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

SITA Air Transport Industry Summit 2012

This is the 13th year that SITA has run – in partnership with Airline Business – the Air Transport IT Summit

We feel that it is now established as the top IT event in the air transport industry’s calendar,  it is the recognized platform for CEO’s, CIO’s and other industry leaders to address their peers across the air transport industry, as well as the wider community. 

Tony Tyler, Director General and CEO, IATA, Khalid A. Almolhem, Director General, Saudi Arabian Airlines and Alex Cruz, CEO, Vueling are among the prominent list of speakers who will address a range of topical industry issues to an audience of senior level delegates from all over the world.  For a full list of speakers and the  topics they will discuss visit www.sitasummit.aero. 

I very much hope to see you there.

SITA/Airline Business IT Summit – Closing Speech June 2011

Here is the video link to the summing-up of what was a great IT Summit in June.

I think it marked a landmark in Airline IT – but more of that later…

There were some great contributions from airline and airport CEOs and CIOs.  Here are some of statements I tried to pick up on in the Closing:

* Spend more on your IT

* Don’t talk about social networking: do it

* Do more IT for less

* Fresh thinking is needed for mobile and social networking

* The difference is that the Cloud is now easily accessible cheaply and securely

* Emphasis on customers will make the difference

* Get IT out of the ‘techy corner’ and get it listened to

* Technology without business process is asking for trouble

* Need to integrate airports with the end-to-end customer experience

* IT is the driving force for Business Model change

* Every CIO/IT Director has Mobile, Cloud, Internet of Things, CRM and Social Networking on their agenda these days

My personal conclusion was two-fold:

First, that IT matters - really matters - even more than before, because it is leveraging social and economic change much more than ever before.  The role of the CIO or IT Director is to make sense of all this change and of all these possibilities.

Secondly, that IT providers are central to airlines and airports in new ways.  Yes, of course, for Operations; yes, of course, for Selling and for Servicing; but now IT is central to the whole Customer Experience.  That is new and that is the landmark change.

SITA/Airline Business IT Summit – Opening Keynote June 2011

I blogged about the SITA/Airline Business IT Summit earlier on 25 June.

You can now see a video of the introduction which talks about the ways that IT is transforming the Air Transport Industry again.

I suggested at the start of the Summit that IT is now central not only to all the back-of-house processes that make airlines and airports function but also – with the Internet and Social Networking – has become the key differentiator front-of-house too, in terms of customer interactions.

Airlines and airports now have customers who expect ease-of-use and connectivity everywhere.

Four ‘Big C’ Megatrends will change the technology and the airline business:

* Convergence

* Communications

* Connectivity

* Cloud

I suggest that the winners will be those companies that use technology to anticipate and solve customer problems.  Speed and agility in adopting new technologies will be critical success factors for the future – and deciding when to adopt new technology will be a key skill for CEOs and CIOs alike.

Customer Interaction – the next frontier for Airline IT

The 11^th SITA/Airline Business IT Summit held in June in Brussels was, I think, the best yet.

I had the hard task at the end of the Summit – after a string of fascinating and lively speeches and presentations – of summarising those contributions.  This is what I said then.

Our first speaker was Peter Hartman, CEO of KLM, who told us about his team of over 20 members who drive KLM’s social networking strategy.  They were responsible for the ground-breaking initiative at Schiphol where they delighted passengers waiting to Board with small presents, tailored to their destination and their interests (as inferred from their Facebook or other social presence).   As Peter said about social networking, “Do it, don’t talk!”

Peter predicted that in future people will choose the airline they fly on through the recommendations of their social media connections.  After all, most of us use Trip Adviser now to check out hotels in advance.

In response to questions, Peter returned to the basics of what CEOs expect from Airline CIOs – the technology needs to work reliably and to costs must keep going down!

Dr Munir Majid, Chairman of MAS, talked about the convergence of technology in a “flattening World”.  Dr Majid argued that innovation matters for survival – something he illustrated with Malaysian’s innovative use of Facebook for Group bookings.

Jan Albrecht, CEO of the Star Alliance, stressed the importance of doing more IT for less.  He saw it as essential that airline IT departments provided users with modern IT tools and technology that worked with app-like ease.   Fresh thinking was essential these days in the new social-networked world.  He mused on what Steve Jobs would do for airline technology.   He asked how we as an industry could catch up with our customers’ expectations.

Having had a challenging start from the CEOs on both social networking and getting the basics right, the audience of IT Directors and CIOs returned (after a nerve-steadying cup of coffee) to a technical session on Cloud Computing.

