Back then, there were people who still knew how to restore service in hours. This will happen again and again, caused by different and unrelated snafus that will cause things to back up and take down the whole system, just like someone having a stroke. The system absolutely requires that all parts run smoothly all the time, and if one part starts backing up, it produces a huge dam that keeps building up and eating up resources until there's a massive cascading failure that as we've seen, is still not fixed after a week of effort. This will NEVER get better no matter how many bodies you throw at it. Billions of dollars and a dozen CIOs have already tried, and all it's done is add even more legacy systems that must be supported. It would have been cheaper to sc-ap the whole system years ago, and just kept a simple list of people with protection agreements and gave them free repairs/replacements than this SYW r----dation, seriously. If only if we could have come up with that genius idea.
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@1cgf here, I just wanted to clarify that it goes even beyond just the split between Sears and Kmart, while that is a big one the split of systems can actually make things easier. A big issue is let say a new rule is introduced in Sears for how something should automatically map, or what systems should pick it up or react. Multiple Sears dept. may say they don't like that change, so special exclusions are put in place for their Div/Cat/SubCat. Months or years later another change comes down, this one to a system that is downstream from the original. The process never fires for a specific Div/Cat/SubCat because of the previous exclusion, and you have everyone doing a fire drill to figure out what went wrong. Buyers are screaming to DVPs that they cannot order, and the implementation team believes there has to be a bug and rolls back the changes... which breaks things for all depts.
In response to @1cgf ... that is a good point. Kmart uses KSN & KSNPID and Sears Div/Item/Sku to identify items. And they both run their own billing systems and some warehouse systems. For years management kept saying they were going to 'combine' the two but it has been an uphill battle and very complex task. In order to do this we need to have a dedicated effort and there has been so much change and turnover in the ranks it just never was completed.
Its even beyond the normal documentation for the changes, because there is a set of rules for Sears, and a set of rules for Kmart... and then there is a set of rules for Sears electronics... but a different set of rules for Kmart electronics.
IT or Operations would get beat down by the buying teams for changing anything, and they always won, because "They bring in dollars" where IT/Operations "Just cost money" and of course every department has some stat that makes them the most valuable department in the company. One will say they have the best sales numbers, another will say they have the best profit numbers, another will have that they sell the most units. If IT/Operations says, you were able to order/ring/track product, they think that should be free.
At this point a system failure may be the only thing that causes them to actually adapt. I was told that there were some systems that once they went down, IT per their contract was not even allowed to try to bring back up again.
The biggest issue with Sears is that system documentation is not kept up to date. When changes are made, rarely are they documented. It doesn't matter who comes in to support the legacy Sears apps, they are going to have the same issues because when people left or were laid off, the knowledge walked out the door with them. There are only a handful of folks left that know how to skillfully support the old systems. And.. it's not just Sears, I interviewed with a number of other companies who are in the same boat. That's why many companies are replacing systems, because even though the old system 'works o.k.' for now, they don't have the knowledge to make changes or fix things when a crisis hits. I once read where the average application has a life cycle of perhaps 5 years... Sears has legacy apps developed in the late 80's to early 90's....we don't have the financial resources to rewrite/replace many apps. Also, we did so much customization that many 'new' apps don't have all the features that Sears requires, especially in the appliance delivery area.
The people in India were taught how to pass Microsoft exams and can recite things read out of a book. All troubleshooting they knew how to do was based off a “knowledge transfer” session which lasted a few days. When it comes to dealing with any customization or dealing with any environmental issue they had to escalate to someone in the U.S. The problem is most of the U.S. people were terminated or quit. The biggest thing they overlooked was the fact someone from India couldn’t walk into a datacenter, look at a hardware problem, and press a button.
Onshore tech was a great team. They knew what was happening. India didn't have the communication skills or experience to fix all issues. What a crass remark!