From an airline perspective, my main priority as a CIO is to effectively align business with IT and add value such that IT elevates its role from merely supporting the business to being a strategic partner. Also considering the global economic turmoil and its consequent impact on the industry, a major factor that I believe all CIOs should focus on is Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Thus, as the CIO of Kingfisher Airlines, business-IT alignment and costs are the two major areas that I currently focus on.

From an IT perspective, costs typically comprise investment on business applications, network communication and other IT infrastructure components. Technology convergence is one of the initiatives that will leverage the cost rationalisation across several services through shared infrastructure. In the next three months, we plan to further consolidate and streamline any pending connectivity and network issues that may have remained un-addressed earlier.

Further, with regard to network bandwidth usage, we plan to adopt a ���pay-as-per-use��� model. But the Indian telecom industry currently does not have the kind of technology in place that offers pay-per-use models on a real-time basis. So to address the issue, we have decided to conduct a quarterly assessment of the bandwidth we are using, keeping redundancy and scalability in perspective, which will help us address the peak transaction periods. The required network bandwidth will thus be decided and worked upon with the telecom operator accordingly. This will minimise the so called ���not required��� redundancy.

We are still investing a lot in our business applications, primarily because we are a relatively younger airline. With respect to business applications, we are mainly focusing on increasing our sales and have taken some very challenging initiatives for the same. We definitely hope to see an upward trend in the next few quarters. In terms of our internal processes, not only to support sales but also to minimise our cost of operations, we are in the process of implementing a state-of-the-art ERP solution. Though we have already been using an ERP solution for our finance functions, now we plan to implement ERP across all our functions of finance as well as HR, so that there is a structured and best-in-class business process.

At Kingfisher Airlines, self-service will be the ���call of the day��� going forward. I strongly believe that whatever we do or plan should be measured, tracked and monitored. Business intelligence (BI) is something that we think will help us address the same. Thus, we have already embarked to see as to how we do a cross-functional analysis. For example, if I need to do an analysis into a finance-related transaction, I can go into the ERP system and get the same; in the same way, if I need to do an analysis into operations, I will go into the operations system. But earlier solutions have posed a challenge when one needs to do a cross-functional analysis for effective decision-making. The ability to undertake a cross-functional analysis can also help improve the turnaround time for reporting on decision-making processes. Today, components such as measuring revenue, cost, performance, etc are introduced in the BI functions.

Industry experts strongly believe and I too cannot agree more that the current global economic downturn is a short-term phenomenon. We thus plan to use the current economic scenario as an opportunity to re-engineer all our IT operations, rationalise costs and be an even more technology driven organisation.