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United They Stand: Airline IT, Business Units Ally

At about the same time, United's CIO, Nirup Krishnamurthy, began to see an up tick in requests for help from the different business units - each acting as independent silos. It was hardly a cost-effective way for an already budget-constrained service department to operate.

A defeated IT department might have decided its resources were few, and being as it was in a bankruptcy situation, it wasn't likely to get more dollars. It could have adopted the strategy of picking a couple of projects and turning down the other requests. Make do. Scrape along. Don't make waves, and keep your head above water.

And yet, the demoralizing atmosphere of bankruptcy did not depress United IT's spirit, willingness to be a team player or creativity. CIO Krishnamurthy not only saw a descending need, but he also figured out how to meet it, and how to address it, in a very cost-effective way. The result is a true working partnership between business and IT today at United that rides on mutual respect and a teamwork approach to working toward pulling the company out of the red.

You can read in detail on our site about the specifics of the strategy employed to get IT working with the business side in a way that got everyone on the same page, working with the same processes, priorities and standards. By paying attention as much to how things were getting done, or not as the case may have been, as he did to organizational dynamics, Krishnamurthy was able to see where processes were falling down. He figured out how to get everyone committed to the same goals, and then devised a strategy designed to tackle all those issues while keeping the key areas United needed to address front and center.

Dubbed "IT Transformation," the plan revolves around seven cross-rganizational "strategic themes," including: Cost Leadership, Customer Experience, Revenue Optimization, IT Infrastructure, Shared Services Optimization, Safety and Compliance and Employee Engagement.

The Strategy served three main objectives:
* Centralizing the investment process to make the most of each dollar spent.
* Implementing an infrastructure management plan that reduced IT's complexity and risk.
* Putting in place the IT leadership and processes capable of efficiently carrying out the mission ahead.

Not on the initial list, but perhaps a bonus, was the number of revenue opportunities the strategic themes have helped to make possible. As author Peter High notes, the proof is in the results: the return on investment on IT investments more than doubled in 2004 as compared to 2003, reflecting an improvement in the quality of investments. A little less than two years into the three-year IT Transformation program, developer productivity gains of more than 15% have been achieved, putting United's IT team well on the way to beating the target of 20% for the full three years. Any company would be happy with those numbers.

United may still be in Chapt.11, but it is an IT success story nonetheless. It provides an excellent example of how IT can rise to meet a business need - in this case finding new ways to cut costs, eliminate duplicate effort, vet the real need for projects and create solutions that fix real business problems - even under the worst circumstances.

Krishnamurthy's success has been such that United's senior management has since committed to investing in IT - even as rival carriers cut IT costs - while demand for IT services has simultaneously expanded. Our hats are off to Krishnamurthy and his team, for their perseverance, collaboration and leadership. Bravo!

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