
Flies in face of travel industry crisis by completing cost cutting review early...
By Andy McCue
Published: 19 May 2003 06:30 BST
British Airways has completed a review of its IT operations that has taken £50m per year off the bottom line over a year ahead of schedule as part of a massive organisation-wide cost-cutting programme.
The airline reported better than expected results today that showed a £135m profit in the year ended 31 March compared with a £200m loss last year, despite the ongoing crisis in the travel industry due to terrorist attacks, the war in Iraq and the SARS virus.
In an exclusive interview with silicon.com BA's chief information officer, Paul Coby, revealed how the airline has taken major costs out of the IT infrastructure as part of a programme, IT21, implemented after the 11 September terrorist attacks.
"It was the IT department's contribution to saving the airline. We have over the lifetime of this programme significantly improved up-times, performance service level agreements and taken £50m out of the cost of running the department."
One of the key parts of the programme was consolidation, which saw 100 file and print servers being removed while 800 printers were reduced to 70. The costly IT contractor base was also slashed by 100.
A technical architecture team also identified redundant areas that had arisen through siloed departmental level IT developments in the past
Coby explained: "We actually mapped all our systems and this enabled us to have a purge of systems and we turned 40 significant systems off and 550 desktop applications. The next significant reduction is to turn off whole families of systems as we have got something of everything."
Despite these savings the crisis in the airline industry showing no signs of easing with the suspension of flights to Kenya because of terrorist threats this week, and Coby said he has already identified new areas for reducing costs.
This includes a possible voice over IP (VoIP) network and the reassessment of its mid-range Sun Solaris Unix mainframe environment to consider the options of Linux and Microsoft.
"It is a highly competitive market now and understanding total cost of ownership is fundamental."
Desirable experience Experience of PFI disciplines Airline Experience, RAF background, Ministry of Defence This is a permanent role, Salary 60,000k ...
There are a number of developments and changes currently being undertaken by this team which have identified a requirement for additional support ...
Content Candidate must be articulate and be able to converse with client, account and other groups within the EDS global community Able to manage ...
CIO50 2008
The silicon.com CIO50 2008 profiles the most influential and innovative tech chiefs in the UK across all industries and organisation size, from the biggest FTSE100 companies to high growth dot-com start ups and the public sector. The list was voted on by the UK CIO community and a panel of experts. Find out more in our latest special report.
July 10th: Just MASH Marketing: The Customer Reference Mashup
Ensure Virtualization is Meeting Your Needs--Read this New White Paper
Mashing it up with Support: Automate, Coordinate and Collaborate with the Incident...
The End of Application Deployment: Virtualised Applications Streamline, Secure and...
Stories from the web...
Copyright ©1995-2008 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Top of page
silicon.com Dear silicon.com: Tech teacher shortage, Kangaroo and phones on planes Reader Comments of the Week
Mike Barrett From CIO to consultant: Project manager or salesman? Hard lessons from the coalface…