Southwest Airlines's Consulting Problem Paper Example

Company Background

Southwest Airlines Co. (SWA) was incorporated in 1967, as a passenger airline carrier within the US and other near-countries. The airline gives point-to-point services through its Boeing 737 aircraft and in approximately forty states, the District of Columbia, and other nine countries. In addition, SWA provides ancillary service offerings like the EarlyBird Check-In as well as providing carrier services to unaccompanied minors and pets. The EarlyBird Check-In service allows clients to check-in automatically before ordinary boarding positions are made available and are intended to improve the seat selection options. Under the pet policy, clients are allowed to travel their cats or dogs in the cabin. Further, SWA gives their clients satellite-based wireless fidelity (WiFi) service on all their planes giving customers an exceptional travel experience, especially through the Southwest's live and on-demand television. The TV product consists of nearly live channels and more than seventy-five on-demand recorded episodes of movies and television series.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

The Rapid Rewards frequent flyer program rewards clients with redeemable points for money spent on fares. The number of points awarded through this program is calculated from the fare price and class that a customer buys where the higher the fare, the more the points earned. Consequently, customers are allowed to redeem their earned points anytime and they can also earn the points from purchases made from the company's partners.

The organization's Internet Website, Southwest.com, helps clients to buy their tickets online as well as to manage their travel plans. Under the "My Account" feature on the website allows customers to view their travel and loyalty activity as well as giving a detailed account of the organization's information regarding fair prices and their ancillary products. The web page has also been translated into various languages like Spanish. Further, the internet option is available through mobile phone applications both for Android and iPhone operating system (iOS) which allows customers to transact 24/7 with the company. The organization's strategy about terminal usage is either through leases or cash payment at each of the airports it uses. However, for purposes of maintaining its aircraft, SWA leases land and infrastructure on a long-term basis in major airports around the US and also for its flight training center which is located at Dallas Love Field. Further, to support its operations, SWA leases engine facility, and warehouses and customer support and services call centers although it owns some of these facilities. Its biggest competitors are Delta, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and United Airlines.

Overall, SWA is a major provider of domestic airline services mainly in the form of point-to-point, short-haul, high-frequency, and low-fare service. Presently, the firm Southwest operates over 700 Boeing 737 aircraft and offers the cheapest operating cost structure in the domestic airline sector. Besides, it offers the cheapest and modest and maintains a high Customer Service records. Regardless of these efforts by the company, it has faced several challenges especially with its implementation of Business Intelligence (BI) technology (Jose, 2018). As a result, the management has resolved to consult on how it can benefit maximally from the BI technology like most of its competitors.

Part 2: Implementation Strategy

Identifying the Problem

In recognition of the role played by technology, SWA has been on a path of implementing various technologies, especially regarding communication. However, the company's IT and business leaders still believe that the Business Intelligence (BI) failed to meet the company's business needs. Following this outcome, a diagnostic analysis by DBM Consulting has established that these undesired outcomes were as a result of various factors such as the organization's structure and governance, available technology and the company's business partners (Jose, 2018). To this effect, the company needs to address these issues to ensure that the BI sufficiently meets the company's needs.

The diagnosis by DBM Consulting showed that SWA was facing implementation issues about their capacity to deliver valuable and meaningful BI results to their clients. The report identified various causes that were highly unrelated including:

• A highly vertical organization structure
• Unproductive business partners
• Ineffective prioritization of activities and governance
• Inadequate, inconsistent, and unclear technology and data architectures
• Vague, nonexistent or inconsistent methodologies (Hitachi Consulting, 2017).

Limiting the Problem

Accordingly, SWA IT and business managers trusted that these issues would have a severe impact on the company over time unless major changes were implemented. As such, SWA has contacted DBM Consulting to oversee the implementation of its newly formed central BI team through a multi-phase change process to rectify the earlier identified issues consequently helping the company's BI team to become self-sufficient in their management skills (Hitachi Consulting, 2017). Thus, in particular, the main objective is to improve the company's IT governance structure.

IT governance refers to the process through which firms direct or control their IT infrastructure. Hence, it describes how responsibilities and decision-making rights are distributed within an organization as well as the rules and processes for making and evaluating decisions regarding the firm's IT strategy. More so, IT governance is all about systematically identifying people who make every decision/ owns the decision right, who possess input right to the decision, and how such persons/ teams are held accountable for their responsibilities.

