British Airways| Paul Coby

Paul Coby became CIO of airline BA almost exactly five years ago, just as the 9/11 terror attacks rocked the world. Since then he has helped turn around the company's fortune's by betting on the proper application of IT, with profits up 21 per cent at 620m when BA's last annual results were posted.

Almost exactly five years after 9/11, silicon.com caught up with him to find out about battling budget competitors, the move to Terminal 5 and more.

Here is an excerpt of his interview with silicon.com editor and site director Tony Hallett.

Tony Hallett: Paul, it's been quite a turnaround, can you tell us exactly how technology has been central to the revival of BA's fortunes?

Paul Coby: We've had to reinvent ourselves over the last five years since 9/11 and I think we're going to have to reinvent ourselves again as we go forward and technology's been a fantastic leader to do that in terms of driving great customer service, taking cost out of the business and inspiring our employees.

TH: When you do innovate is that part of a broader culture of innovation or is tech-innovation seen as quite separate?

PC: It's disastrous to have tech-innovation as a separate thing. You can have some great ideas in the corner but it's about changing the business that matters. So it's the whole airline working together and that's the key thing. It's about how you use technology to change your business and move the business forward, to address the challenges that the business has got. If you do it on your own it's not worth the time.

TH: So the integration is absolutely key?

PC: That's the point isn't it? We're the IT department of British Airways; we're not a research department for god's sake.

TH: Now of course, BA.com has been absolutely essential to your recent success. Can you tell us what sort of customer services you're trying to web-enable or make self-service for the future?

PC: What we did with BA.com originally was to take the no-frills carriers head-on, draw a line in the sand and fight back. And that's what we've done. And last year our short-haul business was profitable for the first time that it has been in 10 years and a large part of that is to do with BA.com. But what we were keen to do was not just sell online but to provide every interaction between our customers and British Airways should be so easy you'd want to serve yourself online. So what we did was we simplified our fares, we enabled you to upgrade, we enabled you to book a seat and one of the things that's really going great guns at the moment which is print your own boarding pass at home and do online check-in and people absolutely love that.

TH: Web 2.0 is a huge buzzword right now. How important is it for CIOs to tap into the kind of consumerisation of technologies and all sorts of interesting things going on?

PC: Well I'm going to be using BA.com 2.0 for the forthcoming business plan and we've already done it with Google maps. And, if you like, it's a god-given opportunity because it combines the great visualisation, the great Google maps product, with our great fares so you put the two together; you produce a real, impactful thing. This came out of the marketing guys and we worked very closely with my IT folk on BA.com and put it together.

TH: Is there an element though where you really feel the CIO's office should have been leading that co-operation with Mountain View or should it have been OK to work with other parts of the business?

PC: No I feel great about it because it's people getting it, that's the whole point. My job is not to be the only person who thinks about how you can use technology. My job is to stimulate the airline. This is the whole business knowing that it's actually founded on technology, thinking how it can exploit it and then us all working together to deliver a great product. That's success.