Airport IT- The emergence of a new segment, the Airport Owners !

While Airports are one of the most sophisticated infrastructures that human kind has ever seen, an advocate of information technology often grapples with the question “ Why hasn’t Information technology come closer Airports as much as it should have? ".  The question looks apt especially in the back drop of slow paced investments in IT projects for the last few years.

The answer although is simple, gets complicated when we examine the nuances. Traditionally the Airlines, rather than the Airport Owners, have been the major decision makers in sourcing the IT infrastructures. On other hand, the Airport Owners focused their energies more on the security and maintenance of the facilities, leaving the operations to the Airlines. The made the Airport owners take a back seat in technology decisions.

However with the economic meltdown, Airline companies started facing the heat of the dry market and therefore less focused on IT infrastructure. This promulgated the Airports to shoulder more responsibilities and take greater control of their facilities and assets. Some of the Airports in Europe and Asia started managing their operations by themselves including passenger-processing infrastructure, baggage handling, catering, below-the-wing services, and the communications infrastructure.

 

Now all these services required the support of Information Technology. And as it states in the axiom “demand meets supply”, the Airports and IT companies started to drifts towards each other. The impending problems however was the lack of standard measures in terms of processes, understanding requirements, satisfying the regulations and implementation of successful IT infrastructure – Software, Hardware and et al.

To accentuate the IT investments and make them work as intended, Airport Consultants Council (ACC) set up the ACC IT&S Committee, in the year of 2008. The committee drafted the guidelines that serve as a reference document for any future Airport IT Implementations.

The members of the committee were from - Air-Transportation IT Service, Inc., ARINC, Arora Engineers, Inc., Airport Process Design. , Convergent Strategies Consulting, Inc. (CSC), Daktronic, Inc., AECOM,  Glover & Associates , Cisneros Incorporated, Paragon Project Resources, Inc., Roy D. McQueen & Associates, SAIC, The Jim Willis Group, SITA, Stellar Services, and XIP Consulting, LLC.

Thus with the dawn of the new era, the IT implementations is expected to get consumed and controlled by the Airport owners more than the Airline companies.