Airline systems manager David Bourgon's staff of eight technicians maintains about 3,000 bar-code readers and ticket printers, plus the PCs that connect to them.
"We take care of it all in-house," he says. "Traditionally this stuff is outsourced, but we do it internally, and our customers don't have to wait for service. We normally handle 50 trouble calls a day. We call the airline back within five to 15 minutes, and most problems are resolved within 30 minutes."
Compare that with phoning an off-site system integrator, staying on the phone with a helpdesk for 30 minutes, or, even worse, placing a call to headquarters in another city and waiting for someone to fly in. Bourgon says it's common for airlines to fly technicians in--makes sense, they don't have to worry about steep airfare. Problems that take longer to resolve tend to be WAN-based, with circuits back to individual airlines' headquarters. "Northwest was down for several hours yesterday when there was a circuit problem," he says.
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Next Steps
April: Thirty-eight common-use self-service (CUSS) systems due to go live in the main terminal
May: CUSS systems to go live for off-site check-in at the Las Vegas Convention Center
July: Backbone upgrade to Gigabit Ethernet due for completion
December: Campuswide wireless network due for completion
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The payback for the airlines that choose to participate in the airport's common-use systems: fast on-site help for local problems, making for happier and more productive agents. And that, in turn, boosts customer satisfaction.
How do Bourgon and the other IT managers keep service levels high? For one thing, the systems are redundant: They're TruUnix 64 version 5.1, Digital Equipment Alpha clusters running Oracle with failover capabilities for FIDS, Microsoft Windows 2000 clusters for LDCS, and a Novell NetWare cluster for CUTE. To standardize these, McCarran plans on transitioning to Windows 2000 once the systems are at the end of their useful lives.
