Satish Mahajan's favourite quip is that AAA uses a variety of systems under the sun, including Sun! For many who didn’t know some startling facts about AAA—or the American Automobile Association—here are some: it is one of the oldest non-profit agency in the U.S. that has 81 club members, 1,176 offices and service more than 47 million members. If you think it offered just towing services for your car in trouble, surprise again: AAA offers a host of travel-related services—travel planning, insurance, privileged shopping (discounts) and financial—and has a massive print business that includes travel books, sheet maps, and trip maps spilling over 300 million travel related material every year. And yes, it does send out that yellow truck to tow your car into a nearby service stop. What started as an offshoot of the then-pleasant pastime of motoring in the early years of the century is now a giant organization of unique clubs.
“The strongest link in our corporate culture is that there is strength in our diversity,” says Mahajan, who was recently anointed VP and CIO of the venerable association.

Mahajan himself is a great example of this diversity. He came into the country when he was in the fifth grade, and went to a new school for almost every year after that—a wonderful exposure to the different cultures of the country, he says, finally winding up at the Case Western University in Cleveland, OH. Post his graduation in computer science, Mahajan deliberately stayed off a master’s degree in engineering and went in for a business degree—not something that was done in the early days of the eighties, especially by immigrant Indians. Mahajan found that not many would employ him for his management skills, and began a career in software—another foriegn subject to him, since he studied hardware at school. But the Burroughs (better known as Unisys now) team members were quite helpful and the fresh MBA learnt much on the job. Four years later, Mahajan moved on to the business-side of technology and joined the management ranks, handling issues in sales, marketing, and more of client-facing responsibilities. At Burroughs, Mahajan’s stint included evaluating many of the offshore service vendors’ service quality and process maturity, while he was simultaneously exposed to handling a diverse range of clients—from automotive to retail and consumer goods. One such client included AAA, for whom Mahajan built two important platforms, the membership management and the emergency services support.

“Coming to AAA from the private sector showed me the large difference between working for a non-profit and other enterprises—we are here truly for our members, and do not face the Wall Street pressures or dictats,” remarks the CIO. Mahajan joined the AAA Club at Cleveland in 1991, as head of IT for the Ohio Motors Association. Ten years later, he moved to the AAA national offices and became the CIO in May 2000. From handling the needs of a club that serviced nearly 600,000 members of the Ohio area, Mahajan now has a role where his audience are the clubs themselves. Heading a staff of 125 at the Florida headquarters, Mahajan meets the unique needs of each club—some that handle nearly 8 million members and some as low as 20,000 members. “My role is one of collaboration, where we draw best practises from each club and try to embed them in the national process,” says Mahajan. On one hand, the CIO handles the IT strategy to help the various AAA businesses—travel services, financials and discounts, and on the other hand he oversees the fulfillment of IT needs at the club level. “Unlike a corporation, we cannot mandate a system or product to be established at the club, as the clubs are independent affiliates, and that means we need to be truly collaborative in making any headway in adopting new systems or technologies,” reveals the CIO. “In essence, we need to become customers.”

The national CIO has been quick to bring the club CIOs to participate in a collaborative forum to share and exchange ideas, processes, and voice needs. “At one point, we had each club building and offering its own emergency service needs. Today, we have an extremely robust system that functions out of the Florida HQ offices, and is used across all clubs. When a customer requests a service, our unique algorithms decipher the nearest service provider, alerts the provider about the request, dispatches the right service, and alerts the customer about the status of his or her request—all from the one system within here. This has eased up much-needed resources at the clubs, and the customer uses one system anywhere in the U.S.” says Mahajan.

AAA.com has gained multidimensional presence, as the association diversified in its product offerings. “A customer starts the relationship with the emergency service business, but now we offer so much more: in travel, we do all the regular air and cruise ticketing business, but we are much deeper than an Expedia.com. We then have extensive mapping, and in that we are far more well-positioned than a Mapquest. We also offer insurance, vehicle pricing and so on. Finally, we offer the credit card business,” outlines the CIO. “It has brought down the operation costs at the club-level, as we now offer so much over the Internet, yet at the local level.”

The association is adopting mobility with a case-based strategy. For example, Sprint customers can now use location-based services that is delivered from AAA. Again, a Hertz’s NeverLost autoguide runs off the AAA information base. “The mobility that industry pundits predicted is yet to come to pass, and we are really focusing on location-based services.” Given that the club affiliates are responsible for their security, Mahajan has devised audit systems where the national team monitors the components on a regular and random basis. “Our job is to ensure that security breaches in one affiliate’s system does not flay open the entire system to the attacks,” says Mahajan. The security at the interconnectivity level is paramount to AAA, and Mahajan’s national team is responsible for it.

Mahajan and team have also initiated and are on the verge of delivering applications as a service. “As network services improve, we felt it beneficial to lower the cost of ownership of application services to our club affiliates. Before, clubs had to own the hardware and software, even as cost of maintaining them fell on the club budgets. Today, the same applications can be delivered as a service,” comments the CIO. A strong believer in the open source movement, Mahajan is an early adopter in moving some systems to the open source platform. “Some of our affiliates have been good adopters, and we are all learning from the experiences,” says Mahajan. As AAA plans to grow its online business supported by the offline service availability, Mahajan plays a crucial role in leveraging IT to add to the business value. “While collaboration is a key strength, the IT challenge is to answer the question: how do we engender this collaboration across the entire AAA, and provide tools to make this collaboration enticing, easy, and valuable,” says Mahajan. In that, says the CIO, lie his next goals.