This was a double act from Vivek Badrinath and Francesco Violante, the CEOs of OBS and SITA.  They described what I believe is going to be a game-changer for the Air Transport Industry – the Industry’s own private Cloud.  OBS and SITA described how they would provide on-demand services from a network of six data-centres in five Continents to airlines and airports – consistently, securely and cost-effectively.  Francesco pointed to the possibility of savings from virtual CUTE and SSKs, and on-demand apps.

After lunch, we were privileged to hear two industry technology experts who attempted to shock the audience: Philip Wolf, CEO of PhoCusWright, looked at how mobility and connectivity were transforming today’s travel industry. Online booking was continuing to grow and there would be 2billion new travelers by 2030.  “What would the impact of a travel app from Google be?” he asked.  His challenge to the audience was to wake up to the impact of mobility and connectivity – these days, devices know where you are, who you like and what you want.

Then Nawal Taneja, Professor of Aviation at Ohio State University, warmed to this theme and urged airlines to provide genuinely personalized service.  What if Google or Apple could take over the retail distribution of airline services? Then, he warned, the airlines would become simply the ‘manufacturer’ of seats!

Chris Klingenberg, CIO of Lufthansa (and fellow SITA Board member), provided what he termed an antidote to all this very technology-based agenda.  He said airlines would not be so foolish as to give away their “crown jewels” in the form of the link to their customers.  They would remain masters of their own destiny.   He also advanced the refreshing notion that you should be proud of higher IT spend than your competitors since this showed you were innovating ahead of them.   He advocated bringing IT out of the “Techie Corner” and getting the Boardroom to understand how important it was.  Great points, I thought!

We then finished with two excellent contributions, the first from Antoine Rostworowski, of Aeroports de Montreal, who stressed the importance of integrating airports into the new visions for airline passengers.  Then Qiang Li, MD of Information Management at Air China, talked about the challenges of massive growth that they face.  He came up with a tremendous list of the IT initiatives he is leading, which would form a great ‘to do’ list for any airline CIO:

• Cloud Computing
• Mobile
• Social Networking
• Passenger Service Systems
• Customer Relationship Management, and
• In-flight Connectivity.

So then I had to try to summarise what all this adds up to!  I think the most important fact is that there was total agreement between CEOs and CIOs, analysts and suppliers, airlines and airports, that IT really matters in the modern world.

We have heard that before and it is really important.  But there is another new factor: we in IT are now central to the airlines’ and airports’ relationship with customers through game-changing technology – mobility is now ubiquitous and social networking adds a completely new dimension to customer relationships.

So, IT matters – and that’s now widely recognised.

And IT is central to airlines in operations, in selling, in servicing and, now, in customer interaction.

SITA Airline Business IT Summit 2011 Videos

Whether or not you attended the IT Summit in Brussels last week – the best yet, I felt – you might like to see the opening ‘Sting’ about Trends in Technology and Communications impacting the Air Transport Community.

It’s a bit loud –  ”Are you READY!!!” – but makes the point about the speed of change and sheer range of opportunities opened up by technology very well, I think.

Also on the link below is the clip we played about this year’s Airline Trends Survey which compresses masses of data into an easily intelligible format.  It’s basically the same message that I gave in the Keynote: Technology is Revolutionising the Air Transport Industry  - Again!

http://thisisweare.com/casestudies/sita-airline-it-summit-branding

[The videos are at the bottom of the page]

The link is to the site of the excellent company ‘We Are’ who made the films for us and did the very striking graphic design for this year’s IT Summit.

Hope to see you at Next Year’s Summit!

The four Big C trends that will revolutionise the air transport industry – again!

I had the pleasure of opening the SITA/Airline Business Air Transport IT Summit in Brussels last Thursday, where we examined future IT game-changers for air transport.

The Summit was a great success with some fantastic speakers, and generated a lot of Twitter traffic at #ATIS  (not least from me). This blog is based on my keynote speech at the Summit, which has also been published by Flight Global and Airline Business.

So, what will be the game-changing trends that shape technology innovation in the airline business?

We in air transport will have to adopt new technologies quickly, since we are a growing industry with limited airport and airspace capacity. The 4.7 billion people who pass through our airports today are predicted by 2020 to grow to around 7.5 billion – another 2.5 to 3 billion people for us to serve at the airport.

Delivering the vision of seamless travel for our customers will need the right mix of technologies. I believe that making the right IT choices will be a key differentiator for airlines and airports in attracting customers in the next decade.

These three billion extra people will be even more tech-savvy than current passengers. Generation X and Y (and Z, by then) will have been born and raised in the digital world.

