In the case of Southwest they failed to invest in critical infrastructure and probably contingency planning as well. Hindsight is always 20/20, but I am sure there were/are people who knew this was a ticking time bomb.
Those employees could, if not see this coming, at least knew the system was antiquated and brittle. A failure of some magnitude was inevitable. This failure however was so bad that they lost everything. They didn’t know where their own planes were, where their crew was, where baggage was, anything. It was all lost or at least inaccessible for days. The details of how and why the failure happened I am sure will come out, but essentially this was tech debt that the previous CEO saw no value in improving.
Herb built up quite a cult, and he was around on the board of directors until 2008. While Gary is a colossal prick what we're seeing is absolutely Herb's legacy. Southwest had already outgrown its reputation as Herb's scrappy little airline by the 2000s. The meltdown is due, in large part, to practices that worked well enough with 90 jets but don't scale to the largest 737 fleet in the world. That lack of automation? That's on Herb, Gary didn't just suddenly decide to walk back a bunch of shit and decree that Southwest employees had to do everything by hand.
American and Delta built out SABRE and Deltamatic in the 60s, United built out Apollo in the early 70s. Under Herb, Southwest basically did everything by hand until they started maybe thinking about buying into the full SABRE suite a couple decades ago. They only just integrated ticketing (with Apollo, SABRE, and Amadeus) in like 2017. Their scheduling (which is the biggest pain point right now) is still done the old-fashioned Herb way. As of 2019 Southwest was still doing load planning manually (a.k.a. counting bags by hand and using assumed weights). Notably this got them in hot water with the FAA.
While things didn't reach a tipping point until Herb died, he did not leave Southwest on the right course. He created a nifty little airline but utterly failed to scale it. The continued lack of investment is on Gary and Bob, of course.
It's because while IT and automation matters, it's not the only thing that matters. The most important thing a CEO can do, especially in this industry, is set culture. That's their greatest role. Culture is far more important than IT.
Herb's positive legacy in this industry is well deserved. This is because Herb set the culture at Southwest, and it's well known that Southwest's employee culture has been--under Herb's leadership--its greatest asset. Herb set it in past crises, such as when they had to sell their fourth airplane to keep the airline afloat, and Herb got the employees to band together to create the 10 minute turn, which allowed them to effectively fly a four plane route network with three planes.
This "band together" culture has saved Southwest's skin countless times. It's what has let them run a highly complex route network of mid-market point to points (vs. hub and spoke) with inferior technology, and yet with good service and competitive reliability.
The problem this time around is that Southwest suffers from the same labor shortage as all other airlines in the industry, and it's this labor shortage that led to their other deficiencies from biting them in the ass. Unfortunately, culture can't solve a crisis when there simply aren't enough people to "band together."
Southwest's IT issues are very well known in the industry, and reports are the current CEO and COO understand and aim to address. This week emphasizes the need, and we can expect SW to embark on a modernization plan. Just remember though, IT modernization takes an enormous amount of time. While we wait the better part of a decade for better scheduling and reservation systems (SW's maintenance system modernization is years and years in and is still ongoing,) SW's current CEO can best spend his time in the trenches of the operation preserving and strengthening culture.
Sounds a lot like the post IPO companies I've worked with where the leadership is still from the startup days..
Superficially, I'd think that's because they were too dependent on automation.
Obviously I don't know how to run Southwest better than Herb Kelleher.
Is this why you STILL can’t see Southwest prices and book them on Google Flights, HipMunk, Kayak, etc?
The airline industry as a whole is known to have antiquated tech and hard to clean data. Someone mentioned in one of the threads last week how difficult it is to modernize these systems where every system is using different timestamp formats. Southwest is just more antiquated and probably at least 5 years behind the rest of the industry in modernizing. Especially with crew systems which is what blew everything up last week.
Eg, unsustainable agriculture, manufacturing, banking…
