A poorly coupled Business and IT System

I experienced and observed a poorly closed system of IT and business operations with the Indian Railways, one of the richest ministries of the Government of India with USD 31Billion in revenue for fiscal year 2006-2007.

With the growing awareness of IT, many people though not much compared to the counter sales, have started using IRCTC’s website – Indian Railway’s online ticket reservation system. With the growing traffic, it is has become an accepted scenario on the part of users to encounter the following:

          Service Unavailable

          Unable to retrieve data, Communication Failure

          Page cannot be displayed

Irrespective of the nature of the flawed business scenario or technical error, one of the above messages is used to communicate to the user that something has gone wrong.

The IT system presents the user with the option to print out the electronic ticket at the time the booking is complete. Alternatively the user can visit later and print the electronic ticket by entering the proper credentials. Once the booking is over, user receives a mail with the details of the ticket called the Electronic Reservation Slip. This is not a substitute for e-ticket.

From the operations point of view, the user (now the passenger) needs to carry the electronic ticket along with the identification proof that he or she opted while booking the ticket. Lack of e-ticket would attract a fine from the ticket inspector.

Sounds like a fair design. Here is an unfortunate experience that I underwent. As a printer was not available when I booked the ticket, I decided to print it later. My train was in the night and from the morning I had not been able to print the ticket. Attempts made few days before the journey also failed. With no e-ticket in my hand, I decided to print out the Electronic Reservation Slip.

During the journey, the ticket inspector argued that it was not the e-ticket, which I acknowledged and tried to explain the fact that website was down. He repeated the same rule again and said that I would have to be fined. I told him that I am willing to pay the fine but he needs to realize that it was a genuine scenario. He was not bothered a bit and didn’t even want to hear the word website.

I was accompanied by eight other passengers in my coach who could not print their tickets as the website was down. All of them were fined.

Now what can a passenger/user can do in this circumstance? There has been no active thought to address such a user scenario and the user being penalized for no mistake of his.

Traditionally we have seen Business Strategy and IT not being in full alignment, but here the case is a very loosely coupled IT claiming to simply the life of passengers, only to cause more and more frustration.

Here is a even more foolish design. The reservations can’t be done between 2330HRS and 0600HRS. This is to ensure that internet users don’t have an undue advantage over the other passengers. However what, one needs to discover, on his own is that one cannot print the ticket that he has already booked between these timings. For my train that starts at 0500HRS, I returned from office late night and tried to print to figure this out. Yet again, I had to pay the fine.

A very poor design where not all scenarios are not being addressed intuitively. Sure, it would take another thousand such cases before the message even gets to fall on the ear wax of a rusted, unaccounted official, leave alone correcting it.

That we are discussing about IRCTC’s website, I would like to share insights from my discussion with IRCTC’s chief architect. I asked him simple question on the necessity to have so many clicks to find out availability thereby reducing the failure points. His answer was ‘The process is costly’. This made me think as what is the trade off to a financially rich organization? Cost of a data fetch process or usability? Clearly the former in spite of so many glaring travel portals that are much user friendly.