Originally Posted by
Agent69
I suspect that to a certain extent BA are a bit like the main UK banks. They have frail & ancient IT systems, that everyone is frightened of touching. Look what happened to TSB when they thought it would be a good idea to swap everything over to a new system.
This is precisely the problem BA faces.
For everyone commenting BA need to update their IT, it's because they are updating their IT systems that they face these problems.
When BA embarked on a program to update their Departure Control System to FLY they mapped out how all their systems interact, to both internal systsms and external systems. (Reservations, Check-in, BA Web and Mobile, Flight Scheduling, Crew Scheduling and rostering, Flight Planning and ATC, Safety Systems, Customer Relations systems and many others). What they learned was that all of these systems were so intertwined that you couldn't remove and upgrade a system without breaking everything. Complicating things further, many of their new systems were incompatible with old systems, so they had to find an interim solution as they update each system one by one.
So instead they created the SIP (systems integration platform). It's like a translator for all the systems. Everything is funnelled through the SIP now, rather than needing to speak directly to 30+ different systems. As they replace a legacy tool, they now only need to interface it with the SIP, rather than build 30 new connections. The plan was, once all systems were upgraded, they would rebuild the direct connections and retire the SIP.
The issue is, BA have essentially created a single point of failure in the SIP, and it is incredibly unstable due to the amount of data being processed through it.
So they are upgrading to some great IT solutions, starting with FLY/JFE at checkin, a new safety system last year, and a new flight ops and crew scheduling system was due this year. The problem is keeping all the systems talking to each other in the interim.