Different Times, Same Mindset

It’s mid-December 2020 and once again the UK stands on a precipice, with the options of crashing out of the European Union under a Free Trade Agreement that will decimate[1] the economy (at best) or without one, in which case things will be substantially worse. Millions of words have been written about how we got into this stupid predicament but just recently I have been looking at it in a slightly different light and reflecting on an experience from my professional life late in the last century.

In the mid 1990s I was responsible for a division of an IT services company that provided computer reservations systems to airlines around the world. Before I got the job the company had entered an agreement to supply a very large system to an airline in another country. I am trying hard not to identify the airline here although people who know me in real life will immediately identify it from my description of the situation. This airline was state-owned and its management had what can only be referred to as a civil service mentality. The particular state had an interesting approach to ensuring diligence on the part of its employees. Every decision ever taken by a government employee was subject to review at any time up to that employee’s death. Any decision that was determined to be sufficiently wrong could result in criminal prosecution. The best way to avoid that danger was quite simple. Never take a decision. 

Unfortunately the avoidance of decision making is a bit of a problem when you are trying to implement a comprehensive update of an entire company’s commercial, operational and administrative processes. On the upside, the team that I inherited on the ground at the airline’s head office was made up of highly competent people and I had a project manager who was skilled in managing the customer’s politics. As a result the project made progress – slower than it should have done, but progress nevertheless. I spent a lot of time there myself. Later I calculated that I had visited the site, which was a nine hour flight away, thirty times over a two year period. 

Gradually the project inched towards completion. Many software modifications were made to accommodate the airline’s own particular ways of doing business. In general the airline management was looking for us to change the system such that they would not have to be responsible for changing anything under their control. The technical team worked absolute wonders to do most of it but some of the requests were simply impossible to fulfil. Sometimes it was down to contradictory requirements from different parts of the organisation but other things they asked for were literal impossibilities. Progress meetings became fraught as we brought in experts to explain why the thing they were asking for simply couldn’t be done, not by us and not by anyone. We asked them to put forward any expert they could identify to tell us we were wrong and how we were wrong but they could not – or at least they did not. 

In the end the issues were escalated. The airline’s CEO talked to my CEO and the CEO of my parent company. They agreed that all efforts must be made to bring the system into production and that I must work with the senior airline management to bridge the gaps and get cutover done. 

I went to the airline’s head office and determined to stay there until there was a solid plan for cutover in place. I took the approach of triage. Working with my excellent project manager I collected all the outstanding issues and divided them into three categories. Category 1 issues were cutover-critical. We agreed that we would fix them to the customer’s satisfaction before the system went live. Category 2 issues were ones that the customer could live with. We agreed that subject to time and resource availability we would fix as many of them as we could before cutover but we explicitly stated that we were not guaranteeing anything about this category of issue. This was very important because this was where we parked the actual impossibilities. The things that couldn’t be done by us or, as far as we knew, by anyone else on the planet. Category 3 issues were minor irritants that everyone agreed could be dealt with in normal post-cutover maintenance. After several days of intense effort all was agreed and signed off. Literally signed off. Ink on dead trees, in duplicate, signed off.  

So, we fixed the category 1s and a good number of the category 2s, though not of course the impossibilities. We cut over the system and after a few alarms and excursions it was deemed operational. Muted celebrations were held and I was able to go home to my family. 

All seemed well for a few weeks until I started to get messages from the project manager that the customer was agitating for the rest of the category 2s to be done. At first I didn’t worry too much. I sent back messages referring to the signed cutover plan in which we had explicitly said there were no guarantees on the category 2s. That cut no ice in the customer head office. Despite the document that simply said that we would do as many as possible of these things ahead of cutover and nothing else, various people in the customer organisation were now saying that this implied that we would do them afterwards. Given that many of them were logical impossibilities this was obviously never my intention and I had been careful in drafting the document to make this clear. 

None of that mattered. The dialogue took on a life of its own. My opposite number at the customer swore blind that I had promised to do things after cutover if they were not done before. The fact that there was a document that he had signed saying something different became irrelevant. I held firm – what else I could I do? He was literally asking for impossibilities. When he got nowhere with me he escalated and eventually his CEO talked to my CEO and word came back down the chain of command that I was to deliver all of the category 2 modifications. Clearly I couldn’t do that. Long story short. I got fired. 

