Extracting Value from It Infrastructure

Extracting value from IT infrastructure

Economic constraints have forced IT managers to extract greater value from existing IT infrastructures.

Few organisations under severe financial pressure have delivered more from their IT systems for less additional investment than British Airways.

In the last few years, the UK airline has had to fend off a series of threats to its business - from the specific challenges posed by low-cost carriers under-cutting its fares to the wider problem of falling passenger numbers caused by the economic downturn, the impact of 9/11 and the SARS virus.

Amid the turmoil, a number of BA's competitors either went bust or filed for bankruptcy protection, and yet BA emerged from the upheaval leaner and fitter than it had been for several years.

How did it achieve the turnaround? Paul Coby, who took over as BA's chief information officer only days after the attacks on New York and Washington, says a big help was the automation of some of the airline's business processes, the fresh focus on exploiting and streamlining legacy systems, the rationalisation of the company's technology suppliers and the necessary (if at times painful) cut in IT headcount, which all helped to improve service levels as well as reduce costs.

This is what 'managing for value' - one of the key strands in Information Age's broad Effective IT initiative - is all about. In tougher times, IT management have delivered considerable benefits to the business by cutting project sizes, reducing headcount, rationalising supplier relationships, reinvesting in legacy systems and pressing suppliers to share the risks of new investment.

In his first few months in the job, says Coby, BA drew up a major cost-cutting plan dictating that IT operational costs had to be cut by one-fifth. If anything, that target has