Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
ETHICAL AND
SOCIETAL ISSUES
Today's global society depends on air travel for business and pleasure more
than ever before. Services offered by airlines have come under scrutiny due
to incidents that point to unreliability. Some of these incidents are caused by
the inefficient use of information systems.
On the list of the major corporate disaster recovery challenges of recent
times, JetBlue and the St. Valentine's Day ice storm appears in the top ten.
Jet Blue has built a reputation as an airline that caters to the needs of its
customers. Plush leather seats, expanded leg room, complimentary bever-
ages and snacks, snooze kits, seat-back displays providing 36 channels of
entertainment, satellite radio, first-run movies, wireless Internet, and smil-
ing crew members, all at affordable rates, are amenities rare at traditional
airlines. On February 14, 2007, the honeymoon seemed to be over for
JetBlue and its customers.
Weather forecasters predicted an ice storm would hit the east coast on
Valentine's Day. While it was unclear how much it might affect air traffic,
most airlines took precautionary measures, canceling dozens of flights. In
its efforts to please passengers, JetBlue gambled and waited it out until it
was too late. Rather than improving, conditions only worsened over the
course of the day, leaving hundreds of JetBlue passengers stranded in
planes on tarmacs at JFK International airport in New York and other major
airports including Washington, DC, and Newark, New Jersey—some for as
long as 11 hours. Around 3:00 pm, JetBlue gave up hope and called in buses
to rescue the passengers from the planes. By then the damage was done.
Thousands of passengers waiting in airline terminals were hoping to
complete their trips despite the storms. More passengers were arriving at
airports unaware of delays and cancellations. Still other passengers were
returning to the terminals by bus from stranded aircraft. JetBlue wound up
with thousands of irate passengers at their counters and no flights departing
or arriving on the east coast. Chief executive officer David Neeleman admit-
ted to doing a horrible job. “We got ourselves into a situation where we were
doing rolling cancellations instead of a massive cancellation. Communica-
tions broke down, we weren't able to reach out to passengers, and they
continued to arrive at the airports... it had a cascading effect.”
Charles “Duffy” Mees won't ever forget that day. Duffy Mees was vice
president and CIO of JetBlue Airways at the time. He came to JetBlue a few
months prior to the disaster with years of experience in the airline industry.
During his first few months, he oversaw the completion of an enterprise
resource planning (ERP) installation at JetBlue. However, his experience did
not prepare him for handling the Valentine's Day crisis.
The impact of the storm on JetBlue's information systems lasted a
week. During the days that followed, many systems were pushed beyond
their limits. Massive flight cancellations and rescheduling placed an
unprecedented amount of traffic on JetBlue's reservation systems. Since
JetBlue did not support rebooking flights online or at airport kiosks, cus-
tomers had only one option for rebooking: call the JetBlue reservation office.
JetBlue's Salt Lake City reservation agents were flooded with calls from
angry passengers. Limitations in the system allowed only up to 650 agents
to work at a time, plenty for normal days, but not for an exceptional demand.
Many customers were stranded on hold waiting to rebook flights. Mees
worked with their software provider to boost the limit to 950, which helped to
open the bottleneck. Still, it was days before many passengers could get
through to an agent.
Meanwhile, customer luggage was piling up in huge mounds at air-
ports. JetBlue had no computerized system in place for tracking bags. The
company had placed that system on the back burner while concentrating on
its new ERP system. JetBlue had to haul mountains of luggage to off-site
locations, where extra workers were employed to sort and identify bags. An
information system was developed on the fly to scan bag tags and identify
the owners from passenger records.
Besides reservations and baggage problems, managers faced outages
and failure from important systems that control core operations. SkySolver
software, which operations planners use to redeploy planes and crews,
could not transfer new schedules to the primary flight scheduling systems.
Programmers from the vendors attacked the problem and solved it within
hours, but the delay caused more havoc. JetBlue was caught in a tailspin of
system failures triggered by too much information all at once.
Mees and his crew spent three days and nights working to bring JetBlue
systems back online. They pushed systems to their limits and created
databases, tools, and applications on the fly in their efforts to find solutions.
During the crisis, JetBlue management learned many lessons and dis-
covered many solutions, including preventative measures. A new system
has now been implemented that allows passengers to rebook canceled
flights online. Computer terminals have been installed at airports to allow
passengers to rebook onsite. Software allows double the number of booking
agents to respond in emergencies. A lost-bag system has been installed to
track luggage—which is particularly valuable when flights are cancelled. A
new system has been implemented that notifies passengers by e-mail,
phone, or Web when flights are cancelled or changed.
Most significantly, the crisis motivated JetBlue to create a customer bill
of rights offering compensation to customers whose flights have been can-
celled or are left sitting too long on planes.
The cost to JetBlue for the Valentine's Day disaster has been estimated
at around $30 million. What about the cost to JetBlue's reputation? After
JetBlue offered many apologies and fired several top-level executives, it
appears that JetBlue is still loved by its customers. J.D. Power and Asso-
ciates 2007 airline satisfaction survey ranked JetBlue Number 1 by far for
the third year in a row. In this case, good intentions seem to have won out
over poor management.
Discussion Questions
1.
What could JetBlue have done to prevent the Valentine's Day
disaster in terms of information systems and management
decisions?
2.
What information systems does JetBlue use to manage air travel?
Critical Thinking Questions
1.
How do you think JetBlue's disaster affected the airline industry
from the airlines' perspective and the traveler's perspective?
2.
JetBlue offers many amenities to its customers that other air-
lines have discontinued in order to cut costs. What are the ben-
efits and dangers of JetBlue's approach, and how does this
incident illustrate the dangers?
Sources:
Duvall, Mel, “What Really Happened At JetBlue,” CIO Insight, April 5,
/1;
Ho, David, “Fans stand behind JetBlue,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
June 10, 2008,
www.ajc.com/business/content/business/stories/2008/06/10/
jet_blue.html;
JetBlue Web site,
www.jetblue.com, a
ccessed June 29, 2008.
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