It's always embarrassing to make your mistakes in public. That's why you have beta testing, and that's why you design things from the beginning to be loosely coupled. Changing the front end shouldn't rely on changing the back end; inventing passes shouldn't require a complete rewrite of everything else. In my experience, IBM consultants over-engineer everything and create a system that might work as an internal "enterprise" app but is just useless as a public facing web-based app.

Were I to have been given this contract (and I'm qualified for it) I would have focused my efforts on uncoupling it, on creating components and modules. I would have on positioned the back end to be accessed by a variety of front ends, including the tools the internal staff use, the public web site, variants designed for PDAs, a variant for the voice mail hell system, and so on. Then I would have added web services so that assorted smart people could improve my offerings for me (think Amazon). I would have created not one but two beta sites, one with purchase disabled for a fairly large population of carefully chosen testers, and one with purchase enabled and a commitment from management to honour all the bookings, even those resulting from bugs, for a small population of trusted and diverse users. I would have ensured the site worked on a variety of browsers and was fully accessible for blind or non-mouse-using users. When I was done with it, it would have worked.

I don't see much benefit in being gentle with our opinions of the current site. It will only encourage them that once they get Hawaii working, or once they remove the "browser not supported" messages, that it will be fine. It's nowhere near fine, and not just the web interface. Getting bonuses you don't deserve, not getting bonuses you do deserve, getting silly emails that get your status wrong -- the whole system is riddled with errors. In my opinion that's because they can't change one part without breaking another. Fixing that will require drastic action, like getting a new vendor.

In my experienced opinion.