Coby sits down with silicon.com editor Tony Hallet in a CIO Vision Series interview to talk about how the Web has featured in BA's turnaround. Here is an excerpt of the interview.
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Q: Can you tell us exactly how technology has been central to the revival of BA's fortunes?
Paul Coby: Technology's been fundamental to BA's turnaround. We've had to reinvent ourselves over the last five years since 9/11 and I think we're going to have to reinvent ourselves again as we go forward, and technology's been a fantastic leader to do that in terms of driving great customer service, taking cost out of the business and inspiring our employees.
How easy has it been to have the culture of innovation within a climate of radical cost-cutting across the board?
Coby: If you face great challenges, you need to reinvent your business. One of the key things we had to do because the no-frills carriers had really eaten our breakfast and were about to eat our lunch. So what we had to do was to reinvent ... innovate the way that we sell things and that's what we did post 9/11 by developing something that we call 'Calendar-led selling': putting the best fares up on the Web.
To do that we had to develop a Web site, we had to change the way we sell and we had to do some pretty fancy IT as well.
When you do innovate is that part of a broader culture of innovation or is tech innovation seen as quite separate?
Coby: It's disastrous to have tech innovation as a separate thing. You can have some great ideas in the corner but it's about changing the business that matters. So I talked about our BA.com Calendar-led selling
-- that was a combined effort between the IT department who developed the selling online, the revenue management folks and the pricing people who developed absolutely new ways of doing pricing and it was the marketing folks who then got the message out on the streets.
So it's the whole airline working together and that's the key thing. It's about how you use technology to change your business and move the business forward to address the challenges that the business has got. If you do it on your own it's not worth the time.
So the integration is absolutely key then?
Coby: Yeah, I mean that's the point isn't it? We're the IT department of British Airways; we're not a research department for God's sake. So it's remembering that we're the IT department, that's why we exist, that's our sole reason ... is to provide the technology and the solutions in the business change that the airline needs to be successful.
BA.com has been absolutely essential to your recent success. Can you tell us what sort of customer services you're trying to Web-enable or make self-service for the future?
Coby: What we did with BA.com originally was to take the no-frills carriers head-on, draw a line in the sand and fight back. And that's what we've done. And last year our short-haul business was profitable for the first time that it has been in 10 years and a large part of that is to do with BA.com. But what we were keen to do was not just sell online but to provide every interaction between our customers and British Airways ... [it] should be so easy you'd want to serve yourself online.
So we simplified our fares, we enabled you to upgrade, we enabled you to book a seat and print your own boarding pass at home and check-in online -- which takes a lot of the issues out of going through the airport, which is, of course, one of the enormous challenges that we all face at the moment.
Web 2.0 is a huge buzzword right now. How important is it for CIOs to tap into the kind of consumerisation of technologies and all those sorts of interesting things going on?
Coby: Well I'm going to be using BA.com 2.0 for the forthcoming business plan and, as you say, we've already done it with Google Maps [actually Earth]. And, if you like, it's a God-given opportunity because it combines the great visualisation, the great Google Maps product, with our fares so you put the two together; you produce a real, impactful thing. This came out of the marketing guys and we worked very closely with my IT folk on BA.com and put it together.
So, it's another great example of the whole airline working together for smart use of technology. It's fantastic when the business line departments have a great idea and say 'how can you do it?'. Now our challenge is then to respond to it fast and quickly enough in order to produce the sort of thing you've seen with the current World Office campaign, which features Google Maps, and encourage everybody to go and look at it at the moment.
We know that Terminal 5 is going to be a huge part of the future life at Heathrow Airport and, of course, British Airways will be the main tenant. Can you tell us what the technology challenges are of a project of that scale?
Coby: They're enormous. It's by far our biggest infrastructure project. There's making sure the new kit will work and we've got a target of four out of every five passengers will either check-in online, or use a self-service kiosk and there's going to be a bank of 90 of them when you come in with fast-bag drops immediately behind them and then customer service desks behind that. So completely new processes and how we do things, completely new management control systems and the way we allocate resources, we manage people within Terminal 5. We're putting in new sweeper systems that will be put in 12 months before we actually move in.
One of the most exciting things is lean processes, which are used widely in the manufacturing industry. Now, having defined the process we've then put the systems behind those. So this is a great example of actually focusing on what the business needs, then defining systems and then defining the infrastructure to support the systems for Terminal 5. So, I'm really proud of the way we've been fundamental to that but it's a heck of a challenge when it opens in March 2008.
