Glenn Weadock on Windows Server 2008

Glenn Weadock

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The Quality of Airport Information Systems

With so many IT geniuses, why are some public information systems so bad?

By Glenn Weadock on Tue, 10/27/09 - 10:07pm.

I don’t know about you, but I know at least a hundred people who I would put in the category of Very Smart IT People, and well over a dozen who would qualify for Scary Smart IT People. The number of such folks in the USA, by extrapolation, should be impressively large. Why, then, do some of our public information systems still perform at such a poor level?

I was at a major airport this past weekend for a simple nonstop flight. The public departure information board showed that the flight was delayed by 30 minutes. Interestingly, the departure time came and went before the aircraft showed up. The public information display showed that the plane had departed before it had even arrived at the gate for boarding! I don’t think you can even do that in Special Relativity thought experiments, much less real life.

This kind of problem is not new. I’ve been seeing this sort of thing for many years. It seems fairly inexcusable, given the advanced state of information processing today. The correct data does exist: asking an airline employee “what’s going on” reveals that fact. It’s just a matter of getting the accurate data to the public display system. The Smart IT People should be able to deal with that sort of issue, shouldn’t they? It’s a significant one in terms of lost productivity. Imagine how many people miss connections because of inaccurate airport displays. These days, a missed connection is a Big Deal because the next flight out is likely to be sold out. And so is the one after that.

The interesting thing was that when I started asking questions, nobody would take ownership of the data being displayed. The airline representatives told me that the city (as the airport operator) managed the data; the city airport administrator I got on the phone claimed that the data came from each individual airline. Rule #1 in data management: *somebody* has to take responsibility for the information, or all the technology in the world doesn’t matter. That’s as true of our corporate information systems as it is of public ones.