Back to Air Transport IT Review - Issue 2, September 2010

Dedicating a command centre to the ATI

With the opening of the first SITA Command Centre, the air transport industry has a new global resource to monitor and manage mission-critical systems worldwide, 24x7. It is the world's only Command Centre totally dedicated to the industry.

We talked to Dave Bakker, Senior VP Global Services at SITA, about the vision and the practicalities of this major innovation.

Q. First, can we get definitions right. What is the SITA Command Centre?

Dave Bakker: It's a bit like an air traffic control centre, except that instead of watching aircraft, it's watching all SITA services provided to customers, in real time. The key is the global, holistic viewpoint - it means we can quickly find links between a faulty component and any service interruption - and take corrective action immediately. Ideally, we will have fixed the fault before any interruption. The Command Centre is the linchpin that will help us achieve zero downtime.

Q. What prompted the decision to launch this new capability?

DB: We've been getting excellent feedback from customers on our service offerings. Our 2009 customer survey told us that 97.57% of SITA customers express overall satisfaction with SITA's Services incident handling, and 95.91% with service availability.

However, looking ahead to the way the industry is going, we've known for some time we need to do more, for three reasons.

First, as we heard at this year's Air Transport IT Summit, IT is changing the way the world works and it's certainly changing the way the air transport industry works. More technology is being deployed that impacts every element of the passenger journey and the aircraft operation. Rightly, customers expect more responsive, consistent and proactive service support across these elements, with little tolerance for disruption or downtime.

Second, there is an increasingly complex dependence on a growing number of components and applications working seamlessly together - as well as on many different technology vendors. The goal is to make this as transparent as possible, while managing the underlying resources and partners end-to-end, regardless of physical location.

However, the complexity of monitoring applications end-to-end, or even just network availability, will increase as more suppliers or partners are involved in the chain of service fulfillment. Integration of systems, information flows and alignment of processes all pose technological hurdles that must be overcome to enable service management visibility across a customer's specific architecture and specific supplier mix.

Third, increased consolidation in the industry means there are larger and more complex organizations. They need the assurance of sufficiently robust and proactive IT service support.

A unified approach
A number of SITA operational capabilities have been unified into the Command Centre:
AIRCOM - air-to-ground communications
Messaging - SITA Data Centre operations
SITA Data Centre
Airport - including CUTE, CUSS, Self-service
Baggage
Network - including a dedicated voice team
Security
Servers
The operations are managed by a dedicated senior management team on-premises on a 24x7 basis.

Follow the sun

Q. Where is the SITA Command Centre located?

DB: We launched the first Command Centre in Montréal in May. We now have 76 application and network specialists based there, 40 service desk staff and close to a dozen AIRCOM staff. Of course, in line with our global/local philosophy, they're fully integrated with our 1,700 plus customer service staff at SITA locations around the world. We're already offering 24x7x365 support from Montréal. We've been operating in the city since 1987 and already had more than 100 staff based there.

In 2011, our second Command Centre is planned to open, in Singapore. This will be identical in toolset, and capabilities, allowing for a seamless fully redundant follow-the-sun capability - of particular value in the execution of any disaster recovery plan.

Q. How realistic is it to achieve zero downtime?

DB: It's a challenge for any technology-based enterprise, and doubly so for an industry as dependent and as varied as air transport. But it's a challenge we have to conquer.

As we all know, a relatively simple incident can all too easily escalate to the point where lost revenues accumulate totally disproportionately. Inevitably the challenge becomes greater as processes and applications become linked and as everyone - customers included - also becomes digitally linked. Add in the wild card of third-party vendors and the permutations become even more complex.

It's also crucial to move away from manual work-around processes. Inevitably, despite everyone's best efforts, these can further adversely impact airline or airport services. Anticipation and speed are everything.

The purpose of the Command Centre is to cut through the risks. By maintaining real-time visibility of network and applications together on a constant basis, it means we can identify problems before they become serious issues - even identifying them before they reach the customer. And if a problem does occur, we can immediately pull together - using a dedicated incident management team - whatever resources are needed to resolve it quickly and efficiently, and track the process to the end. It doesn't mean that we've cracked the zero downtime ambition, but it does take us a whole lot closer.

