Rolling IT blackouts?

Jane Prusakova's picture
Submitted by Jane Prusakova on Sat, Jan 17 2009 - 6:32 PM

It took over an hour to purchase an airline ticket this morning. The Continental Airlines website is broken, the phone lines are busy, and the agent had to go to great lengths to work around the problems in the internal system to actually be able to sell a ticket.

Is it the result of the layoffs? Continental has laid off 3000 people in 2008. At least a few of those 3000 must have been the key contributors to running the Continental Airlines IT infrastructure.

A number of other large companies' and brands' websites appear to work poorly or suffered a widely-publicized outages lately: in addition to Continental Airlines website being broken this morning, there was a Gmail outage in August 2008, Mastercard.com was not working properly earlier this week, and AT&T has had multiple issues with their data network on the East coast.

A well-working IT is not the main business for any of these companies, however, it is an important part of the infrastructure and customer connection. (With the exception of Google, but then Gmail is not their main business either.) Even if the IT infrastructure goes down, the company may think it is still in business and all is well. But it is not!

It appears to be yet another manifestation of the recession - quality considerations go out the window, together with brand integrity and sound management practices. Massive layoffs contribute to declining standards: there is simply not enough people, and the remaining employees are more concerned about keeping their jobs, than about doing them well.

Comments

matt's picture

Yes, I agree. I have heard

Submitted by matt on Sat, Jan 17 2009 - 9:24 PM.

Yes, I agree. I have heard rumors at my company that IT is going to get hit hard this year. Years back we had so many IT issues that the topic getting work done was a running joke. In bad weeks, folks commonly wrote in weekly status reports that 1-3 days were lost due to infrastructure issues.

I think decision makers sometimes decide conclude "it works now, so it'll continue to work if we let people go, or we'll wing it." Nothing is for free.

softwarejanitor's picture

Unfortunately I've seen the

Submitted by softwarejanitor on Sun, Jan 18 2009 - 12:53 AM.

Unfortunately I've seen the same thing. My employer made significant cuts in IT, especially in the Austin office, where we are down to one person (from 4 a few years ago). We actually were down to zero -- they laid off our last sysadmin a while back... but of course the inevitable happened. A production system crashed and nobody knew how to fix it. The knowledge of the care and feeding of critical systems went out the door when people were allowed to leave or laid off w/o any transfer to anyone else. The company ended up having to bring the sysadmin laid off back as a contractor -- which of course is actually more expensive, while she is getting paid less and w/o benefits. Nice.

Oh, and a lot of the other IT functions, desktop support, help desk, etc., have been off-shored to Bangalore or Manilla. Needless to say... Quality? Not. People who have to get passwords re-set, etc, often take hours or days of frustration to get done what the in-house, on-site person used to be able to cheerfully handle in minutes. It definitely wastes time of more expensive people and has a negative impact on getting business done and providing service to customers. But management doesn't care -- in fact they heap praise on how great things are now. They either don't know or won't admit that quality, productivity and morale are suffering.

And people wonder why I am frustrated...