Air New Zealand(MIS100 2010)

By Jess Meyer | Thursday, May 27 2010

2009 ranking: 10

Senior IS executive: Julia Raue, CIO
Reports to: CFO Rob McDonald
Size of IS shop: 230

PCs: 5300
Mobile PCs: 2100
Terminals: 863
Hand-held devices: 2015
Total screens: 10,278

Industry: Transport and warehousing
PC environment: Dell, HP, Windows XP SP3
Server environment: IBM, HP, Sun, Windows 2003, Red Hat Linux
DBMS: SQL, Oracle, MySQL, DB2
Address: 185 Fanshawe Street, Auckland
Website: www.airnz.co.nz
Key IS projects this year: Disaster recovery; inflight and airport customer experience; collaboration; virtualisation.

Air New Zealand’s ICT department will this year maintain its flexibility to react in a timely manner to business changes, while providing strong technology delivery and maintaining the company’s investments in new technology. Key to Air New Zealand business plans in 2010 is creating the world’s best long-haul flight experience. Futuretakingflight.co.nz is considered a revolutionary new way to travel long-haul, and one that looks after everyone on the plane — from families to business travelers to holidaymakers — “because we’ve realised that everyone’s needs are different when travelling long-haul”, CIO Julia Raue explains. “As well as the traditional IT associated deliverables to enable the selling of new and exciting products like the Spaceseat in premium economy and the Economy Skycouch, this programme has enabled IT to move into a new area inflight — that of IFE or in-flight entertainment.”

“Working with partners, we have our own development platform onsite in Auckland and together we are developing a very new IFE experience.”

Virtualisation will be a strong area of focus for the airline going forward. An active server virtualisation project is underway and the team is about to embark upon a desktop virtualisation programme. Additional key projects will include investment in disaster recovery, enhancement of airport customer experience and key collaboration initiatives.

‘Follow-me printing’ has been rolled out across several of the airline’s Auckland sites to more than 3000 users with partner Fuji Xerox, who have installed the swipe card reader technology that links into Air New Zealand’s own security system cardax, meaning users are required to swipe their ID card or their ePass to enable printing.

Advantages have been seen around security, as users must swipe their access card to retrieve printouts. The project has also had a ‘green’ effect, for if a job is not printed within one hour it is automatically removed from queue.

Mobility is an additional benefit of the ‘follow-me printing’ scheme, in that the user prints to a ‘follow-me’ print queue and then swipes at any printer at any site for the job to be retrieved.

Though it can be challenging to balance strategic, tactical and operational ICT requirements across a number of critical systems, strong governance and process ensure that this is not an inhibitor to enabling success, says Raue. “The most rewarding part of my job as CIO is having the canvas to create exciting new technology experiences for our customers that make the entire process from booking to end of journey so enjoyable that flying with Air New Zealand becomes a question of ‘when?’ rather than ‘why?’.

“It is the team that enable those deliveries, who come to work every day to make a difference, that inspire me; and it is the business or internal customers who present us with the challenges and bring us onboard early to ensure success!”