Perspectiva de Gestión Middle-up-down y la Contribución

The airport business can be seen both as being a service industry and as being part of (national) infrastructure. On the one hand, demand for service may change at short notice including a demand for change in infrastructural characteristics. This usually involves changing streams of revenue from the customers (e.g. airlines, passengers). On the other hand, the infrastructural characteristics of this industry incur capital cost for long periods that are paid for by the owners of an airport (often up to thirty years, e.g. for runways). So, a major challenge within airport management would be to address the different business cycles found in this industry (i.e. amongst the different business partners) with proper investments.

In a more general way, Porter’s widely known concept of ‘competitive forces’ (Porter, 1980 and 1998) places any company into its competitive environment, determined by the power of buyers, the power of suppliers, the substitutes available for products and services, possible new entrants and existing competitors (Albers, 2008). The same applies to airports (e.g. high speed rail as a substitute for certain air services).

Based on Porter's works, Park (2003) applied the above to the airport industry. He identified factors that can play a role in an airport's competitive advantage (see figure 2-1). In the context of the research topic, a core question focuses on the potential contribution of information technology (IT) within these

groups of factors. Many of the factors are predetermined e.g.by the location of an airport.

Figure 2-1: Factors of airport competitiveness. (Source: Park, 2003, p. 354). Usually, there are certain categories, into which IT support may be divided:  Control of processes or machines (e.g. baggage sortation)

 Information distribution (e.g. display of flight information to public)

 Administrative support (e.g. invoicing, automated purchase orders, decision support, planning and marketing).

In addition, there are different technical elements within IT that contribute towards a successful IT function such as:

 Hardware infrastructure (e.g. physical networks, storage units, processing units).

 Software infrastructure (e.g. operating systems, message bus, mail systems).

 Commodity software applications (office support such as spreadsheets, word processing, electronic calendar)

 Specialized software applications (e.g. flight information display systems, baggage tracking systems, an airport operational database).

Besides these rather tangible elements there is also the intangible element of managing the IT function (usually referred to as IT management or IT governance). It is assumed that if all the different aspects are carefully aligned, IT may contribute towards the success of an airport. Furthermore, the different players in the airport context may contribute to a variety of the above aspects.

Not looking at extending existing models, but asking for the reasons for possible alignment, Luftman et al. (1999) focussed on enablers and inhibitors in their study. Their study found several contributing factors regarding alignment, as shown in table 2-1.

Enablers  Inhibitors 

Senior executive support for IT IT/business lacks close relationship IT involved in strategy development IT does not prioritize well 

IT understands the business  IT fails to meet its commitments  Business/IT partnership  IT does not understand business  Well-prioritized IT projects  Senior executives do not support IT IT demonstrates leadership  IT management lacks leadership 

Table 2-1: Enablers and inhibitors of alignment. (Adopted from Luftman et al. 1999).

Most of the alignment models assume that there is a certain budget that the IT function spends in order to support the business function in a desired way. In table 2-1 arguments like ‘IT understands the business’ or ‘well-prioritized IT projects’ suggest such an assumption. However, the IT budget needs to be split into different portions in order to deliver IT services in the long run. For example, it may become necessary to invest into an IT infrastructure in order to cope with future business requirements. As the researcher understand the organisation in Libya don’t spend a lot of money in IT requirements than even more difficult for the organisation to spend on IT infrastructure.

Figure 2-2: Technology scope

But in case strategy changes in a way that causes its innovative component to be stressed, a different type of IT investment would become necessary. Although it is not explicitly mentioned in the model above (figure 2-2), the investment function needs to be a core part of business/IT alignment, too. A framework that supports this idea is presented by Ross and Beath (2002).

The key value questions to be answered by this approach are as follows (Apfel and Smith, 2003):

 What is the initiative?

 How will the organisation measure the business value?  What does the technology do?

 How much benefit will the organisation receive?  How much will it cost?

 How does the organisation take into account future uncertainty?  Is the enterprise positioned to exploit these capabilities?

For each of the questions there is a set of standard tools or best practices that can be applied to provide a sufficient answer. The aforementioned balanced

scorecard approach and its extension to strategy maps (Kaplan and Norton, 2000 and 2004) linked to performance measures would be such a possible best practice methodology. As mentioned before, a scorecard on its own would not reflect the IT portion of an investment.

This research project looks at the IT contribution within a production environment. Nevertheless, such an IT solution should have as few requirements as possible towards the other environments (to keep costs low for development and at run-time).

The amount and type of IT solutions found at an airport vary considerably, and are much dependent on the size and business model of the airport concerned. The range may be from half-a-dozen IT applications to several hundred IT applications.

As a first common attempt to list/categorise IT systems within the aviation industry the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and the Airports’ Council International (ACI) introduced an implementation scenario for IT solutions in an airport (see figure 2.3).

The major IT solutions utilised by the different players at an airport are supposed to use an individual sub-set of information from centralized airport data monitoring (ADM in figure 2.3). At the same time, the the IT focus should be? on current information in respect to flight operations. A sort of ‘midend’ across all architectural layers is defined by the Airport Systems’ Integration guidelines (ASI in figure 2.3). These basically aim to enable the exchange of information amongst the players (possibly in an automated manner).

Figure 2-3: Generic IT systems’ landscape at an airport according to an implementation scenario by IATA and ACI (April 1998). Illustration produced by the author.

The implementation scenario, as presented in figure 2-3. is independent from an airport’s business model as far as the (technical) integration of the business processes (or functions) by means of information exchange is considered.

In respect to the alignment of the business function and the IT function for airports, it can be concluded that most of the alignment models (Sage, 2006) may be applied to the research context. However, a lack of causality in the relationship between IT as an input factor and as business performance (in the form of quantifiable output) limits the statements of many models (Gattorna, 2009). Porter’s value chain and the concept of information intensity seem to be a vehicle that can identify the processes that influence (more than others) business performance in cases where it is supported by IT.

2.5 IT Response and Monitoring.

One of the most common complaints that one hears from users is that the 'network is slow'. But how can one relate a subjective viewpoint to an objective measurement that one can monitor and report on? And should there not be a

pretty good idea of what response times are likely to be for an application before it is rolled out to users, instead of after?

There are various management packages that offer application response monitoring, but this capability tends to be part of a comprehensive, complex and expensive systems’ management portfolio. Before organisations decide whether they want - and have the budget for - a full-scale commercial offering, it is recommended that they have a look at what can be done with some home-grown monitoring processes.