Gatwick Airport has had a tech overhaul. Chief Information Officer Michael Ibbitson has overseen the installation of Samsung tablets as information kiosk points throughout the airport and used Box cloud services to make corporate data secure again. Gatwick Airport has also used more 2,000 images of the terminals to make up the largest implementation of Google Indoor Maps and Indoor Streetview in Europe. The maps will help Gatwick’s 34 million passengers make the most of their time at the airport with location-aware navigation and route-planning.
Why have you installed tablets for public use at the airport?
We’ve installed them in really key passenger areas where there’s a lot of through dwell time to give customers that opportunity to use them. We wanted to provide a really easy way for passengers to get information, so we got a product roadmap, which initially just has our website [on the tablets], but later in the year we’re going to put a dedicated kiosk version of the website which will just focus on flight information, maps, shops and restaurants.
Then as we move that forward, we’re looking at how we can use them for more interactivity: register for a loyalty scheme or games for children. There will eventually be over 200 of them. And because they are tablets, they are relatively low cost to maintain and operate and all the content is driven by our web page, from a single content management system, so it works really well.
Why did you choose Samsung to provide the tablets over competitors?
First of all: the choice of devices. We tested a number of different devices to make sure that we got one that could fulfill all the requirements. Also, their focus on businesses to business relationships and then consequently their focus on business to consumer.
Ultimately they want people to trial their tablets because they’re a competitor to some of the other tablet providers, so what a great way to get 35 million people to play with them. So there are a lot of incentives from their side to be involved with it there as well.
Did you have any issues implementing the biggest indoor Google Map in Europe?
The only challenge we have with Google Maps is the content, because the app was created in the summer and there’s a remapping exercise occurring for the new shops [currently being built in the terminal] but it will go on a regular basis to keep up-to-date. It’s a huge undertaking as it takes a week to map the whole airport, but there will be regular updates to make sure we keep it current.
Why did you choose Box as your SaaS provider?
When I joined the company there was an uncontrolled use of Dropbox in the organisation through personal accounts and I didn’t feel that it was particularly smart to have a lot of our corporate data on uncontrolled consumer-based cloud services.
Primarily, it was a security problem: we need to get the data back, and how do we go about it? But it has to provide an equivalent level of service to the customer of IT, which was predominantly senior staff and executives. We also had to have central control.
So we looked across the market and it was the Box-Okta combination that convinced us to go with them, because Okta gave us a centralised control and Single Sign On, and Box gave us all the features that Dropbox had, and even a few more interesting things, like the app has some nice functionalities. Box gives us the granularity to select that kind of level of integration with other third party apps as well which is good for us.
We’ve continued a dialogue and a relationship with them since then and now we’re starting to look at opportunities to do things like archiving and storage of large amounts of data which is irregularly accessed, but needs to be stored somewhere.
How would your archiving process with Box work?
We would set up an integration between our old file servers and Box and then when data gets to a certain age or is not accessed for a certain amount of time, it would be replicated to there. The departments would then Searchbox for the content, rather than having it held in our on-site storage, which is awkward and it just ends up filling up with terabyte data.
Do you still see uncontrolled use of Dropbbox, or is everyone now using Box?
No, everyone is on Box now. It was very well communicated out to the teams that this is the tool you have got to use. In the construction world we still have an old implementation of documents we continue to operate, but that’s for things like CAD files that are a bit more complex, which Box doesn’t have the functionality for. But other than that, everyone has switched and everybody knows that you don’t store data anywhere other than our corporate box now.
Was it a smooth transition to Box?
Because we focused on the senior teams at first, that was relatively easy to get round: the top 30 people in the company switched and moved all their data from Dropbox into Box, that worked well.
Since then, we’ve rolled it out to another 150 people across the business who adopted it so they can start to collaborate with other internal and third parties more easily than they could before.
We had our service desk trained up and they handheld everybody through the transition, we didn’t just switch it over one day and leave to them, we made sure their tablets, their phones had the app and it worked on their desktop computers. But this is when it comes to customer service: if you’re going to have great applications, you need to make sure people know how to use them really well.
What is the future going forward using Box at Gatwick?
We are already using it for our Runway Two initiative. So for our second runway now, all the collaboration that has been set up with external consultants and internals workers to win the second runway competition has relied on Box. I think wherever it makes sense for third party collaboration we will roll it out and use that tool because from an IT perspective it keeps everything well controlled.
