AIR CANADA
Introduction:
Air Canada was founded in 1937, it was privatized in 1989. After facing net losses from 1990-1993, entered into profits in 1994. It was a founding member of star alliance in 1997, which has 27 partners headquartered in Montreal.
Air Canada’s mission was to connect Canada and the world. For this it followed an international growth strategy. Making partnerships with Lufthansa and united/continental, helped its growth strategy and connection mission. To reach the goals it followed a strategy involving engaging with customers, mainly focusing on passengers and products.
Air Canada mainly depends on IT for their activities. The IT department of Air Canada was made of both recent applications and the back-end applications. In 2007, Air Canada introduced electronic boarding passes for the passengers and in 2009 it introduced iPhone and blackberry application which allows passengers to track flights, and also introduced a rebooking tool allowing the passengers to rebook the flights in case of emergency. For this in 1994, Air Canada made a seven-year contract with IBM.
Dual strategic objectives and challenges:
Along with IBM Air Canada selected telecom as its provider for telecommunication
In 2003 Air Canada started to follow multiple-vendor strategy to get best services available in the market and to reduce cost. For that it selected operation SYS, a company which provides several applications’ which Air Canada need.
But, dealing with multiple vendors leads to several challenges, the new vendor or any new application by the vendor need to be integrated with the existing system. For this Air Canada assigned its IT partner IBM as an integrator.
Basic problems:
Until 2003 Air Canada had a centralized IT department but it recognized that the IT department was working too slowly and was not able to respond accurately based on the needs of the real business world. So, to solve this Air Canada attempted to decentralize the it department in 2003.
But this decentralized IT department leads to lack of communication between the departments resulting in an inefficiency in the company.
Solution for the basic problems:
Using a decentralized IT department leads in a huge impact on implementation of the decisions and the projects. For this Air Canada come up with a solution of re-organizing the IT department in 2010. In this structure they assigned an IT representative to each of the three pillars of the company they are customer service, commercials and the operations. And the senior director acts as head of the three departments. After this many changes were made in each of the departments in order to link the business side and the IT department. For this they started employing the people who are aware of both the technology and the business world

Role of IT in business world:
During the change of the 25-year-old aircraft maintenance system the IT department maintained all the data of the aircraft. And also with the introduction of IT commercials department which is an important source in the Air Canada’s market and customer experience it made easy to solve the issues. But, joining the IT and business departments is a big challenge for the company because both are working independently for a long time with their own style of execution it was hard to keep them in one track. For this they started employing the people who can understand both the business and IT languages which is a perfect solution for them.

Conclusion:
Since the day of privatization Air Canada faced several changes in their mode of working which is only possible with the help of the IT. As stated constant innovation to fly high for Air Canada was IT. And its operation with both the business and IT department leads them to grow high. If I was a part of Air Canada, I will definitely follow the same strategies implemented by the company in their odd times keeping in mind about the goals of the company.