Why can't big companies do IT?

I recently commented on an advance in London Underground's customer service, whereby you could elect to have refunds loaded directly on to your Oystercard rather than receiving paper vouchers. Suspiciously, the non-voucher options disappeared from the refund claim form the other day. That was a sure sign of trouble. Today, the post brought four separate, personally-addressed envelopes, each bearing a paper voucher. (At least they're for the right amounts, following an episode in February where voucher values were too low.)

So it looks like LU has given up on Oyster loading, at least for a while. If they'd never offered the option, well, OK. But they evidently did enough testing to feel happy about making it available. This must have entailed integrating the refund calculator with the Oyster pre-pay database. But after the system went live, LU just "gave up", exhibiting the kind of D-grade IT capability that Bulldog commonly practises for customer billing. Even Amazon.co.uk tells me that my package has shipped and gives a link to "Track your package"...which after a day still says "We're sorry - tracking information is not currently available. Please try again later."

Why so bad? Poor project management? Maybe. User training issues? Not applicable for the Oyster loading option. Insufficient technical skills in development and test? I think so; judging by the timelines, I'd guess that no-one ever got their refund directly via Oyster. But it's still the IT management's fault at the end of the day, who now have a staff cost for rolling the system back in as well as rolling it out in the first place!

Someone asked me the other day why their company's generic time-tracking software was so bad, and while it was hard to determine what that really meant (UI? speed? too much fussy information demanded?), the issue came down to the IT department not "seeing through the eyes" of a businessperson who just wants to get on with their job. How can the businessperson push IT to improve the tools they provide? In LU's case, does it really affect their reputation if useful facilities for Oystercard holders are removed? In neither case does the end user have a choice about service provision, and that always makes providers stupid and lazy.

A speaker at the RSA said leaders in the 20th century were those who had great answers, but that leaders in the 21st century will be those who ask great questions. A lot of strategic questions need to be asked about the role of IT departments, and I don't mean about support for Vista desktops. Joseph was right all along.

(Just to labour the point about LU, they continue to give refunds to the value of a single paper fare for the (delayed) journey you were taking. This is a lot simpler than computing the value of the journey with respect to a customer's actual ticket, but a lot more expensive for LU now that all paper singles are £3. In fact, paper singles have been rising faster than season tickets, and will continue to do so to promote Oyster pre-pay. So, refund values will become increasingly disproportionate (in the customer's favour!) to the paid value of a delayed journey. While a great double promotion for Oyster, I suspect it's unintentional; customer service by spraying money around rather than developing proper answers.)

[Update: AJA says that if you claim with a prepay-only Oystercard, the "correct" prepay value is refunded, e.g. £1.50 for a Zone 1 single rather than £3. This must be why the LU refund site asks whether you have a season or a season with prepay ticket. LU's IT is still rubbish, because they should find out your ticket type from the Oystercard number demanded by the claim form. (But they shouldn't check if you actually travelled around the time of the claimed delay, because the Oyster database won't show if you found a non-LU route, e.g. boarding a National Rail train.)]