So, coming back to the present day, where do I see parallels? Clearly the promises made by the Brexiteers were in large part contradictory and impossible to deliver. You can’t have the benefits of membership without paying the dues. You can negotiate on exactly which benefits you want to retain and which dues you are prepared to pay but the bottom line is that a prerequisite for retaining cake is that you don’t eat it all. The problem we have now is that the people who understand that have been systematically purged from positions of power and influence. Everyone who remains is convinced that the quantum superposition of having cake and eating it too is viable at the macro scale.

My airline customer managed to get me fired from the best job I ever had because being right about impossible requirements wasn’t enough. The current political leadership of the UK is somewhat like the person who got my job primarily by being a golfing buddy of the CEO. They still couldn’t deliver the impossible stuff but they had me to blame it on. It didn’t do them much good in the long run though as the company was horse-traded away as part of a much bigger deal involving the parent company. And the airline that gave me all the grief? I am neither happy nor sad to report that it doesn’t exist any more. 

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[1] Yes, nit-pickers I am using the word decimate in its correct, literal sense here.

Brexit, Covid and Airline IT

I have never met Dominic Cummings and I don’t suppose I ever will. But the thought occurred to me this morning that I don’t need to. I have met his type in my professional life multiple times over the last forty years. He is an iconoclast. He is the person who has developed expertise in a small field and has persuaded himself that it is applicable on a much wider stage. He is convinced that his special magic dust can take the place of tried and tested processes which have outlived their usefulness. And he is intelligent enough to convince people who should know better that he is right.

What has this to do with the technology that underpins the operation of commercial airlines? Pull up a chair and I’ll tell you.

Airlines were one of the first types of business to make extensive use of computers in delivering their products to the market. The basic standards for how the commercial environment around booking, ticketing and delivery of flight services were defined in the late 1950s by American Airlines and IBM working together to create a system that was eventually called Sabre. Other companies were working on the challenge at the same time but AA/IBM was the key partnership. By the way, this is a big subject and I am using a broad brush so necessarily I am glossing over a lot of the detail.

Sabre was built to allow real-time control of the inventory of seats available for sale on American’s flights and it was very successful. It used the most powerful computer systems available in its day and it represented a huge investment for both the airline and its technology partner. It stretched the capabilities of the technology available at the time to the very limit which meant that its programming was geared towards efficiency rather than comprehensibility or maintainability.

Over the next several decades Sabre, and the similar systems it inspired, added functionality to manage pricing, ticket-printing, seat assignment and many more aspects of the airline business. Because most of the systems followed similar standards, and all of them were constrained to follow government regulation around the world, they were able to work effectively together. Airlines could book their passengers on connecting flights operated by other airlines. A passenger’s bags could be safely checked in at the start of a connecting journey with reasonable confidence that they would make it to the last airport even if they had to be carried on multiple flights operated by different airlines. It was possible for travel agents to book flights directly in the airline’s reservations system without needing to wait for an operator to answer the phone and make the transaction. All of this was in place by the mid-1970s at a time when other businesses were just dipping their toes in the water of automated billing systems.  

A huge proportion of what an airline reservations system was doing by 1978 when I started in the industry was mandated either by government regulation or by the need to maintain compatibility with hundreds of other systems. The scope for innovation was constrained and yet innovation continued. Airlines introduced revenue management from the 1980s onwards. This ability to vary prices according to forecast demand has boosted airline finances even if it has not always been popular with customers. Towards the end of the century airline systems were connected to the newfangled World Wide Web to allow customers to make bookings directly without need of travel agents or long phone calls. All the time though the basic structures of seat inventory, fare structures and ticketing standards continued more or less as they were in the 1960s[1].

Of course eventually other industries got on the IT bandwagon and by starting much later when technology was more advanced and cheaper they were able to advance rapidly. Business like Amazon, Facebook and Google could not have been created any earlier than they were because the technology was just not available to support them. Entrepreneurs who knew only the systems of the Internet age would look at the airlines industry’s huge spend on mainframe computer systems and enormously complex applications and scoff.

“How can this industry be so primitive?” they would ask.

“I could build a better replacement in 30 days in my garage” is a direct quote that I was in the room to hear circa1997.

And so inevitably the technological whizz kids who had fuelled the great dot com boom of the late 90s and the later Web 2.0 explosion convinced enough financial backers to provide the paltry funds that would be needed to build replacement systems using modern technology. I have personally witnessed a least three waves of this activity and I’m sure that there were many more.

The thing is though – not a single one of them ever replaced the decades old systems that they considered beneath their contempt. The very best of them managed to create something of value that could be added to the existing systems to enhance their operation. Most of them failed completely to do even that. Even the one that Google bought and failed to deploy at Air Canada. The point is that all that archaic functionality is doing stuff that needs to be done.

