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1. Introduction WestJet is the second-largest carrier in Canada, which mainly focuses on economic airlines. In decades past, WestJet expanded its destination network form all western Canadian cities to international scope. During this development period, IT played a important role. For example, electronic ticket is used in the airline reservation system. However, some IT-related issues also hinders the company’s development. This case study will first list the current IT condition of WestJet Airlines, then summarize the key strengths, core competencies and challenges of the company through them. After that, the business-IT alignment will be discussed according to the alignment maturity criteria. In terms of the IT governance, the case study will analyze both strengths and weakness of WestJet Airlines, then provide some improvement strategies of it. 2. Key strengths Currently, WestJet has right technology within its IT system. Take Sabre for example, which is a good ticketing system using codeshare, it allows two or more airlines share the same flight. Obviously, this technology helps to allocate more airlines and expand the market. Furthermore, WestJet Airlines applies electronic ticket firstly, increasing the process speed of the booking system. Appropriate enterprise is another key strength of WestJet. There are plenty of excellent technical people among the IT group, who are key factor of solving IT-related issues. As for the total number of budget and employee, WestJet’s IT was right based on benchmark result. Generally, a accurate number of budget and employee encourages processes to run smoothly. 3. Core competency After summarize the strategies used by WestJet, it is not difficult to find that the target of most ... ... middle of paper ... ...e IT-related processes of WestJet (Ramadhani 2014). Finally, management level can try to do some surveys to get feedbacks from IT staff, to know their attitudes or suggestions about their work. Furthermore, they can evaluate each other equally by marking, which encourages colleagues to work more efficient (Ramadhani 2014). 7. Conclusion The biggest challenge for IT transformation of WestJet is the low-efficient communication, and it is difficult for CIO and IT staff to achieve a alignment. The objective of new IT transformation is IT-business alignment, which serves for the core competency (customer-centered services). By using the alignment maturity criteria, WestJet shows great insufficiency of some parts, especially IT governance. For the improvement of IT governance, some practical strategies can be applied, which is able to overcome the challenge as well.
As per research Bombardier has already been investing heavily to modify its products accordingly to meet the standard of global economy. To increase their procedures, they have joint various strategic alliances with businesses and formed several joint ventures. Bombardier has formed multiple alliances with different companies throughout the world, to ensure steady growth and sales. It has many engineering and manufacturing sites in many countries. Bombardier succeeded to expand its operations in: Europe, Asia-Pacific, North America and South America. In order to successfully strive in growing markets,
As Frontier approached its 10th year of operation, Frontier officials realized an image shift was in order. The airline had established a reputation for friendly and reliable service, and reasonable airfares, mainly appealing to leisure travelers. But they reali...
Strategic use of information systems is one of the most important issues facing firms in today’s business environment. Information systems (IS) can either enable or hinder business growth, so organizations must learn to use IS advantageously. The case study “Building Business Agility at Southwest Airlines” by Ross and Beath (2007) demonstrates how a firm can drive business success through a revolutionary change in its use of IS. In the following case analysis, I will introduce and evaluate Southwest Airlines, describe and analyze its approach to IS as outlined in “Building Business Agility at Southwest Airlines,” and provide future recommendations for the company.
The IT department needs to collaborate with the business to better understand how organization changes impact applications and systems. Moreover, IT needs to strengthen the IT-business alignment to stay abreast of future changes. One methodology that may assist here is business architecture, a blueprint of the business that supports aligning strategic objectives and tactical demands. 7. There are limits to customer-centric responsiveness.
