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.
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.
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