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BA tech plans to "revolutionise" airline industry
CIO Paul Coby wants BA to seize once-in-a-decade opportunity...

By Andy McCue

Published: Thursday 13 November 2003

British Airways claims its use of technology to overhaul the way it interacts with customers and staff will "revolutionise" not only the airline industry, but commerce in general.

BA's CIO Paul Coby reaffirmed its commitment to the technology investment behind its 'customer-enabled BA' programme in an exclusive interview with silicon.com this week following the release of rather gloomy financial results. He said BA will be at the forefront of a once in a decade 'revolutionary' change in the way airlines do business.

"It is still extremely challenging times for airlines. Fundamentally the role of new technology is key to what we are doing to fight back," he said. "You can't have old complex green screens. You can't have 39 versions of doing everything. You have to do it once and keep it simple."

On the customer-facing side, Coby said ba.com had its best ever day last week taking around 17 online bookings per minute, while use of e-ticketing and self-service check-in kiosks continues to gain traction.

On the internal side a major SAP rollout to support its engineering and manufacturing processes will result in huge efficiencies through simplification and standardisation.

Next on Coby's agenda is the standardisation of the airline's global networks, with the emphasis on voice and data convergence. But while a crew rostering system will be moving to Linux, BA will take a cautious approach to adopting the open source operating system.

"We'll look at what the opportunities are as they come forward. We're absolutely not going to migrate lots of existing perfectly serviceable systems that are operating onto Linux for the sake of moving it onto Linux. I haven't seen any figures that suggest we could do that," he said.

Read silicon.com tomorrow for the full interview with Paul Coby to find out how he made it to be CIO of one of the world's major airlines – just days after the 11 September terrorist attacks in the US - and how he balances budget pressures with strategic IT investment decisions.