WestJet Airlines was a "high-value, low-fare airline" that began in 1996 as a regional airline serving five cities in Western Canada from its home base in Calgary, Canada. By 2011, WestJet had more than ninety aircraft in the air serving eighty-one destinations in North America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. With nine thousand employees, the company had become the second largest airline in Canada and the ninth largest in North America. But a 2009 IT shift to the Saber reservations system "that was not as smooth as planned" and a strategic move to implement code sharing and several other strategic IT applications to improve WestJet's competitiveness led the CEO and his executive team to hire an experienced CIO. to put WestJet on par with other airlines.

Cheryl Smith was an extremely experienced and highly successful IT executive who had held senior positions in several large organizations, including McKesson, a Fortune 50 company where she served as Executive Vice President (EVP) and Chief Information Officer (CIO). Smith was hired by WestJet in April 2011 to assess IT competency and take IT to the next level as part of a corporate drive to gain competitive advantage by providing innovative guest services. Smith saw IT as the key to WestJet achieving its ambitions and corporate growth. She formulated an ambitious plan to restructure the IT organization by providing WestJet with a new IT governance model. The transformation included a major reallocation of IT staff and a reorganization of IT planning and budgeting, which affected several other related processes. But senior IT staff, some of whom had been with the company from the beginning and had played a major role in developing existing systems, believed their plan was unworkable. Smith had to convince both senior management and the IT group that implementing his new IT governance model was essential if WestJet hoped to achieve its strategic objectives.

Additional reading

R. Nolan and F.W. McFarlan (2005). Information Technologies and the Board of Directors. Harvard Business Review , pp. 95-106
(https://hbr.org/2005/10/information-technology-and-the-board-of-directors)

F.W. McFarlan, J. McKenney and P. Pyburn (1983). The Information Archipelago - Charting a Course. Harvard Business Review (January-February). p. 145-156.
(https://hbr.org/1983/01/the-information-archipelago-plotting-a-course)

Kotter, J. P. (2001). What leaders really do. Harvard Business Review

Kotter, J. P. (2007). Lead the change. Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review , pp. 92-107

Jones, J., Aguirre, D. & Calderone, M. (2004). 10 Principles of Change Management: Tools and techniques to help companies transform quickly. Strategy+Business Magazine

Homework questions

Study the case carefully and answer the following questions

A. When Cheryl Smith, the new CIO, arrived at WestJet, the CEO asked her to advise on the state of IT at the company. Please propose any applicable IS/IT change management issues that you think Cheryl Smith should highlight in her response to CEO concerns .

B. In organizing her evaluation, Cheryl Smith committed to providing a comprehensive response to her initial assignment, that is, reporting to the CEO and senior management on the overall quality of her IT operations. Criticize your assessment of the apparent problems.

C. Hypothesize how Cheryl Smith could use McFarlan's strategic impact grid to help senior management better understand the importance of IT's role in the organization in terms of its existing and future operating systems.

D. Briefly summarize why Smith's solution could generate resistance from both senior managers and the IT group, and discuss change management strategies Smith could apply to defuse staff resistance to change.