Inside Virgin Blue’s IT transformation

Speaking at NSC Group's business optimisation summit in Sydney, Harvey provided a candid and wide-ranging update on the carrier's IT transformation, which has been underway for two-and-a-half years.

He said that Virgin Blue would continue to embrace partner and managed services.

To date, the airline has outsourced its data centres, remote infrastructure management and applications support and some application development to third-party providers.

"We started [the transformation] by prioritising the infrastructure that needed replacing, but then we stepped back and also said ‘how do we change the game'," Harvey said.

"We had to acknowledge we couldn't continue to do it all ourselves."

Harvey said that in continuing its transformation, the airline had "pushed 50 production servers out to Verizon in the United States" last week, freeing the time of up to seven staff for other projects.

"Cloud computing and storage-on-demand are also things we want to get into our business because they will drive efficiency," Harvey said.

Harvey also indicated that Virgin Blue is "looking at an offshore option" to maintain between 300 and 400 internal legacy systems handcoded by the airline's developers.

Earlier, he described inheriting this bank of applications when he joined Virgin Blue as a "set of handcuffs" due to the way they had been put together.

"We had a young and creative developer team that was mostly straight out of University so they had no point of reference for building or documenting systems," Harvey said.

"In their wisdom they decided they wouldn't use standard development frameworks so they built their own, which took shortcuts that enabled them to develop ten times faster than anyone else.

"The problem is you can't easily go to market and get someone to work on the systems because it takes six weeks to train them [in how they were developed]."

Harvey also showed a couple of images of the ‘data centre' he inherited. One photo showed a series of rackmount servers layered on top of what appeared to be a small footstool. It "clocked up $5 million" in revenue supporting a one-night airfare sale, Harvey said.

"We had lots of aged infrastructure and significant outages," Harvey said.

"We had the air-conditioning and UPS fail 10 or 15 times. I also got a call at four in the morning to say the SAN had collapsed. When I asked what was affected, the caller rattled off a big list of critical systems."

The data centre overhaul spearheaded by Harvey has seen it outsourced to a third-party provider.

Virgin Blue has also invested in Sun virtualisation and enterprise server technology in a project that internal IT staff has nicknamed ‘clusterzilla'.

"We've rationalised some 70 servers into the clusterzilla environment," Harvey said.

The overall environment includes 600 servers (approximately 30 per cent of which have been virtualised), 4,500 desktops, 500 laptops and 110 kiosks. The IT team supports an overall user base of 7,000, including third parties.

The airline also has a call centre run on Avaya technology that has been integrated and managed by NSC Group. Harvey said the airline plans to tie it more closely to its business intelligence systems to predict why customers might be calling for support and redirect their calls to appropriate people faster.

Read on to page two to see how Harvey battled to change Virgin Blue's IT culture.

Inheriting an aging infrastructure that was being stretched to the limit posed a technical challenge for Harvey and his staff, but his bigger challenge was arguably transforming the culture of the IT department itself.

Even before the transformation could take place, Harvey battled against internal perceptions to secure funding for the required changes.

"The culture in IT was that we'd never get the amount we asked for because we were a low cost airline, but we got some quick wins down and that helped," Harvey said.

Harvey was also keen to change the perception that the IT team had to do everything in-house. He acknowledged that "everyone was doing an amazing job" keeping things together but that it wasn't a sustainable approach in the long-term.

"We had to stop doing things that others could do for us," he said.

"That's a very difficult message to take to a young team who think they're invincible and say they can build things faster than a third-party - and probably can.

"We spent a lot of time with the people we thought could help us add value in the longer term, worked out what their career drivers were and their aspirations.

"One thing that played into our hands was that a lot of them are getting engaged or married and have young families. They were already getting tired and the thought of jumping out of bed at 3am to fix something isn't that appealing. Work-life balance was a big play for us."

Harvey also formalised project management and "made it a recognised discipline" in the business by employing a German project manager. Harvey described him as one of the most process-driven people he had ever met - and someone that was immediately at odds with Virgin Blue's free-flowing organisational culture.

"A lot of my executive team had a lot of trouble with this guy at the start, but now they all sit on a portfolio committee prioritising projects using a single tool that he managed to drive in the first 12 months," Harvey said.

"In some cases you just have to ride out the criticism."

Harvey himself was also forced to make some tough decisions within months of coming on board.

"When I interviewed [for the role, Virgin Blue] was two years into replacing its reservation system which, for an airline, is a bit like open heart surgery," Harvey said.

The system had been earmarked to be completed when Harvey came on board, but when he arrived it was still incomplete.

"We aborted that project within three months," Harvey said. "It was a hard decision because I didn't have the full context of the project."