IBM System Journal. "Strategic Alignment: Leveraging Information Technology for Transforming Organizations." Last accessed April 14, 2007. http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/sj/382/henderson.pdf
Bombardier implemented an acquisition strategy to grow their business. With this strategy organization has faced many challenges as during this acquisition they inherited the data, processes and systems of each company which created inefficiency systems that didn’t communicate with each other. Below are the problems created from this inefficiency
The current IT system of WestJet was like a secluded group which was not up to the mark and this system was not good enough for attainment of regular growth and would never enable them to gain competitive advantage and to lead the market. To solve these problems major changes in IT were important. Cheryl Smith assessed many areas of IT and identified the problems in those areas. Smith proposed governance model to solve the problems in those areas and to achieve the strategic goals of the business. Smith proposed to restructure IT organization by allotting half of the IT staff to specific business areas this will result in no contention of resources among business units. The other half of the IT staff remained to together and were not assigned
To identify the issues and problems that the company is facing and how the company incorporates into its business strategy the major trends that concerns air delivery business.
Before to select the proper alternative, three alternatives were analysed and evaluated under four decisions criteria: customer experience, cost, growth rate / market penetration and ease to implementation (See Exhibit 2: Factor Analysis). Between all the alternatives, it was suggested that Southwest Airlines enters to New York City by bidding the slots and gates at the LGA (See Exhibit 3: Alternatives Analysis). This alternative sustains the challenge of changing the customer experience which means adding more flights from and to the East; furthermore, entering to new markets will reinforce “the power of the network” through LGA. At the same time, this decision will allow signing more code-sharing agreements with other airlines flying to international destinations and offer new products and services to LUV customers as loyalty rewards, in-flight internet, onboard duty-free purchases, etc.; as a result of this, it will increase passenger’s insights and experiences by flying with Southwest Airlines. Nevertheless, there is potential risk by selecting this alternative, in the recent years the energy prices has had a huge increase affecting costs, fares and even capacity needed, however Southwest Airlines has been able to hedge fuel for decad...
IT governance in the airline industry is specifically tied to sales and value chain management. By the late 1990s, international travel software traditionally used by travel agencies, such as SABRE, was opened up via application programming interface (API) to web developers (Nicolaou & Schick, 2011). As a result, consumers saw the advent of internet-based travel agencies, and many airlines and other travel companies began to sell directly to passengers (Buhalisa & Licata, 2002).
The culture and structure of WestJet is very much entrepreneurial. There are few levels of management, keeping the organizational structure quite flat and encouraging people to find solutions to issues. (!).Westjet's organizational structure includes informal communication, decentralized decision authority, flatter structures and less hierarchical relationship within different management levels, which explain that the company's personality is organic and effective.
The airline industry is a costly business to partake in especially due to the cost of fuel and technology needed to operate the airplane. With EasyJet internationalizing into Africa, it had the notion of facing new competitors, however, with the finances (see appendix) it possesses and the famous identity of its brand, made the threat of being a new entry within the Nigerian market low. However, a big threat would be if local Nigerian airlines were to reduce its prices then EasyJet might be at risk because the local airlines have the necessary equipment and knowledge to operate in its region.
Henderson and Venkatraman proposed a model for business – IT alignment; it was intended to support the integration of information technology (IT) into business strategy by advocating alignment between and within four domains (see figure 1). The inter-domain alignment is pursued along two dimensions: strategic fit (between the external and internal domain) and functional integration (between the business domain and the IT domain). The objective of this model was to provide a way to align information technology with business objectives in order to realise value from IT investments. The authors argued that the potential strategic impact of information technology requires both an understanding of the critical components of IT strategy and its role in supporting and shaping business strategy decisions and a process of continuous adaptation and change. Hence, they presented a model that defines the range of strategic choices facing managers.
Since its first grand opening in 1971, Southwest Airlines has shown steady growth, and now carries more passengers than any other low-cost carrier in the world (Wharton, 2010). To expand the business operations, Southwest Airlines took over AirTran in 2010 as a strategy to gain more market share for the Southeast region and international flights. However, the acquisition of AirTran brought upcoming challenges both internally and externally for Southwest Airlines. In this case analysis, the objectives are to focus on the change process post the merger with AirTran, and to evaluate alternatives to address the impacts of the merger. II.
An alternate strategy for JetBlue to return to profitability is to expand the market it services. A large part of JetBlue’s business is transporting cust...