We already travel with our own technology: smart phones, tablet devices and laptops. An increasing focus for innovation is how we can link our technology with that of our customers. And these days customer technology is often more advanced than corporate technology, so we find ourselves playing catch-up.

Consumer mobility is also driving new consumer trends. We can now be connected almost any time and anywhere – and we want to be connected more easily, quickly and dependably in even more places, of course including on a flight. Social networks such as Facebook have become valuable not only to users but to airlines and airports wanting to connect to potential customers.

But how do we get a meaningful return from social networks? Reaching the next generation of passengers demands a very different approach – and mindset – from the last decade.

So we have our first C trend: Convergence. Voice and data are coming together on the same device, providing new services. Hardware is converging and today’s smart devices replace what would previously have been multiple devices. Mobile phones replace cameras, we watch TV on our PCs and DVDs on our games consoles. How likely then is it that aircraft will need the type of seatback in-flight entertainment systems we install these days at a cost of millions of dollars?

All of this means more channels and complexity for airlines and airports – and more tough calls for all of us.

My second C trend is the ubiquity of Communications. Everything as well as everyone will soon be connected through IP addresses. So everything – aircraft, engines, components, cargo containers, even bags – will be “talking” and exchanging huge volumes of data.

An enormous challenge will be to make sense of that mass of data. Storing, processing, transporting and, above all, interpreting it is going to need a radically new approach. Then just add to this the sensor technology – near-field communication, bluetooth, radio frequency – that we will be introducing at different points in the customer journey, both for passengers and their baggage. Plus, of course, there will be biometric data to process too.

So how do we turn all that data into useful information? Business intelligence, and how you interpret your data, is going to need to become a lot more sophisticated. If you can get this right, you will be able to drive effective customer personalisation, the key to loyalty.

So we have our first 2 “C” mega-trends: Convergence and Communications. What are the other game-changers for our industry?

The next mega-trend is Connectivity in a mobile world. There are some five billion mobile telephones on this planet. But we have not seen the real impact of mobile communications yet. We can expect that smart phones will outsell personal computers by year-end.

A new wave of entrepreneurs has arisen – application developers who see “mobile” space as the new frontier. Users will expect software to offer the ease and flexibility of apps. People will simply not accept the clunkiness and long load times of legacy systems. Even today’s highly optimised sites seem inflexible and slow compared with easy-to-use apps.

My prediction is that the location-based services will evolve to give passengers information relevant to their precise location at every step of their journey. Location computing should also provide great productivity and efficiency gains in ground operations and maintenance, as employees get the information they need much faster and manual tasks become automated.

And as regulars know, my fourth mega-trend is the move of everything to the Cloud, which I have talked about in previous blogs.

So airline chief executives and chief information officers need to chose which technology horses to back. Get them right and you will deliver brilliant customer-focused service at a competitive cost.

My advice is look at:

Convergence,

Communications,

Connectivity and the

Cloud.

This blog can be found also on the Paul Coby column on the Flight Global web site

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2011/06/23/358712/paul-coby-column-the-four-big-c-trends-that-will-revolutionise-the-air-transport-industry.html

and in Airline Business published on the 23 June 2011.

The Air Transport Cloud – why it really does matter?

This blog is written with my SITA Chair ‘hat’ on… As some of you may know, SITA is the “Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautique”, founded 62 years ago to provide telecommunications to airlines.

Earlier this month, SITA announced its programme to build the Air Transport Community Cloud, dedicated to the aviation industry.

Now, ‘the Cloud’ is a much over-hyped concept – especially by IT suppliers. Seemingly not a day goes past without some cumulo-nimbus decorated piece of supplier propaganda dropping into my inbox! But last June I went on record at the 2010 Airline Business IT Summit as saying the Cloud is one of my “Big 4 C” trends for the next decade for Airline IT. Had I succumbed to the supplier hype?

Well, I hope not.  I still believe Cloud Computing is one of the major trends of the current decade, not least because it enables the CIO to become the best friend of the CFO and their CEO, by accessing economies of scale at the same time as increasing business flexibility.

This is because – if well executed – the Cloud allows normal companies in normal industries to access flexible computing processing and storage capabilities comparable to – and sometimes provided by – companies of the scale of Google, IBM, Orange, eBay or Microsoft.

What is this magical Cloud then?  Well, as with all hype there as many definitions as suppliers.  To me, the Cloud is the provision of a shared computing service remotely from the user, which is charged on a business usage basis.  The cost of the hardware and operating systems, the cost of licences and so forth, is aggregated and borne by the supplier.  This enables you as a IT provider to acquire your basic computer processing at costs lower than you could on your own and to use them when you want them.

