Ravinder Pal Singh, Global Chief Information and Technology Officer at Air Works, identifies the IT dilemmas and opportunities that faces airlines today and suggests how a business might use them

1. “Today we are standing at a crossroad
wherein, on the one hand there is a
serious threat to legacy but also, on the
other hand, a tremendous opportunity to
create a simple, beautiful (and low cost)
but practical IT which can be a potent
business differentiator and confer huge
competitive advantage.”
26 | CASE STUDY: AIR WORKS | AIRCRAFT IT MRO | FEBRUARY-MARCH 2013
What should a CIO think about?
Ravinder Pal Singh, Global Chief Information and Technology Officer at Air Works, identifies the IT dilemmas
and opportunities that faces airlines today and suggests how a business might use them
IT is a wonderful thing: I mean… none of us
would be doing the jobs we do in quite the way
we do them if it wasn’t for IT. In fact, a lot of what
makes the modern world go round and, importantly
for us, helps airlines to fly around and over it can be
credited to IT with its power to marshal information
and help get things done. But, like any strong force, IT
can be a power for good or for bad and needs to be
handled carefully, not only to leverage the best value
from its capabilities but also because, like any power,
mishandled it can bite. That’s a lot of responsibility for
those involved. So, it matters what goes on inside the
head of a Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology
Officer, Chief Architect, Enterprise Architect or anyone
who is trying to take IT strategy decisions in today’s
world of volatility (business and political) and
technology disruption (especially with the two ‘Cs’
– Consumerisation and Cloud – getting into the
enterprise zone).
Today we are standing at a crossroad wherein, on the
one hand there is a serious threat to legacy but also, on
the other hand, a tremendous opportunity to create a
simple, beautiful (and low cost) but practical IT which
can be a potent business differentiator and confer
huge competitive advantage. It’s all down to managing
information, as Bill Gates put it: “Virtually everything
in business today is an undifferentiated commodity,
except how a company manages its information. How
you manage information determines whether you win
or lose.”

2. Technology changes the world
Much of what technology achieves is at the behest of its creators but it could
be argued that there are two near-natural forces that technology brings to
business: disruption and convergence. Disruption occurs where a technology
development doesn’t simply replace its legacy predecessor but actually
changes the environment in which it operates by changing the way people
interact with the function. To use a consumer analogy, when MP3 files
arrived they didn’t just do what vinyl, tape and CDs had done before, they
changed how, where and through which platforms people accessed music
which meant that artists and distributors had to find new ways to attract the
public’s attention and sell their products. In a similar way, convergence isn’t
simply the coming together of technologies but often the converged result
creates a new reality of its own. Again from the consumer world, when
mobile phone technology, email capability and digital cameras converged,
they gave birth not only to a multi-capability device but also to a whole new
paradigm of ‘people’s journalism’ with anybody holding a mobile device able
to record any incident at the touch of a button or screen. Bring disruption
and convergence together and you can put into a child’s hands a device that
would once have been regarded as ‘Star Trek’ science fiction.
These forces also work on wider scale, using technology design to bridge
the gap between desire and need for consumers and technology function
to turn business needs into operational realities in the workplace for
businesses.
These, at first sight, natural forces can be harnessed, can be made to work
with the business through a process of ‘business and IT alignment’; they are
also the source of dilemmas which I and my peers and chiefs face. To run,
procure, create, simplify and continuously improve the legacy… these were
typical IT goals in past and they have changed now. I now apply a strategy
for convergence of design, technology and business to ensure that the right
systems are built, for the right business needs, in the right time; but also
for the right people to bring about quick and true successful adoption. The
trick is to recognise early and then to manage the business advantage that
disruption and convergence can generate.
FEBRUARY-MARCH 2013 | AIRCRAFT IT MRO | CASE STUDY: AIR WORKS | 27
Time and trust
Time is also an issue here. In the past, programs to
realize values from IT have often been lengthy affairs
so that, in extreme cases, benefits have arrived only
after the reasons for which they were developed have
already been superseded by events. By importing
some of the attitudes, priorities and characteristics
that govern the fast-paced consumer technology
space, businesses can move away from past sins of IT
ecosystems: undertaking multi-year implementations
(under the incorrect pretext of IT being complex) and
forced adoption of systems to business users (under
the veil of process improvement). Programs to realize
IT value need to be fast and, with technologies like the
Cloud, they need to be on the business’s own terms for
purposes that the business has identified will serve it
(rather than getting caught in the artificial enigma of
cloud interpretations by various technology providers
acting in their selfish interest). A focus such as this
can, in turn, lead to a considerable reduction in IT
spend and reduced implementation cycle times to
build or improve an IT portfolio.
And, for all of its potency and seemingly miraculous
capability, IT needs to be trustworthy. A practical
interpretation of trustworthy IT would focus on
some basic elements such as a balance of need versus
desire, the value of a consistent user experience,
customization (making what we have manage what
we need) versus configuration (aligning IT with the
business) and the superficial security of predictability
versus the longer term value of innovation.
Image © Air Works
Image © Air Works

