Closing of the SITA/Airline Business IT Summit 2012

This is my summing up of the Closing of the IT Summit

Key themes that came up were the ones I had highlighted at the start

Cloud

Big Data

Social Media

Mobility

I also picked two other key themes that had emerged during the Summit, one a business theme:

How the whole air transport eco-system and community has to join up for customers at the same time as airlines and airports compete intensely with each other

and a techy theme:

How web services will enable the joining up of the industry.

There seemed to me to be remarkable convergence during the day on these six themes.

Joining it all up using technology is of course where SITA comes in.

We need to pull it all together to make it easy to fly.

Opening of the SITA/Airline Business IT Summit

Here is my Opening of IT Summit 2012

I have highlighted 4 Mega IT Trends as the prime movers in shaping tomorrow’s airline industry:

The IT Cloud

Big Data

Social Media

Mobility

Summing Up the SITA/Airlne Business IT Summit

Every year at the end of the IT Summit, I have both the honour and the challenge of summing up the proceedings. 

It’s a challenge since I have to summarise the contributions of the distinguished speakers, and often the results of some interesting debates, and then draw conclusions from them.  I hope I will be able to post both my introductory challenge and my concluding remarks here as video clips. 

Meanwhile, particularly for those who were there, here is a summary of what I suggested were the conclusions of the Summit.  This year it was easier than most years because the presentations and the discussions converged in a remarkable way.

In my opening I said there were 4 “Mega IT Trends” that would hit the air transport industry in the the next few years.  These were:

* the Cloud

* Big Data

* Social Media and

* Mobility

From Tony Tyler’s Keynote in the morning to Henry Harteveldt at the close these themes DID keep coming back.

But there were two additional themes that also came through, which I felt were the glue which will join up these 4 technological Mega Trends.  One was a techie piece of glue and the other was behavioural glue.  

The techie super-glue was

* Web Services

And the behavioural adhesive was 

* Collaboration across the Air Transport Industry or as we in SITA call it Air Transport Community (ATC)

First, web services which Madame Xiong and Dr Krieg from Beijing and Frankfurt Airports – 2 of the leading airports in the World – and our own Jim Peters SITA CTO talked about.  Smart use of web services, open APIs and Service Oriented Architecture could join up apps, data, social media and mobile devices across the industry.

Second there was Tony’s central theme of how the elements of the whole air transport industry – not just airlines – must work together to provide better service for customers, and indeed to ensure that the industry was sustainable.  

Competition will intensify and should, but there are areas where airlines and airports, GDSs and government agencies need to share information so that the whole air transport eco-system works better.  

This is where SITA can help.   As the commercial co-operative company owned by the ATC, SITA can provide an honest broker role at the interface between the airlines, airports, government agencies and GDSs.  As a provider of technology networks and services to air transport we can help “join up the dots” in the new world of the Cloud, big data, social media and ubiquitous customer and employee connectivity on smart phones and tablets.   This would be an interesting reinvention of SITA’s original mission from 63 years ago.