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May 3, 2005
Classic Scapegoating
You may recall the fiasco that befell Delta's regional jet service Comair (Com-"scare") over Christmas of 2004. Their aging SBS flight crew reservation system choked, canceling thousands of flights, and costing their new parent company, Delta, in the neighborhood of $20 mill. In this article, they fault Comair and Delta not replacing the software sooner. However, IMHO, I think one could easily argue that the risks of replacing the software outweigh the risks of not replacing the software. The glitch that unraveled the airline was that the crew management application could not handle more than 32,000 per month before shutting down.
On January 17th of this year, Delta forced Comair's President Randy Rademacher to step down. To me, this is absurd. There's no way anyone could have known that the flight reservation system was going to behave that way, nor is there any crystal ball that would indicate that, had the system been replaced, the new system wouldn't have suffered a similar fate or worse.
I can tell you this, if you think that the IT group running Comair is inordinately clueless, you'd be mistaken. IT departments today are supporting countless systems, both home-grown, and off-the-shelf. All of these applications require ongoing maintenance to correct existing problems, enhance functionality, and to comply with new requirements. All of these millions of lines of code are, at best, poorly understood. Various people understand bits and pieces of each application. Collectively, they manage the programs, fixing them when the fail, which isn't uncommon.
The only real difference between the system failure suffered by Comair is mainly that it occurred in a highly visible system at a critcal time (the holiday rush). The reality is that Randy Rademacher is a scapegoat, and if you think Comair was a disaster, wait until a similar problem happens at the nation's nuclear power plants or Norad down in Colorado Springs.
http://www.cio.com/archive/050105/comair.html
Posted by Peenie Wallie on May 3, 2005 at 2:30 PM
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