Fast Talk: The New IT Agenda

Monte Ford

American Airlines
SVP Information Technology and CIO
Fort Worth, Texas

When I came to American two years ago, I got a clear set of marching orders from our CEO, Don Carty: Restore the company's technology leadership. There was a time when the name American Airlines was synonymous with innovation, and I think we are well on our way back there.

Don genuinely believes that technology will be one of the drivers for this company's rebound and future success. So we are focused on every opportunity to enhance productivity across the organization. And when it comes to technology, enhancing productivity means embracing simplicity.

That's why our most strategic information-technology bet is the technology environment itself. Innovation is not an event, a tool, or an application. It is an overall environment. Our goal is to exploit many different technologies to create a single, unified, easy-to-understand view of the company.

Life has gotten too complex inside American (and just about every major company). We are a large, dispersed organization with an extremely diverse workforce and 95 million customers this year. We employ more than 100,000 people. Roughly 70,000 of those people don't work in an office. They go to a hangar, a ticket counter, a cockpit, or the belly of a plane.

All told, they use hundreds of systems and dozens of technologies. Bringing all of those people together to provide a single view of the company is a daunting task. But that's the task before us. Put simply, we're focused on the hard work of simplification. We want to look and act like a single organization.

John Parkinson

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young
Vp and chief technologist
Rosemont, Illinois

We're transitioning from technology as a fashion to technology as a utility. Between 1997 and 2000, the North American economy bought 40% more technology than it needed. It wasn't entirely irrational, but it wasn't all that smart either. (I believe that the $300 billion we spent on ERP systems was the biggest waste of money in the last century.) We're still absorbing the excess.

The same questions keep coming up: How do I demonstrate that I'm making the most of what I've got? How do I demonstrate real business value from what I've already spent?

The answer? The real-time enterprise. The big bet isn't on one technology; it's on a bundle of technologies focused on creating a real-time enterprise. It will combine better enterprise integration -- the glueware that links together applications inside the company -- with a capacity to extend technology beyond the walls of the company, to customers, suppliers, business partners, or the market.

One example is federated data management. That is, when you ask for a piece of information -- about sales, inventories, projects -- you don't have to know in advance where the information is; it just shows up. Everything is working incrementally off of what's already there. The problem is complexity. We've spent 20 years automating ourselves in an increasingly complex fashion.

In general, the case for IT spending is that it must save money -- fast. I mean payback within two quarters. Only about 5% of companies are habitual early adopters and support a rolling ROI model. The rest of the world is either making the case by doing more with less or by trying to significantly reduce the pain level.