Partnership

Q. The SITA network is operated in partnership with Orange Business Services. Are they involved in this new project?

DB: We're lucky to have such a strong and proactive partner as Orange Business Services. They have been involved in the project from the outset. Within the SCC we have a dedicated Orange Business Service team facilitating the interaction with SITA's largest partner, to ensure network issues are handled more quickly and directly.

Q. Partnerships and contracts are governed by Service Level Agreements. Are these recognized through the Command Centre?

DB: That's a good example of how we are building joined-up thinking into the project: all SLAs can be programmed into the Command Centre. This means they can be monitored to ensure all provisions are met - and if any issues arise, dealt with in the same timely manner as other events.

Building a common language

Q. How does this fit with SITA's overall strategy for service management?

DB: We understand that our customers need supporting services that will help them achieve efficiency in their critical business processes. In our 2009 customer survey, 97.60% of SITA customers express overall satisfaction with management of services from SITA. However, we believe we can improve on this, through the development of a number of key service management components, at the heart of which are the new Command Centres.

These key investments will enhance the core ITIL processes of Incident Management, Problem and Change Management, and they will deliver additional capability beyond our current service set. We're also building a common language focused on enhancing service globally by developing personnel skills and know-how around ITIL knowledge and maturity. And we've recently run several pilots with customers to test acceptance for specific tools. For example, the introduction of Customer Experience Monitoring tools allows us to measure performance on Web-based transactions.

Innovative and best-in-class

Q. What would you say differentiates SITA's Command Centre from others?

DB: Well certainly it's unique within the air transport industry. No other ICT provider has a centre focused 100% on this industry. Because of that, we wanted to ensure we did it right. We had our plans checked in detail by a world-leading industry analyst - and I'm glad to say that they saw them as being innovative, when judged against best-in-class peer groups.

One of the key benefits is that the Command Centre is both an incident resolver and a service provider. For SITA, minimizing the impact of incidents - better yet, recognizing potential problems before they hit the customer's operations - are the main focus areas of the SITA Command Centre, since the knock-on effect of IT downtime can have huge implications.

Take as an example the case of the US Customs computer outage at Los Angeles airport in August 2007 (not a SITA customer). It happened on a peak summer travel day, with nearly 25,000 international passengers arriving. Border management agents were not willing to take on the risk of processing passengers manually. It took 10 hours to fix the computer problem. As a result, 73 flights were affected with 17,000 inbound passengers left for up to nine hours on aircraft. A further 16,000 outbound passengers were affected. Enhanced pro-active monitoring of network and applications could have helped reduce the service restoration time - and perhaps even avoided the outage in the first place.

This is why SITA's Command Centre staff are focused just as much on ensuring day-to-day continuity of service through proactive monitoring of our customers IT infrastructures, as they are on dealing with technical problems and service failures. It's important they maintain that balance.

The Command Centre may not have the romance of NASA's iconic control centre, but our commitment, expertise, energy and determination to focus on moving towards zero downtime is equal in every respect.

About the Command Centre - some facts

3,200 customers are covered by the Command Centre
2,000 airlines and 300 airports will be supported by the Command Centre
300 vendor relationships are managed by SITA through a dedicated vendor management team in the Command Centre
More than 10,000 routers connect the Command Centre to customer airline and airport sites worldwide
220 airlines use SITA's AIRCOM services which are monitored from the Command Centre
SITA Regional Operations, Data Centre operations and field staff are staff are fully integrated with the Command Centre

About Dave Bakker

Dave Bakker is Senior Vice President, SITA Global Services. Prior to joining SITA, he spent 10 years with Dell Inc., where he held leadership roles in both Europe and Asia. He has extensive managerial experience with innovative customer service delivery models as well as hands-on experience implementing large-scale CRM technologies. He is currently based at SITA office in Geneva, Switzerland.