Around 25 years ago a few airlines realised that they could dispense with quite a lot of the complexity but only if they reduced the level of service provided to their customers. Low cost airlines like Southwest and Ryanair didn’t try to sell through travel agents or offer connecting services. They didn’t allow reservations to be changed or refunds given for unused tickets. And in general they only operated short flights of up to three or four hours duration. By stripping out a lot of things that are hard and complicated to do they were able to keep costs and hence fares down for the segments of the market that could live with those restrictions. The technology needed to support LCCs was simpler than the traditional systems that are used by the majority of airlines. The mistake that many of the new tech evangelists made was to imagine that LCC systems were cheaper and faster because of newer technology. In fact it was because they needed to do much less work and didn’t need to plug into a huge and complex global network.

So what has this got to do with Dominic Cummings?

Dominic Cummings is undoubtedly a person with a high degree of intelligence – albeit an intelligence that appears to be extremely narrowly-based. He has gained the attention of the money men and persuaded them that he can take over the running of government without all the complexities that have built up over the centuries since the principles of democracy began to be established. His crowning achievement was to engineer a victory in the Brexit referendum and then to follow up on that by pushing though the most draconian implementation of Britain’s exit from the EU. Just like the computer whizz kids who declared that existing systems were obsolete he has persuaded enough people that the European Union and Britain’s participation in it are over-complex, expensive and obsolete and so should be abandoned completely as quickly as possible. He is impervious to the argument that in the world of the 21^st century the EU provides services that we as a country cannot do without. If we don’t get them from the EU then we will have to get them from somewhere else. But the current policy of driving out those public servants who may have the expertise to manage this does not bode well.

Similarly the ability to manage a novel pandemic disease depends on structures and processes that have been built up over literally hundreds of years. The current Cummings administration clearly does not believe in expertise other than political and financial manipulation. As a result the toll of Covid-19 in the UK, and England in particular, has been much higher than in other comparable countries.

In the airline world those companies that drank the Kool-Aid and were persuaded to commit to the new generation of technology discovered that it couldn’t deliver. Fortunately they still had the option of falling back to the obsolete systems that actually worked. Sometimes there was a financial loss involved in the adventure but at least the businesses were able to survive. Time will tell whether the damage being done to Britain’s governance and financial prospects by the Cummings scorched earth policies will be as survivable.

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[1] In the noughties paper tickets were phased out but the underlying data structures continue in use in airlines systems and still form the basis for control of payments and entitlement to fly.

So Long and Thanks For All The Fish

I’m feeling low today. There are multiple reasons for this, some of them are professional and some of them are personal. I don’t propose to trouble any readers I may have with those matters. They are my problems and I will deal with them. Overarching them all though is an issue that millions of others are dealing with today. At midnight tonight Central European Time the UK will cease to be a member of the European Union and as far as I can see this is simply a bad thing.

Since David Cameron gambled the future prosperity of his country on a wild bid to control the more Neanderthal elements of the Conservative party I have been trying to find anyone who can describe to me a single concrete benefit of leaving the EU. So far the responses I have had have ranged from the deluded to the downright lunatic. Is it straight or bendy bananas that the Eurocrats have prevented us enjoying? I never was sure and of course the answer is neither. “We are taking back control of our laws, our borders and our money”. Well, as far as I can see our money has remained pretty much the same since 1971. The UK never joined the Schengen agreement and so maintained full control of its borders at all times and the European Union Withdrawal Act 2018 effectively copied and pasted the entirety of EU law onto the UK statute book.

“We are ending freedom of movement”. That’s the big one. Let’s keep out the foreigners. Let’s put up walls around our offshore island home. Let’s live in splendid isolation in this cool wet archipelago. Well, freedom of movement works both ways. By ending it we remove the right of British people to live, study, work and retire across the entire continent. Of course ways can be found for some people to do some of these things but we are talking about negotiation of special arrangements to do things that are now available as rights. The end of freedom for our European neighbours to come to work in the UK poses enormous challenges to the NHS, the care system and agriculture, none of which can currently function in the absence of a substantial non-UK work force. However I look at it, the end of freedom of movement is a disaster for all concerned. Even the xenophobes who just don’t like foreigners will eventually catch on to the hard facts of life but how much damage will have been done by then?

