Originally Posted by
flybymonkey
Whilst not perfect like the PR disaster of the florescent waistcoat he did secure funding (approx $400m) for service improvement, food, lounge refurbishments and even Club Suites. Also the IT issues steamed well past Walsh and his predecessors. the last 10 years have been a real headache for them bringing them all forward and up to date, I was told this by an employee in the IT dept. He also had time to speak to people and was not shy of the camera.
Alex did one thing right: Club Suite and killing the previous design that was being floated about by Keith (there was a thread here a while back). His other ideas in the service/customer space were either failures or unmitigated disasters.
IT-wise, when the whole outsourcing kicked off (I seem to think it was in late 2014) BA had an IT architecture that was more convoluted of one of those conspiracy theories where Covid, 9/11 and something else are all the product of reptilian overlords. A mixture of on-prem, cloud, built in house and sourced elsewhere. Staff knew it inside out, and also was aware of the need to modernise. A smart way forward [hindsight is 20/20, obviously] would've been to implement some senior changes, bring in true experts in cloud and modern architectures and, as the cloud move progressed, slowly move into a hybrid way of working with a small-ish cadre of IAG Tech product owners and contracted 'doers'... but instead they offsourced everything wholesale and in 2017 the first, big outage took place.