Originally Posted by
Cathay Dragon 666
The airline industry is intertwined. Major changes made with backend servers on one airline need to be collaborated with ALL airlines or else information will be missed, misinterpreted, and I don't need to say how disastrous this can be if that happens. This is why airlines still uses dot-matrix across the board. It's not that they don't have the IT-know-how to upgrade, it's because it's not just your company's technology, it has to be the entire global airline industry need an overhaul, and with politics involved, it's becoming an impossible task, and people just fall back to the old mainframe that was setup decades ago. The current airline industry data were designed to be print out on dot-matrix, it's not as simple as just putting in laser printer and convert a few fonts here and there, trust me, if it's that easy they would of done it decades ago.
What I'm talking about is a separate system that simply collect passenger data, create a nice algorithm of analysis, and give management benchmarks to design custom programs that best fit the requirements of each category of passengers. As a IT expert that you claim, you will know this is not hard at all, and has NO direct relationship with legacy airline systems.
In the same way it's not as simple as plugging in a laser printer... gleaming customer analytics from a massive database of customer data really isn't that easy. I'm going to answer your concerns in a 3 parts because there's the tech piece, the data science/data analysis piece, and the corporate culture.
The tech isn't a matter of buying software, installing it, and running it. Companies like SAS can probably offer software for data analysis but then there's the implementation of the software which could take years with costs that just go into a black hole. Does anyone understand the data structure of the existing database (which we're going to assume is coming from the FFP rather than Amadeus)? Getting data out is massively complex. Do you need real time? Batch? Is there an ETL process? How does the interface work? Is there an interface available? Is the data coming out as relational data or is there some sort of parsing that needs to happen? Not plug and play.
Let's say you've embarked on a multi-year project and your system is built/installed. Great, now what? How complex is the data? Retail data is incredibly simple, customer A went to Tesco and bought X, Y and Z. This customer buys X, Y and Z every week but occasionally buys W. Let's see if we can get customer A to buy W more often. Generally retail customers will return if they are indifferent but won't return if something bad happens or someone offers something better. My industry (which I'd rather not discuss what I do for the sake of my anonymity) is massively complex. Our clients have no idea why customers leave or why customers come. Selling new products to them is key but their life circumstances don't necessarily mean they need a new product so what do you do? Even if you have a system in place, gleaming data from it is challenging. Correlation is not causation so even if males aged 40-45 generally do something, it may not have anything to do with the fact that they are males and aged 40-45.
Finally the corporate culture is huge. I've seen this time and time again with some of our clients. The CTO make a decision to buy the software but when it comes to implementation time everyone just wants to maintain status quo and rebuild what they used to have. It is incredibly rare for people to say "Let's find a better way to do things" or "How can I use this new software to increase productivity or sales." Generally people will just try to fit a square peg in a round hole because all they know is that round hole. Even when you provide these people with the tools to do things they could never do before they will look at you like you're crazy for suggesting that they could do more (like analyze their customers). They will almost always revert back to their original state of I used to print this report, show me how to print this report so I can sign my name on the bottom and give it to someone else because that's my job.