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Steps to Computer Upgrades

A lot of you know that I have mentioned some computer upgrades that are coming, and that the timing of these are dependent upon other upgrades. In turn, I know some of you are impatient with this pace. This article from the Dallas Morning News yesterday will give you an idea of the complexity of the issue. CS2 is obviously the core and it has to be in place and working before all of the other good stuff can come along. So, we are making progress, and this is one of the big hurdles we are about to have jumped.
Brian

Quote:

Originally Posted by DMN article

Remember that scene from Meet the Parents where actor Ben Stiller waits as an airline agent types in about a million keystrokes to find out if he can get an earlier flight?

I saw a guy on TV a few weeks ago describe checking his bags as enough keystrokes to program the space shuttle.

I'm glad to see the silos are coming down!

Quote:

Originally Posted by BNA-WNFan (Post 10088206)

I'm glad to see the silos are coming down!

Yeah, those silos are what prevents us from introducing a lot of the new Customer Service enhancements that we have on tap, like better proactive information during irregular operations. Everything is intertwined, and it is complicated to unwind those ties and reconnect in a more streamlined manner.

This item from the article caught my eye:

"More important, the new system provides the foundation for several other key technology projects that Southwest plans to roll out to bolster its competitive position in 2009, including a revamping of its frequent-flier program. "

Can you expand on what revamping of the FF program is planned?

medic, please refer to the thread titled "Official Rapid Rewards 2.0 speculation."

[Quoted from a different thread:]

Quote:

Originally Posted by SWAVictor (Post 10031604)

As we have publicly stated we are hard at work to make improvements to our website, so I'm interested in knowing what you feel are the current shortcomings of the Plan Trip page. Of course, I can't promise what will or won't be implemented - but we do value our Customers input, and would like to know what about this part of the process isn't working well for you today...

Is there something else about the search that is currently leaving us behind industry standards?

Victor, thanks again for dropping by, your participation here is much appreciated.

I apologize in advance if this comes across sounding sarcastic, but in response to question two: does your department have its own list of shortcomings and/or design goals, or should I start from scratch? I'm kind of thinking that maybe WN employees, perhaps because they don't have to use travel web sites very much, really don't have much experience with state-of-the-art features used on other sites. If you do have a list it would save me countless hours of work to start there; heck, perhaps you have everything I need already in the works. I presume you can't post such a list publicly, but I'd happily sign a non-disclosure agreement to be able to see it privately and thus be better able to discuss these matters with you.

Also, out of curiosity, I'm wondering about several things related to the development of southwest.com. I realize you might not be at liberty to answer them all, at least publicly, but here goes:

What year was the southwest.com web interface to the booking engine deployed?
Was it an internal project or was it developed by an outside contractor?
If internal, how many, if any, of the original developers still with the company?
Is the online team separate from the team working on the back-end systems? If they are the same group I can see that it would be difficult to take them away from the back-end work to spend time on the other parts of the system.

Finally, in terms of the feedback you seek, how much detail and technical specificity would you like? Should I go to the level of pointing out that "visibility" is misspelled as "visiblity" on line 599 of the reservations default style sheet? (I did not make that up as a hypothetical, it really is misspelled.) As Victor no doubt realizes, user agents ("browsers" to the lay person) are required to ignore the invalid declaration. I have not attempted to trace the affected class and where it might be used to determine whether this error ever comes into play.

To tie this in to Brian's original post, I need to explain that I assume the overall system consists of three relatively distinct major components:

The HTML forms and pages with which the web site visitor interacts;
The southwest.com web server(s), in particular the CGI programs installed thereon; and
The back end systems, presumably consisting of the 1991 vintage mainframe applications.

If I am mistaken about the above, please clarify for us.

I realize that upgrading the back end is an enormous undertaking. (I wonder, though, why y'all can't just pay the garage-o-mizer dude to stay home for a week or two and knock out the whole project for you! :D) All kidding aside, I maintain that significant enhancements to the user experience could be made with changes to system components one and two in the list above. Many of these enhancements would be easily implemented, some would take a bit more effort. I also believe that relatively few of the things I have in mind would require waiting for the major overhaul of the back-end system. (In fact I have recently been successful building a few experimental workarounds for some of the impediments that cause my own interactions with southwest.com to be so inefficient—despite the fact that as of the morning of 14-July I knew virtually nothing about writing DHTML; I could not have even written the "Hello World" script in JS without Googling for it.)

As an aside to the above, has anyone on the online team looked at the comments and suggestions in several previous threads on this topic, such as the one titled ""A much needed web site enhancement, please" or "Wish list: flight status for previous day" (the thread started by nsx that finally induced me to join FT!) I know Brian mentioned bringing up some of those suggestions, but, for example, last time I made a southwest.com purchase my credit card information was still being saved in my forms completion file, and that is not a good thing from a security perspective.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ftnoob (Post 10091293)

Should I go to the level of pointing out that "visibility" is misspelled as "visiblity" on line 599 of the reservations default style sheet?

Quote:

Originally Posted by ftnoob

(In fact I have recently been successful building a few experimental workarounds for some of the impediments that cause my own interactions with southwest.com to be so inefficient—despite the fact that as of the morning of 14-July I knew virtually nothing about writing DHTML)

Quick - hire this guy.

ftnoob -

Wow! I really didn't anticpate you spending even this much time on a response - I certainly don't want you to spend countless hours on it - I know your time is valuable - and we have a whole team of software engineers to figure all of that out.