It can be used to switch on and switch off test systems.  It can be used to provide for peak loading.  It can be used to provide fundamental services.

This development is very much helped by the arrival of the Internet and web connectivity.  Thus Software as a Service is provided in the Cloud.

Indeed, the air transport industry (ATI) is no stranger to such Clouds.  In my definition of a Cloud, the airlines’ invention – the Global Distribution Systems (GDSs) – is one, and thus Amadeus, Sabre, Galileo and Worldspan are Cloud Computing providers – they just did it with older technologies.

Some background about how SITA got here may – I hope – be interesting, plus some explanation of why we believe this is going to be a winner for the SITA’s Community Concept.

This hit me in a flash almost two years ago (check out last year’s ATI Summit video, where I talk about this) and I have been encouraging SITA to develop the Air Transport Cloud programme since then.   This is because the Cloud is a service that is particularly well suited to SITA with our unique Community services, the telecommunications infrastructure for which is provided on a not-for-profit basis for the whole Air Transport Industry.

SITA’s investment in shared Cloud Computing infrastructure is now well underway and the ATI Cloud applications and the SITA Cloud services will be going live from June. They will include infrastructure, platform, desktop and software-as-a-service offerings. Even better, the Infrastructure Cloud Services will be provided by SITA as a Community Service on a not-for-profit basis to all SITA Members!

As I recall, the Cloud came up at a SITA joint Board/Executive Strategy Day way back in 2009.   As I said, it is not a new idea for air transport.  We already access economies of scale in terms of reservations and check-in, where airlines pay per passenger boarded for a centrally hosted service by the GDSs and SITA.

However, the idea of extending this to a wider range of services, facilitated by the new technologies in datacentres, networks and software-as-a-service, is absolutely made for SITA; since SITA uniquely has global network connections to almost every major airline and every major airport in the World.

Francesco Violante (SITA’s CEO) and  SITA’s Vision has been that the air transport industry’s very special needs are brilliantly suited to an Industry Cloud.  Each flight that takes off is of course a miracle of process and systems integration: involving many different entities including airlines, airports, manufacturers and GDSs that share numerous business applications and for that take-off to occur safely and efficiently, they must co-operate across the complex air transport eco-system. The aviation industry operates within complex national, regional and global regulations and standards.

SITA has therefore built an integrated cloud combining network and IT infrastructure solely dedicated to and – best of all – specifically tailored to the air transport industry and our integration complexities.

Our SITA Air Transport Community Cloud is based on six large regional virtual data centres across five continents; together with virtual data centres based at large airports. Services will be delivered through regional portals, providing airline CIOs with on-demand computing.  Every end-users will be no more than 100 milliseconds away from one of the SITA data centres.

And the SITA Air Transport Cloud will not just be limited to SITA apps: as well as providing the basic applications to run an airline or an airport, we are going to provide the platform for independent software vendors and application service providers to distribute their applications to aviation customers.

So I really believe the ATI Cloud is a game changer for the air transport industry.  Airline and airports around the world can have their applications instantly and flexibly.

Watch for developments.  I think the Cloud will revolutionise ATI technology, both in service  and in time in cost.  We have seen this happen already in passenger service systems (PSS), and the Cloud makes this open to all air transport services.

Leaving BA

As a result of the merger of British Airways with Iberia and the formation of the International Airlines Group (IAG), I have decided there is not a suitable role for me within the new BA Operating Company.

I have therefore chosen to leave to pursue other opportunities outside BA.  I will, however, continue as the BA nominated director on the board of SITA, which I currently chair.

Announcing my departure, Keith Williams, BA’s CEO designate said: “Paul has been CIO of British Airways for just over 10 years (and Head of the wider BA Services for the last two years). We would like to thank him for his significant contribution to our business – notably the development of BA.com – in some of the most challenging and exciting trading periods in the company’s history.”

I am very proud of what we at BA have achieved in the last 10 years.  BA.com is indeed the jewel in our crown, and is now fundamental to how the airline sells tickets and holidays, and to BA’s customer service.

I am equally proud of the  24×7 IT operational excellence which is the foundation of everything the airline does.

Technology has helped transform business processes across the airline and “LEAN” techniques have empowered teams in many departments. My principle has always been that there are no IT projects, only business projects.

Everything I have achieved over the last 10 years as CIO and latterly Head of Services has been the direct result of the skills, professionalism and commitment of BA people.