British Airways CIO Paul Coby

In the first of a new series of interviews with some of the biggest characters in IT, Andy McCue catches up with a man in the top tier of management at the UK’s largest airline, Paul Coby. Here is a man with some commonsensical ideas on IT and business – and some of his approach would have even made sense 2,000 years ago…

British Airways CIO Paul Coby can justifiably claim more than most of his peers to have had a tough time coping with the economic slowdown and cuts in IT budgets.

It was a tough start for Coby, who was publicly unveiled as the airline's top IT man just days after the 11 September terrorist attacks in the US. And if the collapse of the travel industry after those attacks wasn't enough then the foot and mouth outbreak, the continued general economic slowdown, SARS and the war in Iraq have made for a ‘challenging’ set of circumstances.

That, combined with the stiff competition from North Atlantic carriers and the no-frills airlines which had embraced the web as a low-cost way of doing business, meant BA was forced into a battle for its own survival. One of Coby's first tasks was a radical round of cost reduction.

Coby says the seriousness of the situation actually helped in that the board and the organisation was willing to accept the need for significant changes.

"It did mean we were at a time when people were absolutely willing to make changes. If we hadn't taken significant cost reduction, if we hadn't reduced the contractors we hadn't on board, if we hadn't reduced the run-rate in IT operations by over a third in two years, then we wouldn't be here," he tells me.

The figures are certainly impressive. BA has cut overall IT spend by £93m – 34 per cent – over two years. But far from abandoning technology, Coby said the airline's actual investment in new IT has increased and that technology is vital to the future of BA.

"Fundamentally the role of new technology is key to what we are doing to fight back," he says.

How and where the CIO chooses to spend on new IT investment is one of the areas where the IT department can really make a difference, according to Coby.

"One of the really strategic choices you have is 'Where am I going to invest the IT budget?'," he says. "In BA we spend about two per cent of our overall turnover on running the IT operation and a much smaller amount than that on the IT investment. If you get it right it should lever a tremendous amount of business change and business payback."

Coby's overall strategy is to simplify and automate BA's business processes to fundamentally change the way the airline interacts with its customers and employees.

Part of this is the 'customer-enabled BA' programme, which Coby says is his and his department's greatest triumph. It has seen the overhaul of ba.com – once upon a time a URL owned by US regional telco Bell Atlantic - and an increase in online bookings, e-ticketing and self-service check-ins.

"This is not going to just revolutionise the airline industry. It is going to revolutionise commerce. Actually putting your customers in charge of how they interact with you is a fantastic lever," he says. "You can't have old complex green screens. You can't have 39 versions of doing everything. You have to do it once and keep it simple. My view has been that IT revolutionises the airline industry once a decade and what's next is customer enablement."

On the internal side the largest project underway is a massive SAP Engineering Wide System (EWS) rollout across the company. It will replace over 170 disparate legacy systems – some almost 30 years old.

Networks will be the next area that Coby looks to standardise. His IT department will make recommendations towards the end of the year.

"What it would be really nice [to do] would be to buy network capacity almost on a spot market basis so you could get the best deals available at any one given time," he says. "We're some way off that, so what we're looking at the moment is maintaining effective competition between the main suppliers and using VoIP where it is available and appropriate for us."

BA is also looking at its mid-range server strategy and while Coby admits Linux will undoubtedly play a part in the future he is in no rush to move to open source at the moment.

"We're absolutely not going to migrate lots of existing perfectly serviceable systems that are operating onto Linux for the sake of moving it onto Linux," he says. "However, as new systems come forward or upgrades come forward we'll clearly be looking at the possibilities."

In fact, looking at future technology trends - and making sure BA bets on the right ones - is an important function of the IT department, according to Coby. One of his favourite mantras is "There are no IT projects - only business projects". But he says the IT department shouldn't forget about the technology.

"One of the things I was concerned about when I joined the information management (IM) department was it actually spent a lot of time not talking about technology, so it wasn't worrying about Linux or data-voice convergence," he says. "The guys who have a profound understanding of technology and where it can be deployed and how not to let suppliers pull the wool over your eyes are absolutely valuable to you. You have to have that in your department just as much as the people who run your business."

That said, Coby is very much on top of the business side and is part of the BA 'leadership team' led by CEO Rod Eddington that is charged with formulating the airline's future business plan.

"It is important that IM sits at the top table and has its say. I think in terms of my colleagues' understanding of what technology can do for us it is very clear. We are genuinely fortunate – the chief executive and leadership team does 'get it'."

On his own team, Coby has a CTO, a head of design, head of delivery, a head of IT operations, and three ‘mini-CIOs’ responsible for making IT deliver to other parts of the business, as well as a business transformation team that looks at project management and business process change.

Coby himself tries to focus his energies on the key issues and spend time communicating his strategy internally and externally.

"Every month we have a big issues day. Diaries can fill up with middle-range crap very easily. What we try and do is limit ourselves to five issues that really matter – where the networks are going, how we deal with the business plan," he says, singling some out. "I think you've really got to spend at least 20 per cent of your time – one day in five – on communications or listening or some form of interaction with people."

So just how do you make it to be CIO of BA? Coby joined the airline in 1997 as a senior manager in the IT department responsible for the OneWorld Alliances. Prior to that he had a long career in the civil service, most notably as principal private secretary to the secretary of state for transport during the 1990s, in charge of a £2.2bn budget that included setting up the widening of the world’s busiest ring road, the M25.

He found it interesting seeing how government works but said he became frustrated with the lack of overall responsibility for projects.

"When the civil service is working as it should do you are in a position of considerable responsibility and influence, but you shouldn't actually be in charge of anything because ministers should make the decisions. So you can actually have a very interesting stimulating career but then you reach a stage where you realise you are not going to be responsible."

Coby also finds time to wear a Sita hat as chairman for the airline industry standards body but when there is the chance to get away from it all he admits to a fascination with Roman military history.

"I'm often to be found hanging around the ruins of Roman forts, either on Hadrian's Wall or in Germany, trying to understand how that all worked. I'm fascinated by the achievement the Romans made being able to run an empire from Arabia to North West Scotland and Turkey and Morocco. It's a remarkable achievement."

But his time is currently taken up working on BA's new business plan with the rest of the leadership team following a gloomy results statement by CEO Eddington last week. Yet despite city analyst talk of the need for further cuts, Coby maintains BA will continue to invest in technology to transform the business.

"Using technology to transform and simplify the business is what we're about," he says and somehow you feel a Roman general would agree with that approach.