I think a lot of the reasons are related to the primacy of the project. The A380 was a bet-the-company move for Airbus and Emirates. This means that practically

I think a lot of the reasons are related to the primacy of the project. The A380 was a bet-the-company move for Airbus and Emirates. This means that practically everyone at both those companies are aligned around the necessity to make the project a success, and there is a broad and shared understanding of the need to shape the world around the project for it's success. Organisations often fail to realise the strategic importance of big IT projects, and fail to treat them accordingly. "The geeks" are tasked with figuring it out. Whenever a new subway line is built in a city, years and years are spent moving existing underground infrastructure like sewers, water, gas and electricity. All sorts of weird complexity tends to bubble up around this time. A comparable IT project will typically have requirement 264/B-4: The project will be delivered without changing existing infrastructure. This again probably has something to do with the sequestration of IT as a staff function. This is absolutely the correct place for the office that builds and supports workstations, runs the Exchange server and manages the Active Directory, but it is not where you anchor a large, strategically important project (IT is definitely an important stakeholder, but they don't own it). Emirates doesn't have a staff office tasked with buying, taking delivery and integration the A380 into the fleet, that is a project that spans the organisation and is run out of the CEOs office. Tangentially to this, there are the complications around the fact that many large IT projects replace existing systems, sometimes decades old. I'm not sure there really is a good physical analogy to the ways old IT systems creep into and get entrenched in adjacent use cases, often without the system owners really realising. It's like Emirates realising two weeks before the inaugural flight of the A380 that there is something about the ailerons of the new plane that means half of the check-in staff can't get to work.