Even the manner of the UK’s departure from the European Parliament filled me with gloom. The boorish, screeching, hateful display from Farrage and Widdecombe on their last day in an institution they had done their very best to sabotage truly made me ashamed of the country that had elected them. In contrast the behaviour of the other MEPs in the chamber as they sang Auld Lang Syne gave me a glimmer of hope, as did the gestures of lighting the Grand Place in red, white and blue and dressing the Mannekin Pis in John Bull style yesterday evening. I spent a lot of time in Brussels in the 1980s and saw the little guy in various forms of fancy dress but I never expected to see this particular one.

This morning the BBC is covering the last day of our EU membership in its usual way. In search of balance it is interviewing politicians who still think that Brexit is a good idea. One in particular caught my attention although sadly not to the extent that I remember his name. His thesis was that in the months to come the EU would have to wake up to the fact that there was now a British government with a large majority and so it would have to accede to British demands in the trade negotiations. This too deepened my gloom. What possible difference does the size of Boris Johnson’s majority make to the fundamental facts of the situation? The EU and AEA together remain a market of almost half a billion people while the UK has 65 million. If the UK wants access to that market it will have to accept most of its rules. If it wants to diverge from those rules there will be costs. None of this is altered in the slightest by the fact that the Conservatives have a majority of 80 in the House of Commons. The speaker went on to describe the forthcoming negotiations in confrontational terms. Part of me was waiting for him to suggest that if those nasty Frogs, Krauts and Dagoes didn’t yield to our righteous demands there would be gunboats sailing up the Rhine forthwith.

How the hell does someone this stupid manage to dress himself in the morning?

Then on the lunch time news I heard Anne Widdecombe again. Leading a march away from the European Parliament behind a lone piper. Usually if you hear a lone piper, he or she is likely to be playing a lament and I can’t think of a day in recent history that more merited a lament.

While I’m on Anne Widdecombe and I’m venting, just a footnote about her brand of nasty Catholicism. I was brought up in the Catholic Church and went to Catholic primary school where ten lessons a week were dedicated to religious instruction. As an impressionable child I was much taken with New Testament teaching. You know, the bits about turning the other cheek and loving your neighbour as yourself. By the time I was a teenager I had noticed that many of the people professing these principles were actually amongst the nastiest and most bigoted people around. Love your neighbour [unless your neighbour is a single parent, gay, protestant, Jewish, a sex worker – or just generally different]. This is why Anne Widdecombe is a Catholic nowadays and I’m not.

But I digress.

As I write this in eight hours’ time the UK will have left the European Union. In practical terms not much will change tonight because we have a transition period until the end of the year. That time is supposed to be used to negotiate comprehensive trade agreements not just with the EU but with our other major trading partners throughout the world. I have yet to hear any expert with knowledge of trade negotiations say that this is in even remotely feasible. As things stand the true cliff edge will come on New Year’s Day 2021 and the prospect is hideous. The lunatic currently in charge of the Downing Street asylum, one Dominic Cummings, has been scheming towards this end for years. It’s hard to understand his motivation. Presumably it is a mixture of being very well paid and a manic desire to be disruptive. Whatever it is, he will be pushing the Prime Minister towards the hardest of scorched earth Brexits and it’s difficult to see any way to stop him.

One voice of hope this dismal morning is David Allen Green, a legal commentator whose blog has been a voice of reason over the last three and a half years and who I met in a pub once. Green is not a “Remainer”. In fact he is on record as saying that after the Maastricht Treaty he would have preferred to leave the EU but judged it to be too much trouble. He has been extremely critical, not of the decision to leave in principle, but of the absolutely shambolic way in which three successive Tory governments have attempted to carry it out. Green, along with other legal commentators, has noted that Michel Barnier has proposed an Article 217 (of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU (TFEU)) Association Agreement as the basis for the future relationship between the UK and the EU. This provides a vehicle for mitigating some of the damage that leaving the EU will do to the UK. The EU already has more than 20 such agreements in place with neighbouring countries and the legal framework is well understood. It would be a political hot potato and some of the backwoodsmen of the ERG (the European Research Group, or as I usually think of it, the Provisional Brexit Party) would no doubt oppose it with their customary venom. However, this may be where the Tory majority of 80 plus could come in handy. If Johnson were to wake up to the enormity of what he has done he might see an Article 217 Agreement as a way to avoid the worst stains on his record. With a crushing majority in the Commons and likely support from at least some of the opposition parties he could probably push it through.

Today is not the day for detailed examination of such an option but that day will come soon. Is it likely that someone with Boris Johnson’s history will take a pragmatic course to restrict the damage? In all honesty no. It’s not likely but neither is it impossible. And on this dismal day that tiny ray of hope is the only thing I am clinging on to.