The CIO of San Francisco International Airport talks to ZDNet about protecting the airport's network and providing new services such as passenger WiFi.
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We're at the San Francisco International Airport and you've been the CIO here since 2001. What's the scope of your responsibility at the airport? Obviously you're not running the control systems for the FAA but what specifically are you running at the airport?
John Payne: It's the IT systems for basically three customer sets. I have what we call the commission employees, which are the folks that actually run the airport -- so it would be the employees if you will of the organisation, the enterprise, about 1,200 folks. Then it's the tenants that participate in running the airport, the airlines, the concessionaires, parking management, a variety of different tenants, federal inspection services like customs, TSA, DHS. Those kinds of folks. And then the last most important are the passengers themselves. So those three consumers, if you will, of my services are the folks that I support.
Well let's talk about security because that's obviously been a big issue since 9/11 and just the airport being critical infrastructure -- so what kind of disaster planning, catastrophe planning do you have in place?
John Payne: I break those into two different very, very important areas. Security is one and then disaster recovery is another. Clearly San Francisco ... has a major initiative across all city agencies to ensure that we can continue to operate in the event of a major earthquake or man-made disaster like a terrorist event. We put a lot of effort into figuring out how to deal with the unthinkable and we have multiple data centers in zone 4 earthquake-proof buildings.
We have offsite capabilities when it comes to moving technology and keeping the airport running and one of the biggest challenges in business resumption planning is sitting down with your business managers and figuring out what are the scenarios that you want to plan and budget for. So it's an ongoing effort that we go through and identify what are mission critical systems and to what extent do we want to spend and prepare for certain kinds of disasters. What systems truly need to be up and what don't. And as we think and talk about this the primary responsibility in a catastrophic event is pure communications.
So what is your responsibility and involvement in the day to day security for the airport?
John Payne: We get inundated like everybody with spam so that falls into my security group's domain. We also deal with attacks. We have hacker attacks on our servers. We also have situations where e-mails and notifications will come to us overseas declaring that some bad event will happen at the airport itself and the TSA or the DHS will contact us and ask us to try to help isolate where that came from and then provide that information back to them so they can track it down. So it's a fairly active involvement in cyber security on an ongoing basis. We also perform audits on our network every two to three years to ensure that we can afford to do best practice.
Now you talk about an airport as being a public facility and in the public sector but yet it seems to me that you have to be competitive as well.
John Payne: Absolutely and indeed I think the airport is an enterprise agency within the city county of San Francisco and as such we don't take any municipal tax dollars at all. We have to be self supporting. So we among city agencies are very attuned to people have a choice and those that based on geography or convenience could go to Oakland or San Francisco or San Jose or San Francisco, we have to compete for those folks, those passengers.
What are you doing to create business value through IT in terms of being more competitive as a transportation facility?
John Payne: In 2003 we were able to put WiFi in place within six months around the entire airport.
It's not free WiFi.
John Payne: It's not free WiFi. Because we do not take general funds from the city and county of San Francisco, we had to do a pay-as-you-go and the implementation of WiFi needed to pay for itself so therefore..
Let me just interject with one question I've always been wanting to ask. Why is it at this airport, which I spend a lot time at, there aren't very many electrical outlets for those of us who need to keep our laptops charged up?
John Payne: Well cause honestly a flip answer would be we want you to relax and have a good vacation and it should start the minute you get into SFO. So it's quality of life. The serious answer is that we understand that that is a problem and we have a project in place right now where we are piloting traveller workstations where people can power up and you will see these in our Terminal 3, United Terminal, as well as Terminal 1, and those will be rolled out within the next 12 months.
I'd even be happy to pay a fee. You know, put in my quarters to keep charging in a convenient place with a nice seat.
John Payne: Excellent, I will note that. I will pass that along to the project manager. That's great to hear.
What are you doing from an IT perspective or business intelligence perspective to understand... What are you tracking in terms of the travellers, the customers of the airport, and how you can create a better experience, how you can turn more of a profit?
