I remember clearly how surprised I was to read a while back that Boeing’s Alan Mulally, after 37 years with the aircraft maker, went to head up the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. While still with Boeing, Alan gave the impression that he was an aircraft guy through and through and in fact he kept Boeing straight and level by innovative management techniques and by embracing all kinds of new production solutions that improved quality and efficiency across the board.
Come to think of it, it makes sense for Ford to want him. As Alan recently put it in an interview with Time magazine: What does it take for America to compete in the global marketplace? He also gave the answer: you start by making the best products in the world.
Well, coming from Boeing he can certainly claim to know a thing or two about making the best aircraft in the world.
One of the things he did at Ford was to dismantle the old structures that had successfully prevented much needed reform in the past. This did not go without a fight and a lot of old hands were complaining bitterly but by insisting on full and accurate information from all corners of the enterprise and sharing this information across the management matrix he had created, he essentially neutralized those power centers that assumed their power from hoarding information and withholding it from other parts of the company. This way the local fiefdoms were no longer the holders of real power, it went to where it belongs, the top of the company.
Shared information has tremendous power and it works in two ways. First and foremost, it empowers managers on all levels to interact whether they have good news or bad. There is nowhere to hide and it is not necessary either. Problems are there to be solved not to be hidden and with shared information it is no longer possible to cover up things or to make results look better then they actually are. Secondly, the previous centers of power, groups or divisions who had information but did not bother to share it or even worse, purposely hid it, are suddenly deprived of their livelihood and they are no longer in a position to scuttle reforms or hold back other needed change.
This process is called large scale systems integration and to work correctly, it needs all the partners to work together. Here is another quote from Allan’s Time interview: “A car has about 10.000 parts, and an airplane has about 4 million, but the technology is the same. The sophistication is the same. The parallels are incredible.” Of course saving Ford will require that the new approach results in new and better cars that people will want to buy, but those new cars are made possible, to a very large extent, by information sharing.
In air traffic management we are not building cars or aircraft. ATM’s product is a safe and smooth flow of aircraft flying trajectories that were specified by their operators… But with a bit of imagination, we could consider that trajectory as being put together in a manufacturing process not unlike the assembly of a car or aircraft for that matter.
The efficiency of the trajectory when actually flown will depend on how well it was “manufactured” , how well the various partners (air traffic control, airports, airlines) worked together to create a product that can be “sold”. Shared information and the elimination of information hoarders is as important in creating trajectories as it is in creating cars or aircraft. Just as the experience of an aircraft maker could be used to good effect in car making, so can this experience also be projected into air traffic management developments to highlight where improvements are needed.
Our version of information sharing goes by the name of SWIM (System Wide Information Management) and no modern ATM system can exists without it. Perhaps when Alan puts Ford back on track he will want to try his hands with air traffic management and SWIM. If he thought Boeing and Ford were tough cookies…
