Originally Posted by
davidjohnson6
The problem for the average CIO, is that it typically takes a few years and a lot of money to migrate the company off a bunch of legacy systems. If those systems are absolutely critical to the company (and these exist at all firms), the migration had better be perfect... or the CIO gets pushed under the bus when problems occur and customers complain. Furthermore, after the passage of a few years, at least a few of the C board members will likely have moved jobs or retired... so the benefit of the capex spend is not seen under their watch. The annual accounts don't really show investment in IT, and most investors will have sold and be long gone by the time a new IT system comes online.
Unless the CEO begs the CIO to migrate to a new system... it's literally more than the CIO's job's worth to do anything more than tinkering.
I write this as someone who knows a lot about Amazon's cloud product (AWS), but regret how depressing it really all is...
BA's IT infrastructure will improve significantly only if Luis Gallego (no, not Sean Doyle) wants it to improve
It shouldn't be that different from investing in new cabins or aircraft. A decision was made to allow the hard product in the remaining B767s to become dinosaurs in market and eventually invest in new A320NEOs which are comparably more modern and way less comfortable. The investment decision was a medium term one.
Despatch reliability is an operational need, as is systems reliability. It's all about management buy-in, some leaders get it, some don't. The ones who don't just store up all the pain until it breaks and the next guy has a world of problems. Just like Boeing using the GE model to maximise short term shareholder value over putting the longer term interests of the business on a sound footing. One day the ball gets dropped and you get the Nightmareliner, Frankentanker and the MAX crashes.
Real leaders see IT as a BAU necessity and aren't afraid to get it right. Putting the pain off just make the cumulative agony worse.