Background
San Francisco International Airport, SFO opened in 1927, and serves over 40 million customer today. In the 1990s, the airport modernized its biometric technology to give it a competitive edge over other competing airports around the world. It did further upgrades in 2000, when it renovated its old airport, and streamlined through the decommissioning of its Terminal 2 airport. Increased traffic and competition allowed the airport to reopen Terminal 2. This reopening also presented the airport with the opportunity to address SFO’s credentialing system, its physical identity and access management systems. These upgrades would cost the airport financially, but could make economic sense over time through technological changes.
Issue #1:…show more content… The airport’s Physical Access System PACS, controlled when security doors opened or closed when accessed with a badge. The information from badges issued to all employees and contractors fed into different computer systems. The credentialing system was supposed to verify employees, contractor and flight crew access, including travelers in an instant, but was short in that execution. This poor execution was due to the way these information communicated with other systems or portals poorly, and sometimes could not even communicate with other servers. Compliance and audit systems were also built to ensure that all access and security protocols are followed, errors detected and corrections made. These critical functions fed through a manual badging office that could not operate optimally, thus culminated into an incompatible information technology systems.
My analysis of issue of issue #1 is that the airport operated a badging system that fed credentialing, physical access control and compliance/audit systems through a manual badging system that took time to collect, process and transfer data. Data communication was also a bigger issue for the…show more content… A lot of data is gathered at the airport every second, but data integration and communication was so inefficient that an average wait time was about 560 minutes as a result of the manual main-hub processing that was in operation at the airport. This inefficiency in wait times translated to poor customer service for airport travelers, increased cost and productivity loss for service employees. SFO also had outdated software and hardware systems that fed into separate databases. The separate databases cost the airport time and money to