AC IT growing problems
 

I think the general population of FT in particular has been mostly unappreciative of AC's efforts to upgrade their web sites using IBM technology. The idea is to create a web site and pricing mechanism that is simple yet offers choices to each level of flier.

I spoke with a friend last night who headed up the installation of SAP in a major multinational company...a well over $100 million undertaking.
The beta testing was endless and when they went live with each module they still had serious obstacles to overcome and it took a lot of time to shake out the bugs. And AC has to be live 24/7/365. The company involved were able to shut downparts of most weekends to clean up bugs and deficiencies.

Its appropriate to comment here on the deficiencies we see but at least lets be objective which will help the techs get things up to speed faster.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'let's be objective' ... can you please elaborate.

Thanks.

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.

In my experienced opinion.


"Experienced opinions" are always welcomed and appreciated. Thanks for taking the time and trouble to post your opinions.

The minutae ofpicking on everything in a *****y mode does nothing to help improve the system. AC has many lurkers here and I don't think they are comfortable with the problems......but it is a roll out of new stuff.

The guy above who is "obviously" an IBM fan is a case in point. I pointed out in my thread starter that SAP took a lot of time and several major beatings to get a major multinational up and running smoothly. So are they worse than IBM or was that guy beating his own horn. His suggestions were ok but its too late for that since IBM is the vendor and we're stuck with what we've got.

I believe that in this instance, it is a request to keep your mouth shut unless you have something complimentary to say. Obviously, even the experienced opinion posted a little ways above would not be appreciated, since it is not only not laudatory in nature, but points out a possibly better process, based on experience and well thought out processes. If AC lurkers are cringing, then maybe it's because they know that the voice of experience is right.

I never said that...all I meant was for people to stop whining and be objective in their analysis as the problems will get fixed and will be better fixed if the concentration was on constructive criticism.

Of course coming from a character like you who openly acuses AC management of sexual harrassment hiding behind an alias...constructive is not in your dictionary. :rolleyes:

the long winded guy was suggesting a vendor change...how constructive can one get :rolleyes:

Parnel is right!

We should be constructive in our comments. Yes, it is frustrating and we should report what we find here so that AC lurkers will fix things.
It is not possible to get everything fixes in advance if Beta testing uses only in house staff to test.
Why don't we offer a group pf FT'ers to AC as beta testers. I am sure we could find more bugs in a few hours than they would in a few days because of the diversity of our needs and the cities we travel to. I can raise this with Duncan Dee when we meet him Thursday. We could be given access to the staging server with passwords that would expire after a while for obvious security reasons.

For example, yesterday I was on ac.com and got a one way economy fare from HKG to YOW for 10,000 $ !! It probably means that no one tried that combination in beta testing.

There can be no excuse for this fiasco. A major company should not be going into the public realm with a system that does not function on so many levels. After last week's ludicrous emails to SEs, and this weekend's thorough disregard for a major segment of its customer base -- Macs are used disproportionately by the creative community, who represent a far larger customer base to a company like AC than they do in the general public -- one has to wonder why AC remains with a supplier like IBM.

And my experience last night with Tech Support was abysmal and thoroughly uncaring. The guys there are engineers not customer service reps. The attitude taken was it was my fault for using a Mac, and that I should be able to reset my system to work with theirs. This is not customer friendly, and this has further eroded any desire I have to stick with AC where I have a real choice.

BTW, can't even get the AC site to load this morning...

Let's not go too far there... A fiasco? Only for a limited number of people, of whom I am one. I can still make bookings - even international bookings via the multi-city function. I had a similar experience, and similar poor customer service from a help desk, when ESPN cut over to a new display that my browser/operating system can't handle. In that case, they lost me entirely. Here, I have hope AC will fix things, but if they don't it will lose revenue and deservedly so, although the Classic Mac crowd is small and shrinking. Most creative people I know aren't using Classic anymore. They are on OS X with at least a G5 Power Mac or Powerbook. My computer is coming up on seven years old, my monitor is even older (I bought it used). Rogers can't help me when something goes wrong because they are similarly backward and unfeeling towards older Mac users. Each of us will find a different solution. Some will gift other carriers with business. Some will go through a call centre or travel agent or maybe get the SE desk to help. My solution - independent of this situation - is to buy another computer in mid-2005 because I just have to keep up with the evolving technology. My G3 Powermac is just too slow now.

As for a fiasco, check Westjet's November traffic release. Now that is a fiasco, and it involves what should be a mature computer system.

Hey SH have you tried getting your ebills from MA Bell in the last three months..they launched a new billing system and it worked so badly they didn't even bother to collect money for three months until they got the bugs out. I could not even download my cell phone usage properly.
BTW mac users are only 5% of the computer population so why should they prioritize that.
That real choice is because you no longer have AC or any other elevated status with other carriers...at least tell the truth.

Note to AC IT lurkers:

Firefox 1.0 browser is not recognized. I get the 'some features may not work..' message. Since Firefox is rapidly growing in poularity (especially in Europe) you may want to adjust the main HTML...

As a recent graduate of a software engineering program I can tell you all that AC'ss IT department seems to have absolutely no idea about software standards. AS some of you may know, the HTML language family has standards that are defined by an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which ALL modern browsers are built to work with. Some browsers can handle errors in the standard better than others, but if a page is built exactly to standards there should be no problems displaying it. I can tell you from experience that making a dynamically generated page follow all of the standards can be a bit of a pain, but a large corporation like AC should have little trouble making this happen. I tried running ACs homepage through the validator that is provided on W3C's site and it shows 263 errors on the homepage alone. If you want to try it for yourself go here: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...en%2Fhome.html

Are you sure about this? I was under the impression that, in general, IBM technology was not being used. Although I don't have 100% confidence in my sources on this.

I'm inclined to disagree with any forgiving position on AC's performance, speaking as an IT practioner for the past 4 decades. If my company experienced these sorts of problems during alpha testing, we would be taking a pretty serious look at why our unit testing failed. For something like this to happen during beta testing would almost certainly be cause for personnel changes. It this happened in production ... well, it wouldn't matter much, we'd probably be out of business.

On the other hand, AC might have made a deliberate decision just to implement the changes without performing a full test and let the customers find the errors. There's no better test environment than the real one. This might not be a very good approach for the company image, but it can save a lot of time and money.

I believe this new launch marks the switch to Amadeus' e-travel platform. As announced here:

http://www.e-travel.com/about/pr06282004.asp

In Destina's recent communication they mention they are also moving to an Amadeus platform.

Not sure how much involvement IBM would have - it seems that the majority of the problems are related to the reservations portion of the site.