Keeping pace with Passenger Demand Date:   Tuesday , September 04, 2012 Air India (AI) is an international Air Transport Company carrying passenger & Cargo. Aniruddha Sinha is the General Manager of IT division of the company. IT Policies: AI’s IT strategy is to align the business requirement with the latest Information Technology to achieve best IS. IT strategy is a continuously evolving process to improve services. The company had upgraded its core passenger services systems such as passenger services, departure control, e-ticketing, e-commerce and baggage services to the latest state-of-the-art solution on a hosted platform. We are in the process of replacing the existing ERP, MRO system through a well known SAP platform. AI has implemented a corporate document management system with the existing corporate mailing platform. Perspective on innovative technologies like cloud and virtualization: Vitalization would help the IT infrastructure consolidation and thereby ease of maintenance, increased utilization, reduced wastages, and others would bring down TCO. Depending upon application criticality, sensitiveness, volume, cost benefit analysis, AI can evaluate private or public cloud. Resources to keep updated with latest technologies: Reading technology, aviation review magazines, attending conferences and the product presentations, demonstrations and several others. Biggest obstacle: Keeping pace with passenger demand with technological changes and to meet the users’ requirements. Contemplate ways to prevent security breach: Continuously changing users environment at multiple locations (cities, airports and others) across the globe are major challenges for information/database security. IT Leader must be Manger or Technologist First? He should be a visionary manager first with the latest technological knowledge to fulfill the corporate vision/mission. Relationship between CIOs and CEOs: CIO provides information for CEO to take decisive actions on Business strategies. Outlook: To align an integrated IT system at all levels in the company to improve the services under business requirement.