Nothing has change the face of business more than information technology (IT), and few industries have been more radically transformed than the airline business. Scandinavian Airlines Systems (SAS) was founded in the 1950s, and this book traces the company’s history and how IT influenced its business environment, focusing fist on the 1950s and 1970s, which the author terms expansion and crisis, then the 1980s: Transition, and the 1990s: transformation. During the 20th century, nearly all cooperations of the world copied the business model of Fordism, based on mass production and specialization. Since the 1950s, SAS also worked within this Fordist environment. Like other firms, however, SAS soon discovered that computers would be a necessity to make its machine-like organization run in an efficient way. Stating with the reservations system, computers expanded into all the other main functions of the company. The book shows how the effects of the general economy and competition made computerization indispensable in virtually all cooperations. Transition began in the 1980s, when western corporations tried to meet the internationally successful Japanese way of production. Being deeply rooted in the Fordist model, however, western management and business took a decade to start building the present flexible organizations, based on market orientation, liberalization and globalization. IT played a vital role in this fundamental business reform, and at the same time, the IT industry itself was in the process of transformation, fuelled by chip technology, new software, networking and the Internet. By and large, SAS, and the airline industry in general, passed through the same processes of transition and as did the whole business world. The radical changes of SAS and its IT dimensions were most clearly seen since the mid-1990s. Preparing to meet the challenges of open competition and global IT infrastructure, SAS fought to overcome the strong historic roots of its organization and IT systems. This text helps the reader to understand how industry, through the experiences of one company, was transformed by computer technology over the past four decades. It offers information about global corporations, the IT industry and SAS, plus intelligent analysis.
