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Alignment on the Horizon
At Frontier's headquarters in a bland office park in Denver, the hallways are clogged with boxes. Pilot uniforms spill out of some of them. It is late spring, and the company is bracing for its busiest travel season yet.
Every quarter, Carolan flies five hours as a flight attendant to keep her certification. And during the busy holiday travel season, she's been known to push customers through the airport in wheelchairs to help out. Other folks in the IT department have pitched in with baggage handling. "During our busy times, our titles are removed," she says. "People have a commitment to do whatever it takes."
While Frontier may still have the feel of a nimble startup, Carolan says the company's next challenge is bringing the IT department up to the next level of professionalism. Current plans call for introducing balanced scorecards and other best practices she used at Quest. "My folks here are mostly technologists," she says. "You can't improve what you don't know about."
When Carolan was a flight attendant, she discovered that the IT department didn't have much of a grasp of how technology was being used by flight crews. In the crew lounge, for example, there was often a line to sign in for work on a PC. There were a thousand pilots and flight attendants but only six computers. And when more terminals were added, the setup was different and there was no tech support. No one used the new computers.
"Last year someone was working on our in-flight system, and they had never worked on the business," she says. "They said, 'We can just do this.' I spent five minutes explaining how that small feature, which from an IT perspective wouldn't have any impact, really would."
Once IT is better staffed, Carolan says she would like to develop a program to give techies a chance to spend time either observing or actually working on the frontlines of the business.
That kind of experience, Rapp adds, is invaluable. "Geri, being a flight attendant, knows through experience what it means to operate an airline and the importance technology plays in that operation," he says. "That is where it begins and ends, in information technology. We serve the business. Otherwise, we don't have a right to exist."
Michael Ybarra is a contributing writer for SearchCIO-Midmarket.com. To comment on this story, email editor@ciodecisions.com.
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