A Decision Support Framework for Implementing Greening by IT in Airlines: A Case Study at KLM

Abstract

As the aviation industry faces mounting pressure to mitigate its environmental impact and with zero-emissions aircraft still likely years away, it is crucial that airlines find intermediary steps to make progress in the meantime. An opportunity with massive potential is for airlines to leverage IT technologies to reduce their footprint, otherwise known as Greening by IT. Through applications such as better flight planning algorithms which could reduce 0.5-1% of annual emissions or better data oversight to more easily identify polluting elements of the operation, the ways in which Greening by IT can help airlines is numerous. Despite its promise and several demonstrated examples in the industry, airlines still seem to lag in fully implementing Greening by IT solutions and realizing its full potential. A good example of this is within KLM Dutch Royal Airlines, where most efforts to improve sustainability within IT have been put into Green IT, which consists of measures to make IT itself more sustainable. While many of these efforts are admirable, one should question why so much effort is put into reducing IT’s contribution to the total footprint, which makes up less than 1% of total emissions from KLM. When one looks closer, it is easy to see that implementing Greening by IT is more complicated, as coordination with stakeholders outside of IT is needed and the impacts of changes you make are less clear. If navigating tight resource constraints, balancing many other high priority needs, and complying with aviation’s many regulations wasn’t enough, the research on how to best implement Greening by IT is scattered and lacks concrete answers. There is a lack of an understanding in which factors influence implementation the most, which strategies can be used, and a lack of a widely-accepted adoption model which could be used by practitioners and researchers alike. Beyond this, there is a complete absence of prior research on Greening by IT’s application within airlines, nor any unique aspects which must be considered. As a result, the purpose of this study was to explore the key factors impacting Greening by IT implementation, the strategies to guide it, and to integrate these together into a decision support framework. This framework is designed to be used primarily by IT practitioners within airlines to understand the implementation process, select the barriers which impact them the most, and choose strategies which can be used to help overcome them. In order to design a framework that is relevant in practice and to understand the complex phenomena involved with Greening by IT in practice, the study was carried out together with KLM’s CIO Office. Conducting this study with KLM enabled access to important documentation and stakeholders within the company. More specifically, the use-case within KLM Information Services was defined as Data & Technology platform, which combines business and IT elements to provide IT services for several KLM-specific business streams. Three qualitative research methods were used, consisting of a literature study, desk research of KLM documents, and stakeholder interviews. The research process was broken down into five sub-questions which were used to guide the research...