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American airlines (or at least their parent AMR Corp) has decided to start building a completely new system for all their (reservation, flight information, check-in and CRM) operations according to this article in the Chicago Tribune. A very courageous step, because of the sheer size of the migration, the complexity, the timespan of (only!) four years and the required investment (unknown but estimated to be several hundred millions of dollars).
A powerful decision made by the responsible executives like Monte Ford, to overcome the ongoing airline industry IT issue in needing to deal with and customize 30-50+ year old systems (Sabre in this case). By starting from a green fieldsituation, design mistakes from when the industry was only half as old as currently can finally be resolved. The innovative angle of this program, called Jetstream, is that American has now chosen is to design the new system around the passenger (data) rather than the data of the reservations. This will enable the airline to integrate functionality of loyalty programs, integrate easily with social media sites, and enable their customer service to be truly customer centric. It may even help AA to transform itself to other business models. It will be a massive operation, and it is interesting to see the details of the implementation strategy. They now plan to do it module by module, which also means the need to integrate with the old systems, at least temporary. Hewlett Packard will build the new system. More information on the Jetstream program announcement: Official press release: http://aa.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=2713 Good blog on it: http://blogs.forrester.com/ebusiness_strategy/airlines/ Other articles: Stockbloghub, LA times, Mercury News, Zacks. |
