For anyone who has ever wondered what Climate Science is for:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/05/30/claim-four-trillion-dollar-per-annum-carbon-tax-required-to-save-the-world/

TinyCO2, you would have thought that an Airline, flying internationally, with IT Support in India, would know about hot weather and computers.

May 31, 2017 at 8:52 AM by TinyCO2
A good, general description that exists in many areas, but IT has the added complication of running software which is invisible to non-IT people, while IT people will know it is about, yet know nothing of the details if they weren't involved with the systems nor have any useful documentation​ around on it.

For example, some silent, invisible, but critical system could be running out of production hardware, on an operating system known only to retired employees or created by a development system that does not exist, or whose programming code has been lost. Even one of these would be a big problem.

The obvious solution of putting all applications on a single, standard operating system, all on the same release of that operating system, and doing the same for all the other components can involve rewriting parts of the system in a different language is not to be done when time is short. :)

The converse of what you say is also true: the above will not guarantee low risk computing, but it would be a sign that there are at least a few competent people around in positions of influence.

If there is no IT director on the company board, there will be no one person accountable and knowledgeable.

If there is an IT director, the situation may still not be that good. :)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4556640/Did-British-Airways-overheat-warm-weather.html

Article makes some suggestions as to what caused the problem.

The off site support team were tagged as 'the men in black' because whenever there was an upgrade, they'd arrive en masse in suites and ties. Invariably they left with half a dozen machines, non functioning, which I'd have to fix. The cry went 'please don't let the men in black touch my computer!'

The problem is not the IT support being in India, it's the distance between the servers and the IT support. More, it's the signal of corner cutting it signifies. I worked in a remote IT position for a while as the only person with the machines and the 'support' 40 miles away. I was run ragged because of the number of jobs that just couldn't be done remotely and even if they could, people wanted me, because they knew that I couldn't just hang up on them if the text book instructions read out over the phone didn't work. 'Try turning it off and on' doesn't always fix the problem. The 'cheap' nature of the support was a sign of cost cutting elsewhere, like renewing machines and making sure that there were spares. What they did invest in was a repair contract and have a supplier contract. Theory went that there were economies of scale but in practice it was overly expensive and slow. For the same price of the two contracts I could have replaced every bit of IT equipment every 2 years and had spares sat on a shelf waiting for emergencies. Any fault could have been sorted in hours, rather than wait for repair people to assess the problem, order the part and come back to fix things. It wasn't even as if they'd transfer software and data.

Since the BA problem is most likely with much bigger and older equipment, the maintenance of them was probably quite specialist. Things like testing the backup equipment probably fell by the wayside because the people on site, didn't have the time or the energy. Company decline is very demoralising. Employees think 'why should I go the extra mile when they'll not even notice, never mind reward me for it?' Management often don't grasp what people do, especially if the job isn't regular. Those left are invariably harangued for not being able to fix something that they didn't know existed, never mind had any training in how it worked.