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To become more responsive to customer needs, American Airlines needed a new technology platform and a new approach to development that would help it deliver digital self-service tools and customer value more rapidly across its enterprise. IBM is helping the airline migrate some of its critical applications to the IBM Cloud while using new methodology to create innovative applications quickly while improving the customer experience.
Working with IBM to migrate some of their key legacy customer-facing applications to VMware HCX on IBM Cloud, while simultaneously transforming them to a cloud-native based microservices architecture is enabling the world's largest airline to innovate faster in response to changing customer needs.
In the highly competitive airline industry, customer experience is a major point of differentiation – and digital channels are increasingly important.
American Airlines wanted to provide convenient digital services for customers and understood there was an opportunity to remove the constraints of the existing legacy architecture, platform, organization, development and operations approaches. Customer-facing applications were based on monolithic code, duplicated and managed in silos. Every change required the same work in up to three places, each managed by different teams.
To respond better and faster to customer needs, American Airlines needed to transform the way they worked to take advantage of new technology features. There was a need to update its technology stack, further increase agility, and introduce DevOps concepts while leveraging an open and flexible cloud platform. While American’s algorithms typically rebook passengers on the next best flight, customers had to call the reservation desk or visit an airport agent if they wanted to discuss other options. American wanted customers to be able to see other possibilities and update their flight selection via the website, mobile app or at a self-service kiosk.
With the busy summer season approaching, the company president challenged American to deliver a new customer-facing Dynamic Rebooking app within just a few months – a challenge that could not be achieved with the legacy approach and would have taken at least twice that amount of time.
American approached IBM for help, and keen to prove its credentials, IBM stepped up to the challenge. The centerpiece of the IBM transformation is the IBM Garage Method, a holistic methodology covering technology, people, processes and organization. As the first step in the Dynamic Rebooking project, IBM and American Airlines’ developers met and rapidly built more than 200 user stories to guide the development of the new app.
Next, the teams identified their first MVP (minimum viable product – the simplest possible application that meets the business requirements) and started to code. The use of microservices, paired programming and test-driven development enabled a highly parallelized approach that accelerated the creation of the new cloud-native code. Microservices allowed each business function to be broken down into simple, reusable functions that can be composed and called as many times as required by any connected platforms.
After just four and a half months, the Dynamic Rebooking app was released to production in eight airports, and steadily rolled out to more airports while testing, development and updates continued in the background.
Jason Hobbs, Senior Manager, Application Development at American Airlines, says: “IBM was pivotal in helping us work in a different way. I think we even surprised ourselves on how fast we could put the app into customers' hands.”