As I stated in another thread, I do speak a little geek . . .but I'm definately not a software engineer - I'm a marketing guy! so most of the detailed analysis you offer would really be a bit lost on me.

Basically, I was wanting to know what part of the "plan trip" and "search" functions the OP was finding lacking.

Although you are correct that most of us don't have a "need" to use other travel websites, we are by nature curious - and always interested in what our competitors (including other airlines and travel sites) are offering, so we spend a fair amount of time doing competitive research. Keep in mind that Southwest has always taken the "keep it simple" approach, and we don't add "bells and whistles" just for the sake of having them. We have to know that they actually provide value to our Customers or the company.

We do have our own list of both design and functionality goals - and, you are correct I cannot share them publicly - I'm sure you understand that our competitors would be very interested in knowing what we have planned.

I can answer some of your specific questions though:

What year was the southwest.com web interface to the booking engine deployed? April 30, 1996
Was it an internal project or was it developed by an outside contractor? Developed Internally
If internal, how many, if any, of the original developers still with the company? I'm honestly not sure - but I know some of them are
Is the online team separate from the team working on the back-end systems? If they are the same group I can see that it would be difficult to take them away from the back-end work to spend time on the other parts of the system. This is where it starts to get really complicated, and takes us back to where SWABrian started with this thread. There are a fixed number of IT Employees, and while they are typically dedicated to specific areas, you can't really redevelop the backend without modifying the front end and vice versa. So all projects involving the website are fighting for the same fixed set of resources. There are also inter-dependancies with other internal systems, so in some cases even if we had the resources to update the website - we may not be able to get those other systems updated due to other projects on their plates. Remember that the website is really a front end to all of the same back-end systems used by all of our other departments. Every department has its wish list - and when resources are shared, there has to be prioritization of projects. Projects that save on costs or generate revenue will always get prioritized above the "nice-to-haves". We are tackling all of the changes that Gary refers to (Rapid Rewards, Codeshare, web redesign, new ticketing system, and new airport computer system) with a "big picture view" so that they all work together seamlessly going forward and provide cost savings, revenue opportunities, and Customer convenience.

Finally, Yes, I have read the other threads you refer to, and have gotten some great ideas from them. I incorporate many of those ideas into the ongoing discussions about where the website is going in the future. In fact, while I am a new poster - I have read nearly every post in this forum for the last several years.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SWAVictor (Post 10095327)

In fact, while I am a new poster - I have read nearly every post in this forum for the last several years.

;)

Make some of the hi level executives learn the system themselves, they would change it if they had to deal with it.

[I myself just spent 2 weeks volunteering my time revamping a small peer to peer network system for a non-profit] Not coding, but very time intensive!

I'm looking forward to seeing the changes that SWABrian is writing about.

With regard to the current southwest.com...

from my personal opinion...what's there to complain about? I can book a ticket in less than 60 seconds (I know where I'm going and what flights I want), and I can check my Rapid Rewards Balance quickly also.

Compared to the travesty that is United.com, I'll take the simplicity of the southwest.com site any day.

Quote:

Originally Posted by auggie doggie (Post 10095771)

Augie,
Here's an example of those changes, and this one isn't a secret. The article to which I linked way up at the top is about our new airport computers. Once they are in place, it will give our Airport Employees complete access to the Ticketless system, and they can finally sell Ticketless for travel. Until now, the airports only saw a snap shot of the most current available funds. And, if they needed to change a reservation, even during irregular ops, they would have to "drop" the funds to a paper ticket before changes could be made. Then, those paper funds go off the radar so to speak of our reservations folks. The only way to track paper ticket usage is through our finance computers. That's just one of the things CS2 will correct and simplify.

And ftnoob and Insulator-King, our current VP of Marketing, Sales, and Distribution, Kevin Krone, was one of the members of the Team that developed the Southwest Home Gate which became southwest.com. Our "high-level executives" aren't living in a vacuum. They fully know the importance of upgrading all of our systems, and they regularly meet with our IT project Leaders--the folks who are doing the actual design and programming. It's not a question of lack of knowledge or will to change, its battling through years of complexity brought on by systems designed to meet a need for a department but not necessarily being able to talk to other systems within the Company.

Now, we have that uniformity in vision, we are bringing uniformity to our systems, but it takes time to unravel 30 years or so of independent system silos.

Quote:

Southwest has been testing CS2 at airports in Amarillo, Midland and Tulsa, Okla. It will be rolled out to Love Field at the end of the month and expanded to the rest of Southwest's system by mid-November.

Very nice to hear it is being beta tested in real service situations. I know of too many companies who release software updates or new systems and just do a cursory beta test and then launch it live on their entire system. Remember US upgrading their systems when they merged the HP and US systems. Wasn't it all check-in kiosks were down for the better part of a weekend?

I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but here's something that affects me just about every time I plan for travel:

There should be a one-click way to switch between Standard Reservations and Rapid Rewards reservations without having to re-enter the travel dates and cities. Better yet would be to just go ahead and add columns for Freedom Awards and Standard Awards to the Standard Reservations search results if the user is logged into their Rapid Rewards account and has at least one voucher available.