Components of the IT governance

For the current case, the governance operating model will define the system and interaction points through which governance will be executed. More so, its purpose is to help the executive leadership and top managers as demanded by their duties and responsibilities to structure these systems and interaction points across the firm's business environment (Herschel, 2012). Enterprise-level models, similar to the proposed system, can adapt to any operating or functional area for purposes of facilitating effective implementation of governance (Clementi & Candho, 2006). Accordingly, the current governance operating model will comprise of four major components:

Structure: This will include the committee structures and charters, organization's design and reporting structure, and support and control function interdependencies

Oversight responsibilities: This component refers to the responsibilities of the management and the committee, oversight responsibilities, and the accountability matrices

Talent and culture: The purpose of this element is to facilitate the activities and behaviors that are necessary for effective governance including business and operating principles, reward policies, promotion policies, management and performance appraisals, training, and talent and leadership development programs

Infrastructure: the element will comprise procedures for governance and risk oversight, measures and metrics, procedures, reports, and management capabilities among others

Further, within these components, the primary aspects of an effective governance operating model that will be considered include:

Oversight and responsibilities of the board: It is the responsibility of the board to perform oversight responsibility in the firm on issues like a business and risk strategy, structuring, financial well-being, and compliance with regulation (Herschel, 2012). For this reason, the governance operating model will facilitate the board to:

• Involve the management to communicate their agenda about risk right and exercise governance
• Articulate the knowledge and skills the board will need to perform its oversight duty adequately and to evaluate its composition against such requirements
• Provide the management with advice on policies that consequently influence the way governance is undertaken
• Have clear perception of governance activities that happen at different organizational levels, and facilitate the management in its efforts to support the efficiency of the program

Responsibilities and authorities of the committee: Boards and management committee structures have the capacity define the terms, number, and qualifications of members, their responsibilities, reporting and acceleration approaches, as well as the way they interact. For instance, the model will help the board to:

• Invoke charters that elaborate on the responsibilities of the committee and addresses its connection with the general executive team, and the key stakeholders
• Outline the categories of decisions and other items that should be specifically addressed by the board or otherwise- attach roles for each management level
• Outline method that should be used to report important issues to the appropriate person

Design and reporting structure with the organization: Evidence shows that comprehensive and clear organizational structure often allows for ease and coherent movement of information across various organizational levels (Herschel, 2012). As such, the enterprise governance operating model will be designed to help the executive management to:

• Putting in place discrete and define the responsibility in regards to control function authority about issues of compliance, legal, risk, finance, and audit
• Delineate a mechanism of supervising the scale of risks throughout the organization
• Maintain a structure of governance that is considerate of every stakeholder in the organization

Therefore, the current strategy intends to determine and outline decision rights and accountability frameworks with the aim of encouraging appropriate behavior in the use of IT infrastructure through a functional organizational governance structure. For the current project the BI system is based on six basic components:

Company strategy and governance: Gives the direction for structure for the IT and outlines the desirable behaviors that influence its governance

IT governance structures: Allocates decision rights for various IT prototypes key decisions with the objective of realizing business performance goals

Performance objectives of the firm

IT planning and acceptable practices should be harmonized and aligned with the enterprise strategy and structure

Metrics of the IT and responsibilities outlines ways through which IT will benefit the performance targets and recommends methods for evaluating the IT infrastructure's efficiency

Governance systems of the IT infrastructure: suggests tools for implementing and reinforcing the IT governance decisions (Clementi & Candho, 2006).

Governance Methodology for the IT infrastructure

The following methodology develops a systematic strategy for designing the governance model of the IT system ate SWA. The proposed methodology is explained regarding numerous stages as well as their relationships as well as specifies the inputs, processes and the expected outcomes for each stage.

• Phase 1 - Information setting: the aim is to obtain a basic understanding of SWA and the status of the company's IT governance structure.
• Phase 2 -performance assessment of the IT governance: The purpose of this phase is to identify makers of decisions and other contributors of the IT infrastructure, the IT governance structure and the manner in which the identified results of the governance structure are evaluated about financial parameters and the effective use of the resource.
• Phase 3 - IT governance redesigning: Following the assessment made in t...