Fredrick Masiga
22 April 2008
opinion
Over three weeks ago, Heathrow International Airport, one of the world's busiest air travel destinations in the city of London officially opened Terminal 5 - T5 - to ease the congestion at its four other arrivals and departure platforms.
Despite months of preparation for the D-day, the awed anticipation hit the most unexpected hitch that has left British Airways, which has the sole use of T5 riling in a 'global' embarrassment for failing to live up to the British style.
"Teething problems" led to cancellation of 34 flights and thousands of check ins were suspended as passengers and luggage waited for hours to be cleared. On the first day, approximately 15,000 bags were lost leaving BA with a huge bill to deliver each of those to their owners worldwide.
Then, as if the computer techonology installed at the 4.3 billion Pound T5 to rally information on departures, arrivals and baggage collections was a borrowed one; it collapsed. The software posted wrong messages on notice boards adding to the clogged mess.
To put a face to the mess, two top BA executives; the director of operations and director of customer services found themselves on the wrong end of a swirling knife. Period!
Which brings me to the city of Kampala. For weeks on end, customers of Barclays Bank have been agonising over the inefficiency of the bank's Automated Teller Machines. The stanza from the bank's officials though goes something like: "we are integrating our systems and that [the problem] will soon be a thing of the past".
Well, the bank has been integrating the system since last year and the problem has been around that long and yet someone does not seem to take full responsibility for the agony that customers are facing including lost hours of work, lost business for delays caused at the bank, for charges on bounced cheques since the system sometimes fails to verify accurate account balances and for the embracement of ATMs that sometimes give you more or less than what you have keyed in for.
Last year, Barclays Bank spent billions (the figure has never been made officially public) to acquire Nile Bank. A deadline for integrating their systems was set for December last year so that customers across the two banks could easily conduct transactions no matter which, one belonged to initially.
Initially, Barclays attempted to migrate former Nile Bank customers to its Brains software systems but that failed since Nile was operating on the Equinox platform.
After much time wasting with letters sent to former Nile Bank customers to regularise their personal information with Barclays, even though in the first place Nile Bank had its customer data base, Barclays has been wrestling with a hair-raising beast called Flexcube - a new banking platform meant to link up both sets of clients that will then allow Barclays to drop Equinox and Brains.
The problem at Barclays though is double pronged: Someone has not adequately communicated the situation to customers' satisfaction and secondly, whoever is working on operationalising the platform has removed their attention from the customers who are supposed to be the end beneficiaries of the system.
Unfortunately, the silence in the bank has been so deafening as is the noise on the streets about failing ATMs that one can hardly hear what is happening in the bank's IT department. Peak a leaf off T5's tree.
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