Plucking Success from the Grip of Failure

You may not have much appreciation for just how expensive software development is but it is one of the major factors of business development expenses for many different industries.  In 1995 a company called The Standish Group published a fascinating in-depth study of major software projects that failed.  One of those projects was a joint effort by American Airlines, Hilton Hotels, Marriott Corporation, and Budget Rent-A-Car to develop a revolutionary reservation system that would service all their customers' needs.  One of the project leaders was Nicholas Bredimus, then President of AMR Travel Services (an American Airlines subsidiary).

Although the CONFIRM project failed Bredimus went on to found a small software company named for himself (Bredimus Systems).  The company sold a reservation system called QuikTix that revolutionized the travel industry.  Clearly Nicholas Bredimus learned from the mistakes of the CONFIRM project, but he also drew upon his extensive knowledge of computer software development and travel and hospitality industry needs.

With more than 25 years' experience in IT services for airlines and hospitality companies, Nicholas Bredimus was uniquely positioned to launch a new ticketing system that would help airlines and travel agents around the world make and adjust reservations in a real-time mode for considerably less expense than the old manual systems entailed.

It is no understatement to say that Bredimus' accomplishments saved consumers billions of dollars in unnecessary expenses related to travel and hospitality.  But he did not work alone.  He was not Superman saving the world all by himself.  Nick Bredimus developed teams of programmers through the 1970s and 1980s that faced many challenges.

His remarkable accomplishment with QuikTix is all that much more amazing because it reflects a lifetime of working toward the goal of fulfilling customer needs in real-time and reducing costs for companies and their customers.

The case study for CONFIRM is quickly summarized as a failure for many reasons in the Standish Group study but there is more to the story than that the four companies failed to define their requirements properly.  Their joint effort may have been doomed to failure because each company attempted to bring its own special needs to the forefront of the project.

What Bredimus was able to do as an independent software developer was focus on the most critical tasks without having to cater to corporate egos and legacy systems.  His development team reduced the monumental task to a discrete set of solvable problems.  It was their smaller size and their experience with the previous project's failure that gave Bredimus and his programmers a leg up on helping the travel and hospitality industry move forward.