Exploring the world between business and technology

Webjet’s approach to delivering IT at the speed of business

I recently wrote a piece about how we’re seeing more and more misalignment of the business cycles between IT and business. IT departments are apparently blocking business achieve more and can’t keep up – well maybe not intentionally.

Webjet reached a situation where their business has grown so rapidly that their marketing people couldn’t generate further demand because the internal IT systems couldn’t cope. CEO Richard Noon said “We used to have a situation where the marketing department had to check with our technology people whether it was ok to send out a campaign.”

In dealing with this misalignment Webjet have struck a deal with Macquarie Telecom to establish a more flexible approach to manage its website and ticketing applications.  Their response has been to commoditise the provision of the production IT infrastructure to a 3rd party provider that has the business model and flexibility required to support Webjet’s changing needs.

In doing this at appears that Webjet will retain the really important piece – site content and business rules – the essence of their customer relationship if you will. The next most logical step for them would be to optimise this further to drive differentiation.