eUpgrades - an observation
 

I find it strange that Altitude determines the number of eUpgrades that you are awarded, yet your balance is not displayed on the Altitude website. Anyone else find this odd? We have a separate eUpgrade site at AC.com instead.

Aside: how long do the 60k threshold bonus eUps take to post?

+1

I do always find that inconvenient.

Someone who knows AC well recently told me that everything in AC is in silos and the silos are very strong.

So someone gets handed a project to go build an eUp website. Their job is solely to build an eUp site. So, they build the eUp site. They're not required to integrate it with other functions of the website. So they don't, they just make it handle the eUp functions. Same thing with Altitude and so on.

It all starts to make so much more sense when you think about it in those terms.

I hear you. Yet Altitude can display your AE balance. So AC can integrate with AE, but not with itself. :)

Funny how that works, eh? :D

I'd take a modest pay cut to be given enough authority to completely revamp AC's IT.

I'd take the CTO job if I was given the budget and authority to dump IBM and go with someone else :p

But I wouldn't take a pay cut :p

I think it's beyond the CTO... the silo issue. And I suspect you would take a cut if you became CTO at AC. =P

I'm sure you techxperts could do a better job, but is this really a tech issue?

I feel like ultimately this is a problem more of leadership and culture. If you tell IBM to build a single, integrated website that lets you mange PNRs, track mileage, eUp, etc all in one place, I'm sure they can do that. Someone else might do it better and/or cheaper, sure, and that would be great. But unless the people at the top are prepared to break down the silos and make some tough decisions, you could have the most brilliant people in the world doing the coding and it would still suck.

Hence why I would want the CTO job.

The first thing I would do is set up a call with UA and DL to talk to them about how they built their systems.

The second thing would be to fire IBM.

Actually, here's a question for you guys. Other than the eUp system, which probably requires some sort of custom module or whatever, why does AC not buy a website off the shelf from someone else? I'm super-impressed with DL's. BA's is good. I like the UA site quite a bit as well, although I don't really use any of the MP-related stuff, so I don't know how well that's integrated.

It seems to me like the AC beta site is a step in the right direction but still a long way behind what I would consider the better airline websites I've used. So why not save a bunch of money and just licence the design from someone else? Obviously alliance links could be an issue, but other than that?

There might be some interesting technical challenges, but on the scale of "tech problems", the entire thing rates pretty low.

The leadership and culture issues are also probably pretty major - which is why, like cc said, you'd need to come in at the top.

The biggest problem, in my mind, is the existing technical debt and existing systems that work "well enough". All considered, AC's IT actually works quite well at its core business - ticketing, PNR, checking in, flight management, etc. The problem is that it's all been built over time since the 80s or even 70s, and there are huge swaths of stuff that reflected the best practices (by probably mid-level developers) of the time.

How would I handle that? Toss out the entire stack, and rewrite from scratch using modern distributed backends and tools - in parallel to the existing system, feeding from the existing system, running quiet and hidden until it is stable and correct enough that it can be slowly phased into production as a full replacement.

Multi-year R&D cost on top of the existing system with no tangible benefits for probably the first 18-24 months. But, when it's done, massive reduction in cost and massive increase in reliability, performance, and maintainability. Also massive improvement in analytical tooling, business intelligence, marketing, preventative maintenance.. probably improvements in OTP and other rather visible stuff.

Edit: Realistically, tossing the entire stack is unnecessary and probably too big a risk. But as an outsider, one can dream. :)

I don't think dl would be interested in helping a non alliance competitor improve its business.

ua might but that would probably be limited to starnet or whatever info is cross shared through the alliance. This is part of the reasons aiines join alliances to have it costs spread across many members (economis of scale) as opposed to building your own. Boarding area offers the same type of value proposition to its bloggers, so they can remain focused on creating content.

I bet IBM has some great cancellation clauses that would hose ac, just like ac does to their customers on a regular basis.

So just out of curiosity. What would ac be looking at cost/investment wise to build a parallel system like that?

Truth? No idea. Don't know enough.

But I'd have a hard time thinking it would be much more than $20m. Then again, it may cost $20m just to get rid of IBM.