Originally Posted by
yoganmahew
Disclaimer - SLF in airline IT
The thing is, it's the attitude that IT is an 'overhead' that is the issue.
You cost manage overheads.
You invest in core product.
The problems are not limited to IT (it's primarily a people cost), but to all the other areas that airlines nowadays consider overheads rather than assets - check-in staff, ground staff, air staff, pilots. Get good at what you do and bank some seniority and you are very much an overhead. Unless you're an accountant, it seems...
Disclaimer, strategist and executive education tutor in a business school here - I am surprised that you misdescribe an overhead and some other definitions.
Identifying IT as an overhead is not an attitude, it is a fact, it's an ongoing expense of running a business and that does not infer that critical infrastructure is not an asset. An IT system is certainly an asset and like most assets, needs maintaining by the allocation of resources, costing time and money. However, IT does not directly fly planes, serve passengers, load baggage so it is classed as overhead expenditure.
Check in staff, ground staff etc are not assets they are operating expenses directly linked to the product/service and create a capability that is either mandatory (a table stake) or a differentiator that provides market advantage.
The 'issue' (why don't we just call it for what it is, a problem?) is when executive management in a company doesn't understand where a capability such as IT fits in the value chain primary activities and then reduces expenditure in the support activities to the point where it becomes unfit for purpose and detracts from the value proposition.