26/04/2017
London Marathon's failing sponsor - The fiasco of the London Marathon website downtime on Sunday 23rd April 2017, clearly demonstrates the error of placing little or no value on effectively managing a corporate web presence. Another glaring example of 'penny wise and pound foolish'. The persistent website downtime would have cost tens of thousands in lost donations and resulted in the frustration of many dedicated runners. One can imagine that the IT professionals charged with looking after the site would have been viewed as unimportant. Fans of the TV series The IT Crowd will already be familiar with how corporate Britain views it's IT, professionals. In the corporate world, the people who actually do the work, ie) Look after the interface that allows for the processing of the donations, could not possibly be as important as those that manage them. It should have been a straightforward matter to calculate the anticipated bandwidth and distributed server load. Some simple math based on the number of runners and projected sponsorship for each would have been sufficient. In an age of Cloud Servers, capable of allocating sufficient resources to deal with any spike in traffic more or less instantly, it is unforgivable. Contrast the ambivalent attitude of Virgin Money to the tireless dedication of the runners who would have trained all year round in order to cross that finish line, only to be let down by their main corporate sponsor. For many, the name Virgin implies a lack of experience, but really it is incompetence and lack of responsibility that is the real issue. Next year they should invest in an experienced professional IT team to manage their donation website. One who knows how to calculate server loading or already has their own copy of 'Websites for Dummies'!
