Lessons Learned from Southwest Airlines

Over the 2022 holiday season, we witnessed a catastrophic technology failure from one of the leading airlines in the United States.?The failure was not from weather or heavy holiday travel although these two factors certainly contributed to the culmination of events.?The failure was from dated technology from the airline we have all "luv"ed so much for many years.

Technology debt is a topic we should all be familiar with and we should all have awareness against in our organizations.?It was also the culprit of the failure at Southwest Airlines.?Every day, our businesses are incurring a technology expense.?This expense exaggerates when the business is growing or changing.?If we are not continuously investing in technology, this expense accrues as an invisible debt and it will come due sooner or later.?If later, it is generally not at an opportune time as was the case with Southwest Airlines.

Technology debt can take many different shapes.?In the case of Southwest Airlines, the airline deferred operational system improvements for years as they grew continuously.?In this failure, the airline's scheduling system was "calling" flight crews to notify them of scheduling changes.?Among other challenges, none of this was automated via text message, email, or a mobile app. Flight crews were sitting in airports with no idea which airplane to fly and where to fly to.?The software dated from the 1990's which was clearly a different landscape in aviation, technology and in Southwest Airlines' journey as an international carrier.

In another scenario, I recently watched a growing energy company not invest in their ERP software over time.?They instead maintained a minimal maintenance agreement and never implemented recommended upgrades.?A gradual investment over time in this software would have extended the life of the software by many years.?They reached a cross roads in their growth which caused the senior leadership team to make the "jump" to a much larger system.?While I don't think this "jump" was a huge mistake, it caused a significant capital expense that could have been deferred, planned, or even eliminated had the company been making more gradual investments over time in what they had.

I have seen this example in countless other scenarios. Hardware infrastructure is one of the more common ones where servers and network infrastructure are not upgraded until a major downtime event occurs. Cybersecurity measures are deferred or avoided until a cyberattack forces the issue or a compliance violation brings it into focus.

Whether it is infrastructure, software, security or just IT support, every business has growing and changing technology needs.?Businesses that are growing or evolving have an even greater technology change trajectory.?These needs will come due.?It is up to the leadership team to plan when they come due or wait for circumstances to accelerate the debt call with little to no notice.