Do Marketing and IT Talk To Each Other?
6 January 2008
How many times have we seen the situation where a company runs a promotion, only to find that their technology isn't up to the challenge? The latest company to find this out is Jetstar, who decided to sell 5000 seats in Australia for five cents each. Unfortunately, they didn't take in to account the fact that every Australian with an Internet connection would be accessing their site at the same time in a scramble to get a seat. As a result, they had a few technical difficulties.
Similar problems occassionally happen at Air New Zealand's grabaseat site when they offer really low fares.
I work at New Zealand's largest ISP. Last year, some bright spark decided to let Yahoo take over the mail platforms and offer a new web portal. Customers were required to sign up for the new services. Someone forgot to take into account how many customers the company had. The servers couldn't handle the number of customers trying to sign up at the same time. As a result, customers had problems signing up, emails were lost, and we had a lot of unhappy customers.
These problems could be avoided if people talked to each other. If Marketing told IT what was happening and what sort of response they were expecting, IT could then react accordingly. But I guess some people will never learn.