John Payne: We basically do surveys on an annual basis where we ask passengers what they like and don't like about the airport itself. We look at those year after year trying to ensure that the facilities are safe, they're clean, they're convenient. There are a number of initiatives from the standpoint of parking. That's always a big issue for folks. We put in place a brand new parking system that's automated that allows us to track time and parking in garages, short term, long term, valet parking. It's a huge issue.
So that's under your responsibility in terms of specking out those services?
John Payne: We participate in the business manager that owns those initiatives. So those are all driven by the business and IT is basically in support of the business. It's a horizontal function within the airport and we take direction from the business manager that has those projects and then work with the business manager in how we should implement the technology and what the technology options are for those.
When I talk to a lot of CIO's, they always mention that they are trying to move from a position where it was cost controlled to being able to invest more into innovation and to create a culture in which they can automate a lot of the day to day operations and then funnel funds into things where they can get some competitive advantage. What is the San Francisco Airport doing in that vein?
John Payne: I think we're really unique. There are very few airports and one of the great things about my job is we're actually a profit center and not a cost center. So what we are able to do is we resell network bandwidth and other services to our tenants and this allows us to become a profit center, generate revenue, not be a cost center, and then we take that money and that experience that we gain and that ability to have a tight relationship with our customer set and then drive innovation through that.
Examples are WiFi as well. We run our visual paging monitors through WiFi. We put in customer self-service kiosks that allow international passengers to generate boarding passes. Those are all run over WiFi. So it's very synergistic between a lot of the technologies that we implement and then how we service the passengers and the tenants.
What kind of metrics are you tracking on various customers that you have at the airport?
John Payne: We track a variety of different metrics again through surveys as well one of the issues we want to ensure people have a good experience in comparison with our friends in San Jose and our friends in Oakland is get predictability going through checkpoints, ensure that people know when they go to SFO, they know how long the checkpoints are going to take and so we track metrics through our airport operations group, and our airport security group, how long does it take a peak times to get through a checkpoint and we're very proud of the fact that it's not very long at all. It's predictable day in and day out.
Service oriented architecture (SOA) is another big buzzword, more lightweight applications, web 2.0, mashups. Is that part of your innovation streak? What's an example of something you've made?
John Payne: Sure. AIRS, Airfield Inspection Reporting System. So the Concord left because of a disaster that happened in Paris because it picked up debris on the runway. There's a 7 by 24 effort at the airport to ensure and inspect all the runways all the time because you can't have debris on the runway and things fall of airplanes as they land.
Is this done through remote cameras or manual visual inspection?
John Payne: Manual physical inspection so all of the above are used but you need people on the airfield 7 by 24 looking for debris and also looking for things like lights that burn out and other things that happen. You need an application that will then collect those incidents and those repairs that need to be done. That needs to be reported both to our facilities folks but also to the FAA and also to airlines.
So once that gets into the system, all that further downstream is automated?
John Payne: That is indeed, correct, yes. And those are applications you just can't buy, it is to specific to airport business. Another is aircraft parking, just as you park trucks, you got to park airplanes, when you park airplanes there is revenue derived from that parking, for a 24 hour period of time, and again you can't really go someplace and find an airport parking application. You really have to build it yourself.
The greening of IT is a big topic right now and many companies have initiatives in that area, is that something that you are focused on at this point?
John Payne: Absolutely, huge. San Francisco prides itself on being a green city, the airport as part of San Francisco has very aggressive initiatives when it comes to green advance initiatives. The airport business in general, there is a worldwide effort to have green airports, so there are solar initiatives, there's an energy reduction initiative that we have at the airport. And when it comes to computers, we basically buy energy star compliant, and we pay an extra fee to have correct disposal of computers to ensure that the metals are dealt with in an appropriate manner and there is an on-going effort through the city's Department of Environment to meet more stringent requirements when it comes to computing initiatives.
