Westjet Corporate Governance

r market by entering into strategic code-sharing agreements with international carriers, such as Cathay Pacific , and American Airlines

"In 2014, Air Canada achieved its best full year financial performance in the Corporation 's 77-year history," said Calin Rovinescu, President and Chief Executive Officer. (Air Canada Website CIO 2015) Adjusted net income was $531 million, representing an increase of 56.2 per cent year-over-year.” The purpose of this paper is to examine how Air Canada in 2011 successfully aligned their business strategy and Information Technology (IT) by managing information resources on several levels to accomplish a competitive advantage over other airline carriers and gain the attention of their customers through innovation. Finally, this paper will address suggestions to achieve better Business-IT alignment to meet Air Canada’s goals for the future and continued success.

Westjet came into the air travel business in 1996, offering fares up to 50% cheaper than there competition. They strived for an excellent relationship between the employee and the employer by creating an ecstatic, friendly work environment. Westjet is one of the most successful airlines as it did start out with the most start up capital any airline has ever experienced, as well as keeping their debt to a minimum. With such commercial success, Westjet was questioned with their actions towards Air Canada as one of the founders employed a travel agent to find out certain information about Air Canada which gave them a competitive advantage so they knew exactly what price would be a noticeable difference, which would attract

Over the past few years growth, of WW has not increased and it has remained stagnant due to the slow growth of the economy. In order to improve the growth of the organization, a few IT organizational changes are required that will help streamline the internal processes for WW to improve the

As CEO Saretsky observed, “I’m not sure if we have a great IT…or otherwise”, Then she understood the inability of WestJet to state with confidence about its IT operations and standards. Smith’s initial Statement was “come in and help us figure out what we have”. The outcome of this assignment should determine whether WestJet had the right technologies, the appropriate expertise, efficient processes and procedures, an effective operating structure and solid systems.

In order to assess the corporate governance performance in WestJet over the long term, we are looking into three different fundamental corporate governance issues:

The major goal is to integrate Information Systems/Information Technology with the corporate strategy to use information for better governance and management. This has improved with the connectivity and networking and also the shrinking cost- performance ratios in technology. IT governance thus is a result of the complete merger of computer and communications technologies, like data processing and high advancement in networks, and integrated systems. (Bloomfield; et al, 2000) To this extent the software of the stand alone systems have to be converted to a single functional system for all requirements and the system involves the creation of a network with the following functionality:

WestJet develop their IT operation early and force them get the lead in the aviation businesses. However, as the global economic and the change of people’s demand, the strategic plan of WestJet need to be change to follow the change of the world. Compare with other aviation business, the IT structure of WestJet is small and keeps running on their pervious operation before Smith join into the organization. There are some risks coming out if WestJet continue these IT operations.

The most influential stakeholder is the IT staff (employees) in regardless to their resistance in the beginning of change but this due to human nature for resist the change either is positive or negative, also if these employees get redundant this will have a negative effect on the rest of the employees, they might be thinking of the same that they can become redundant anytime and will not work efficiently. For that WestJet applied a comprehensive solution to motivate their employees such as job challenging, Facilitation and support, regularly update knowledge and effective interpersonal work relationship. Moreover, this group of stakeholder have the most important role in IT transformational plan in Westjet because they already working in

Westjet is incapable of identifying the priority of the projects as well as the resources arrangement from monthly meetings, which results in a mismatch in the views of Vice Presidents of business units and the Vice President of IT department. For IT department, there are not enough resources for such many projects undertaken due to the inability of business VPs to prioritize the projects. The overburdening of IT department results in the delay of project delivery time. On the other hand, business VPs were disappointed that the IT department seldom meets the deadlines of projects undertaken. As Chan (2002) classified, it is a strategic business-IS misalignment, which concentrates on the fit of the priorities and activities.

A: I’d say it going to be used for strategic, enterprise top line growth. In order to leverage IT for the benefit of the whole organization enterprise architecture must be developed to oversee IT strategy. Centralizing IT strategy at the start of the new business strategies will be important to make sure IT and business are working together with common goals that deliver the most

One of the first things that Cheryl Smith did when she start to work at WestJet, was to bring two performances expects to carry out a benchmarking study with similar companies in the transportation industry. The objective of this study was to compare WestJet’s IT cost, resources and budget to the industry standards. With the results of the study, Cheryl was able to find out that the IT group of the company was technically competent and mostly were since the

The new process that was instituted to prioritize IT projects at Volkswagen of America is very well organized. It takes an IT project and looks at it from multiple aspects, from business to IT. It also allows for several departmental entities to play a more active role in tying in business objectives with stated benefits of the IT project. As stated in Applegate, “IT governance is the effort to devise an overarching and integrated approach, addressing broad themes such as operating performance, strategic control, risk management, and values alignment.” (Applegate, 403) In

This portfolio focus on what I have learned during the whole IT Strategy and Control paper, a critical reflection of this paper would be provided. This reflection includes the key points, support reference and the demonstration of my own understanding about the paper itself and all of my personal understandings are based on the learning outcome of this paper. In the first part of this portfolio, I would discuss all the key IT Operations Management framework which have been introduced in the paper, the analysis of the processes based on my own understanding would be given. In the second part, analyze processes required for aligning IT infrastructure and operations with the business goals of an organization would be talked about, and I would focus a business organization which has been mentioned in the caselets as a sample. In the third part, some critical evaluate operational IT organizations and their processes against the studied models would be listed and analyzed. In the last part, the recommendations and analysis of my own would be given against those organizations (caselets) which have some problems and current issues arising from the implementation of the IT framework.

The purpose of this project is explore how information systems helps organisations to make decisions at different levels to achieve set objectives and strategic advantages over competitors .The team carried out research and debate on various companies, and agreed to focus on British Airways. Through literature we found out, that BA is amongst the busiest premium international airlines worldwide, BA operates mainly from Heathrow, London city and Gatwick airports and flies over 35million people to more than 300 cities and freights an average of 700,000 tonnes of cargo each year (ref). BA’s air cargo business, in conjunction with its scheduled passenger services operate under the licence governed by the United Kingdom Civil Aviation Authority