3. 28 | CASE STUDY: AIR WORKS | AIRCRAFT IT MRO | FEBRUARY-MARCH 2013
“A lesson learnt from the consumer environment is that,
for users, IT should help them not challenge them.”
A world of data
Investment in IT cannot be a cost in isolation but must be aligned with
the global, world-class ambitions of the business. In order for this to
be managed in the business, it is important to ensure IT clarity at all
levels: clear architecture and design guideless, especially related to system
performance and user experience; applying simple technologies like search,
application marketplace, auto identification, maps etc. When applied in the
aviation domain, such clarity of purpose, execution and user experience
can increase efficiency by multiples. A lesson learnt from the consumer
environment is that, for users, IT should help them not challenge them.
This is true of most environments but we need to be wary of the very
smart technology providers with their respective (and often self-serving)
definitions and vocabulary about the Cloud and User Centric computing.
My vision is of a ‘World of Data’ in which data is stored wherever that is
best achieved, made available to whatever systems might be able to use
it and the resulting output presented as a seamless and immersive user
experience on whatever platform suits the user’s needs or circumstances at
the time.
I see this as three elements (see diagram above) to manage business
information (corporate, customer and operation data), considering
globalization, growth, high quality experience and connected value chain.
By adopting these elements we can create:
• Mission critical confidence;
• True breakthrough insights.
These, in turn, will generate a true differentiator and support continuous
business success.
Business Intelligence
With change being the new constant in today’s world of volatility and
constraint, a smart IT is the only channel which can provide business
intelligence. I would differentiate today’s equating of business intelligence
to C-level dashboards as an immature view which invariably ends up with
poor ROI (return on investment) for IT investment. I would instead put
the stress on insights through coverage of all business critical paths (see
diagram above): for me, business intelligence is IT.
Image © Air Works
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4. FEBRUARY-MARCH 2013 | AIRCRAFT IT MRO | CASE STUDY: AIR WORKS | 29
ABOUT AIR WORKS
Air Works is India’s largest independent aviation
MRO and India’s first EASA certified MRO. The
company is certified to maintain 50 different
types of aircraft – ranging from small, single
engine machines to turboprops plus B737s and
A320s. Air Works includes Air Livery, UK which is
Europe’s leading independent aircraft painting and
re-finishing company and Empire Aviation Group,
Dubai which is the Middle East’s largest aircraft
management services company.
Ravinder Pal Singh
Global Chief Information
and Technology Officer
Ravi is transforming current IT and
creating its future avatar which is
aligned to Air Work’s Vision and its
various business goals. He has lived
and worked on three continents
and his global experience covers broad disciplines
ranging from strategy to execution. In the recent
past he has been associated with a leader in
technology and a ‘big 4’ management consulting
firm to help their Fortune 100 customers and
government institutions in IT transformation. He is a
child rights activist, practices yoga, runs marathons
and does mountaineering. Ravi is also a holder, in his
personal capacity, of several technology patents.
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Taking the best from the rest
None of this requires those of us working in aviation
IT to reinvent the wheel. There are plenty of mature
and proven adoptions of technology which we can take
away from other domains, including cases wherein,
to help their overall value chain, even fierce business
competitors, global brands, have come together to
share staple information, hence reigniting the growth
of their shared market and increasing by many factors
the efficiency of their industry at large. At the same
time, such collaborative efforts have given birth
to new paradigms and innovation which have, in
turn, improved the whole industry within which the
businesses operate.
Of course, working collaboratively and sharing
information across the value chain, especially working
with Cloud based solutions, can cause some people to
worry about security and privacy. Loss of competitive
advantage is an often expressed concern in this context
but also, depending on where the business is located,
concerns can extend to issues such as intrusion
into human rights with an attendant fear of unions,
legislation and restrictive regulatory agencies, customs
and corruption in emerging markets, a fundamental
reluctance to contemplate anything that smacks of
outsourcing (the individual manager’s personal interest
in managing a large number of employees to create his/
her empire as opposed to passing parts of the job over
to managing vendors) and so on and so forth. But, in
the end, users have to believe that what has worked and
generated across-the-board business success in other
sectors stands a very good chance of achieving as good
an outcome in the aviation IT sector.
That really is something positive for CIOs and
everybody involved in taking IT strategy decisions to be
thinking about today. n
Image © Air Works