it with support for check-in and boarding passes for US bound trips makes no sense at all. New features are great if they are useful, but prioritising them over missing core functionality that other airlines have supported for years puzzles me.

It has never made sense to me why SK simply can't issue a new non-branded card (if the traveler so desires) when you have one of the creditcards. There should be no limitations in doing so, alternatively they could try harder to make the cards unnecessary or make the digital version in the App a full alternative.