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.