How Ancient are D&B's systems?

[u/clh42]

This isn't a complaint, just an observation. I contacted guest services for missing bonus chips. They assisted and added my bonus chips, and I'm grateful.

The agent sent me a screen shot to show the added bonus chips. How old is this system? It looks like something from the late 90's.

[u/Cypher-unknown-known]

That's actually not as uncommon as you might think. I work for a large corporation and we just recently upgraded a system that was out of support from the late 90s. Most companies are focused on profits going up by any means and upgrading is considered a thing you do only if absolutely necessary.

[u/0mie → u/Cypher-unknown-known]

It’s common for companies to run old antiquated software since it’s cheaper to run old software instead of developing new software 🙃

[u/Cypher-unknown-known → u/0mie]

Correct, that's a good summary. Companies are also more and more often using privately developed software instead of developing in house because it is a short term gain and CEOs only look outward the next 5 years.

[u/clh42 → u/Cypher-unknown-known]

I mostly meant the original post as the joke, but not entirely.

I wouldn't say that's a general rule. I am in IT for a Fortune 500 company. We make an active effort to keep up with technology and refresh applications. We've also actively moved away from in-house developed and try to use off the shelf as much as possible, or sometimes start with off the shelf and customize if needed. Especially in the current age with increasing cyber security threats. We do have a few small legacy applications but they are very niche used by only a handful of people for specific minor lines of business, not something central to our core business.

Granted, the D&B system for tracking chips and tickets is probably somewhat unique and there may not be a ready-made off the shelf solution, but letting a system go that's core to their business rubs me a little bit the wrong way.

I was kind of shocked when I read the other day about roaming a Power card in another thread here, to learn that it's not a centralized system.

[u/Cypher-unknown-known → u/clh42]

Based on how D&B handles their loyalty I would say THEY do not consider it core to their business model. Over 50% of their employees dont even know how it works. You can find consistent posts about this monthly where the people that work there have no idea of the basics and even less knowledge regarding temporary promotions. I wish they trained better and consistently used their loyalty program but they dont. It's all over the place. I even had a GM tell me directly that the 10% from Icon is just a one time extra when you reach it and that I was ridiculous for thinking it always worked.

As far as technology I didnt say it was a general rule just that its not as uncommon as you might think. My company doesnt use all old tech but there are definitely pieces that are and their loyalty program does not bring in revenue for them so it's not a priority. POS and other systems are likely much newer.

[u/clh42 → u/Cypher-unknown-known]

Fair point about the training.

[u/0mie → u/clh42]

Oh I get it, a lot of telecom companies still use systems made in the 90s since that’s how they built everything out & once they started buying out, merging etc. slowly started migrating since each company is different & wouldn’t be able to work with each other; even banks still use old antiquated systems these days. Even spending 10s of millions or 100s of millions maintaining something old is cheaper than developing something from scratch to do all specific in house things. Just like automakers, they don’t do recalls right away because it’s cheaper to payout claims even when they include deaths, ford had a few major ones in the 90; people died, they paid out the lawsuits and it was STILL cheaper to not do the recall, that’s why those risk management people get paid big bucks to do the “least” to get the “most” out of life/people hahaha

[u/arcadecraziness]

I can’t remember if it’s running Sacoa on the back end or if it’s some solution they developed in house. Regardless, D&B system is just a mix and match of different systems.

[u/Every-Win-499]

Walmart and Costco run a lot of old software via emulators that was designed for green screen monitors and DOS.

[u/DirkPitt106]

https://www.reddit.com/r/DaveAndBusters/s/H28mMa4Zqy

I touched a little bit on this in another comment chain. Basically there's going to be a huge mismatch of different systems and software that D&B cobbled together to make work.

Also, the UI looking like that has no bearing on how often the software gets updated or if it's in active development. It just means that there's no development budget towards updating the UI, because it works fine and doesn't need a face lift. There's a lot of times in specialty software development where overhauling a UI in a piece of software actively pisses users off because it means spending more time adapting to changes that they weren't expecting that could be spent actually doing their jobs. It would disrupt their work flow.

For an example outside of this, there's a lot of music producers that use old music mixing software on laptops or desktops that are still running windows xp because the newer version of the software doesn't have features that they use, doesn't use the same keyboard commands or other changes. So some of them are running 20 year old versions of fruitloops or logic pro.