Keynote Talk

Information Retrieval at Boeing: Plans and Successes
Radha Radhakrishnan
Boeing

Background
Many information technology products in the marketplace are designed as "Enterprise" solutions and systems. Boeing is an enterprise composed of multiple enterprises: Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Integrated Defense Systems, Boeing Capital Corporation and Connexion by Boeing. In the necessary globalization of the 21st Century, each of these major business units are really extended enterprises due to the partnerships and business arrangements we have made, involving worldwide engineering design and manufacturing companies, suppliers and subcontractors, air carriers and leasing operators, and military & government agencies. It is difficult to scale many IT design approaches and products to the Boeing operating environment. Across the Boeing enterprise, there are literally thousands of "production" applications accessing and managing many petabytes of information. There are also hundreds of thousands of formal documents, office documents, 3D model files, analytic files, email messages, and now multimedia files: video, photo and sound. Over the last decade, we've created many thousands of web sites within our internal Intranet. In addition, Boeing must comply with stringent regulatory requirements and maintain key design information over the lifetime of our products, which is measured in decades. Yet Boeing must make accurate information available to all users who have authorized access. And according to industry pundits, we can expect our total volume of data to double over the next 18-24 months.

Plan for the 787 Airplane Program
1.1 787 Program Information Availability The new 787 airplane program includes a Common Data Warehouse initiative. CDW is a unified environment for all reporting and analysis requirements for 787 product and process information. Over a period of six years, information will be copied from transactional systems and optimized to support user access. Over time, the information will be re-structured into a more neutral form, allowing the data from multiple subject areas to be more easily correlated from a business view, and more directly examined for analytic and predictive reporting. Common tools will be utilized to extract information from the CDW, allowing multiple disciplines to share definitions for data views, report formats and analytic processing. The sequencing of these subject areas will follow the 787's priority to support: Program Introduction Financial Data Program Management Data Initial Product Design and Manufacturing Bill of Material Data Enterprise Resource Planning Data (Supply Chain) Customer Requirements Management Data Customer Support and Product Improvement Delivery and Maintenance Data Manufacturing Quality Data 1.2 Airplane on the Ground (AOG) Example The information access needs of several personnel who support AOG situations, one of our most critical customer issues, will illustrate how the CDW's single source integrated data approach will function. 1.3 E-Commerce Relationships As a major information resource, the CDW is designed to evolve along with transactional application systems as the 787 program matures. Our global community of users will be able to access the most correct information to accomplish their tasks.

Vision
Boeing IT Leadership has adopted a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) designed to allow us to assemble and manage our computing infrastructure, while permitting us to utilize commercial off the shelf components and products. The SOA approach to applications will permit us to respond quickly to changes in business processes and allow us to take advantage of technology advancements. We also expect the number of application systems to decrease as Boeing adopts leaner business functions and processes. Coupled with the key business requirement to make information available, we are embarked on several programs to eliminate redundant data and integrate existing information into major data collections that can be analyzed and mined in support of operational reporting and business intelligence.
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). SIGIR'06, August 6­11, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA. ACM 1-59593-369-7/06/0008.

Success from Human Resources (HR)
Events occur in life which bring changes that can affect our work and personal lives. These events are known as "Life Events." Whether it is having a baby, getting married, taking an

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extended absence due surgery, or retiring, these events drive the need for information to support decision-making. In 2000, the human resource function faced a number of issues related to providing accurate information to over 150,000 employees. Users had to manage multiple Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) and passwords to access information on the web or to use the telephone services. Many organizations had to be contacted to obtain information or get questions answered and it was not clear who to first contact. No one organization assumed total responsibility to provide the necessary support. Most employees dreaded what was required of them to pull the story together and the few who were the most successful were the ones who had the best contacts into the HR function and organizations. 2.1 Role of Mergers and Acquisitions Certainly, many of the challenges that users faced were the result of the merger between Boeing and McDonnell Douglas in 1998, Boeing's acquisition of Rockwell's aerospace business in 1997, and Boeing acquisition of the satellite business from Hughes in 1999. However, most of the issues did exist previously at each of the companies and the merger and acquisition transactions merely exacerbated the situation. It was these business events that provided almost the "perfect storm" that led to a major investment in Information Technology to significantly improve the situation. 2.2 HR service deliver strategy In HR, the same question can have a different answer depending entirely on who the attributes of the employee or retiree. With over 90 union contracts, there are a great number of "correct answers". What HR began to formulate was a strategy to present "One Image" of the Boeing Enterprise to all end-users of HR services. This delivery strategy would enable users to go to "One Source" to access HR services via the Internet or telephone. This "One Source" would allow end-users to make "One Request" to find information, perform transactions, make decisions, and receive true end-to-end HR services. 2.3 Implementing the HR delivery strategy In early 2002, Boeing began the implementation of a HR service that it branded TotalAccess. Over the next 2 years, services

were converted and integrated into TotalAccess. The first release improved access to employee paychecks and introduced a single-toll free phone number into a contact center to support the organizational transition to web self-service. HR really got the attention of users when they eliminated the multiple PINs and Passwords and provided access to these services from employees home computers. The web services are presented to users via the employee portal (MyBoeing) and HR is able to target or personalize the delivery of content. 2.4 Role-based services for Managers Managers now access to a tremendous range of services to manage their teams and can perform most transactions online. This includes performance evaluations, personal development plans, salary planning, access to employee's work history, vacation and sick leave balances, overtime usage, and medical restrictions just to name a few. Previously, managers would have had to contact their HR representative for each service that is now available online. 2.5 TotalAccess introduced support for certain life events Life event checklists were introduced to assist employee decision-making when faced with a Leave of Absence, Potential Job Loss due to layoff, planning for and initiating retirement, or the death of an employee. Future support for more life events is planned but the improvement has been valuable, especially for initiating retirement. 2.6 Summary TotalAccess is a very recognizable and highly utilized service within The Boeing Company. The web services on the portal receive over 4 million hits per month and are used by over 100,000 unique users. Customer satisfaction has improved significantly to over 90% satisfied with their experience. Having "One Source" to access HR services has really made a difference to users. With the introduction of TotalAccess, the human resource function has also been able to eliminate approximately 60% of its previous web content. Later this summer, TotalAccess will be offered to over 300,000 former employees and retirees through the externally facing MyBoeingExpress portal.

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