Just when it thought that bymarrying inflexible systems, and getting data to its customer servicerepresentatives, it had "done it all", UAL realised that it was wrong."With the Internet, travellers could get services off the Web. Gettinginformation to them became a reality and also something they startedto demand. Travel portals allow customers to buy their own tickets.All they had to do was to get enough information to plan theiritineraries. All these meant that we had to rethink how we selltickets, and how much information we have to give them to make theirtravel experiences hassle-free. It was a true revolution,"he says.

With Sept. 11, customers began to realise that it was important forstringent security checks for air travel to be safe, leading toanother mindset change at UAL. "In the last 10 years, we had beendriving towards building these really cool systems to get people tofly speedier. Now, we still need to make it easy to fly in spite ofthe security measures that have taken place," Robless says.

Three years ago, UAL drew up a road map that detailed how it was goingto pull together its systems onto a flexible and adaptable platform onwhich to build its applications. The architecture had to achieve anumber of objectives: firstly, to get information to customers whoneed it, when they need it; and secondly, to share data andinformation widely and securely.

It decided to buy the infrastructure, preferring to concentrate on itsbusiness rather than technology. Building technology internally wouldalso be too costly. "What we needed was development software thatallowed us to put together systems cheaply, and quickly," Roblesssays.

The first need it recognised was to have a common architecture andplatform to achieve its objectives. So it took a top-down,architecture-based approach, mapping out how it was going to build theinfrastructure and deploy all its systems. "We defined a referencemodel and built against it. We also made sure we had a very strictdiscipline on how we were going to use the technology we were puttingin place. We were dealing with very old and fragile systems and itwasn't worthwhile slapping technology on top of it. Thirdly, we wantedto leverage open standards-based technology. We had to be sure that inthe future we could always leverage what we will buy."