Wheels Up - The Weblog of Aircraft Data Fusion

The changing world of IT in the airline industry

A recent article in Information Week regarding audits of industry IT departments underscores that not only are IT budgets declining as a percentage of revenue but there is less and less time available to analyze technologies and industry trends and how it may affect their business. Further due to budget limitations, the focus has become more on day-to-day operations. Nowhere is this truer than in the airline operations.

Corporate executives are becoming less dependent on internal analysis for their assessment of technologies or IT business solutions. Increasing pressure is being placed on vendors to offer business solutions with best of breed/class technologies and applications.

IT departments business processes are being transformed more into matching business solutions to corporate objectives. As stated by Ton Nealon, CIO of Southwest Airlines:

"Technology can help," Nealon says, "but if you're starting with a fundamentally flawed business model, it's not going to fix that." Fortunately for Southwest, its business model doesn't appear to need fixing. And the IT moves it's making now indicate the airline isn't waiting for that model to break.

The IT department will provide the oversight for contracting, implementation and support.. It is also becoming increasingly clear that the airlines operations IT functionality must be installed on a services oriented architecture (SOA) that creates a free flow of information between operations and the enterprise. The extreme pressure the airline industry is under to manage costs requires that every advantage be applied to streamlining operations that drives productivity and efficiencies.

The most successful airline operations of the future will be those that are able to apply cost effective business solutions to achieve maximum affordable productivity and efficiency to their operations.

Our blog and welcome to it!

Welcome to Wheels Up, the weblog of Aircraft Data Fusion. We'll be getting under way in just a few moments. In the meantime, let's review the current situation.

The airline industry is currently undergoing change at a rate unknown throughout its history. Those of us who have spent our lives in this industry have seen it coming, and have been personally impacted in one way or another.

As a former pilot for Northwest Airlines, I have spent a great deal of time on various technology initiatives, always with the intent of improving the information flow between the aircraft and the enterprise. Think about it - the aircraft is the only thing in the airline industry that really makes any money. Yet it's the one part of the business that is disconnected from the overall enterprise network. In any other industry, this would be unacceptable. But in this industry, it's the way we've operated since the beginning.

This must change. It will change. Market forces dictate that it will change. The ability for airlines to maintain viability will rest on their using every possible bit of business intelligence and bring them to in creating competitive advantage. Doing this impacts everything: safety, delays, maintenance, fuel utilization, and of course profitability.

I founded Aircraft Data Fusion to help the industry navigate this transformation. Over my 30-plus years as a pilot, I have developed and refined a set of notions of how to use technology to streamline operations. I'd like to share some of those ideas here on this blog. Others you will be able to experience first hand through our products and services.