CWHK: How's your team structured?

MW: We have a very small team. We probably have half the number of IT staff as other airlines with similar size. Most airlines have a ratio of about 1:50 for IT staff to the total number of employees. When we reach a mature size, we are expecting a ratio of 1:80.

My team has less than 10 people at the moment-they mainly cover infrastructure and application development. Although our reservation system is outsourced, all the web-based applications and interfaces are developed internally.

Within my team, there are also a few employees that serve cross-departmental functions-to cross the boundary between IT and marketing. The team mainly helps to bridge the sales and distribution business unit with IT.

For example, if we have promotions on special fares, we need to ensure the message is communicated across all channels. Since we rely on direct sales to agencies, we need to ensure the consolidators' systems also recognize the promotional offer. The team provides the coordination work to ensure that different parties and their applications within our distribution ecosystem are supporting that promotional offer.