BA – Blinking Awful?

I haven’t posted for a while as I’ve been very busy working with clients on industry 4 projects, but the recent IT outage for British Airways (BA) requires a response. (for more information on the BA IT outage follow this [link])

In August 2016, I examined the cost of the IT outage to DELTA airlines [link]. I calculated that this must have cost DELTA at least $60m [correction:  with related costs the post says it would be $100m]. In the wake of the BA story the FT published an article over the weekend [link] looking at the top 5 IT outages. They tell us that DELTA believed that it cost them at least $100m.

We’ll wait and see what effect that BA outage has on their revenues – but IAG (the owner for BA) declared a profit of about £2Bln for 2016, so there is a chance that this will have the possibility to knock 10% off the earnings for 2017.

Now – in an eerily similar set of circumstances to Delta – the company had recently outsourced their IT and they experienced a “power surge” and the back-up system didn’t work.

The following seem likely to me:

1. The digitisation of business has happened and is accelerating, IT systems are not peripheral to operations they are now crucial.
2. The creation, management and care of these systems are critical, but it appears that there is no-one on the senior leadership team who is on the case.
3. The focus on “business cases” for IT investment don’t consider the transformation of current business operations, nor the risk of “not investing”

This posts talks about the need to prepare non-linear business cases [link].

The Oil and Gas industry (and others) are becoming rapidly digitised and will require different investment decisions around IT. It is no longer appropriate to concentrate on cutting costs, driving standardisation and outsourcing the activities. In operations “IT” is now critical to business success. This means good investment decisions drive competitive advantage and loss of IT capability can cripple the business.