San Francisco International Airport (SFO) in California hosted its first-ever Tech Day in November 2024. The day brought together aviation and technology firms, along with academia, to understand shared challenges and future goals. Tech Day provided a forum to foster new ideas, strengthen partnerships and share the creativity of teams from across SFO to develop technology-focused aviation solutions. The airport also shared its Technology Improvement Program, which includes its technology roadmap for the next three to five years. According to SFO, the oversold event will likely continue on a recurring basis every year or so. To find out more, PTT sits down with Iyad Hindiyeh, the airport’s chief digital transformation officer (CDTO), and Ana Živanović, principal of strategic initiatives at SFO.
Tell us more about SFO Tech Day – what was involved, who took part and what was the motivation behind the event?
Our motivation behind Tech Day was to break down barriers that tend to exist between airports and our vendor community. As airports, we all rely on partnerships with vendors, contractors and service providers to accomplish our goals. They bring unique expertise in their specific field that can help us achieve our own goals and objectives. This is especially true in the IT sector, where the latest innovations can be adapted to secure our operations and enhance the airport experience for our guests. With these opportunities come challenges. Business partners may not always be clear on the vision for our airport. They may not understand our constraints and operational challenges and what we are trying to accomplish. This can lead to presentations and proposals that don’t align with our own goals, leading to cold-calling that is unproductive for both parties.
Tech Day was our first technology-focused vendor outreach event to help both existing and prospective business partners understand our vision, our goals as expressed directly from business users, and how vendors might fit into it with the solutions they offer. We invited the likes of veteran aviation firms and technology startups, local small businesses as well as academia – as many representatives as we could fit in our Aviation Museum!
Presentations provided a spotlight to specific initiatives from within the technology team as well as business domain experts from across SFO. The day event also featured information booths to demystify procurement processes and provided a networking forum for building new connections in service of innovation in aviation technology. We made all materials from Tech Day, videos and presentations available through SFO’s digital asset library. These can then be accessed by anyone who could not attend.
How is SFO looking to change how it works with technology providers, moving forward?
We want to challenge the way stakeholders, vendors and, ultimately, guests experience aviation solutions for smoother implementation and adoption journeys. That is why we are taking a different approach to engagement. Hosting events like Tech Day enables SFO to become a knowledge-sharing hub. We aim to create a forum for connection in service of SFO’s business challenges and upcoming technology pursuits.
Tech Day turned out to be a day to celebrate the creativity of SFO’s teams that comes from pursuing bold innovative improvement programs like TIP [Transportation Improvement Program]. We realized the industry wants to hear more from us so we will do our part to share more about who we are, what we are doing and where we need help from a technology perspective, tapping into a great resource bank of tech vendor relationships we are cultivating. In turn, we expect a positive impact from investing time in outreach on our technology adoption, from how vendors present their services to implementations that reflect our goals.
What are the key points of SFO’s Technology Improvement Program and what factors are driving them?
SFO’s first Technology Improvement Program (TIP) includes a three- to five-year roadmap divided into four key focus areas – infrastructure enablement, technology upskilling, cybersecurity and finally augmented guest experiences for revenue enhancement.
To create enabling infrastructure, we are implementing cutting-edge technologies that drive operational efficiency, reduce siloes and enable real-time data visibility. When it comes to technology upskilling, we are empowering our people and boosting decision-making capabilities to deliver an exceptional technology experience. For our cybersecurity goals, we are optimizing each airport journey moment through the lens of safety and care. And, for our augmented guest experiences and revenue enhancement goal, we are creating a more connected and enjoyable guest experience as soon as travelers choose SFO as their preferred airport while also expanding our non-aeronautical revenues.
The catalyst for SFO’s TIP is our major network redesign and data platform. We needed a way for the organization to start seeing technology infrastructure as a utility so that every new project has the same proactive, resilient and agile foundation, ready to adapt and support continued growth, especially as we anticipate reaching terminal capacity of 72 million passengers.
Where is SFO in need of the most help regarding its technology transformation?
We are working to transform the design of airport technology infrastructure and data architecture. This facilitates SFO’s growth in so many ways. With cyberattacks increasing exponentially, it helps us strengthen our cyber defenses today and in the future. After all, when we control our data, we get closer to controlling our destiny.
We are elevating our networking backbone from 40 to 400GB, enhancing our 5G coverage on the airside, landside and terminals. This is a much-needed improvement that enables us to think forward and adopt a fully segmented network design, which not only helps our technology team oversee the network but also provides added opportunities for capital recovery through increased non-aeronautical revenues.
We want all our data to reside in one platform and follow an event-based architecture. That is our north star. Airports that are geographically constrained like ours know very well that event visibility is critical to smooth operations and asset optimization. We are working on bringing new/existing databases into a singular platform that potentially can improve not only SFO’s operations but also change how we implement airport operational databases (AODBs) across the industry. It directly coincides with our efforts to establish SFO’s airport integrated operations center (AIOC), among other extraordinary projects our technology efforts enable.
What do tech providers often fail to understand about working with an airport such as SFO?
As an enterprise department of the City and County of San Francisco, we work within the frame of city policies. The value-add is enhanced cybersecurity and visibility of shared business challenges. SFO can learn from city technology implementations and vice versa. That is why we featured information booths at Tech Day so attendees could learn about doing business with SFO and our procurement processes.
An objective of TIP is to share information to promote better technology management best practices. In turn, we break down data silos. When we start to scope out a new technology, we try to maximize the number of use cases one technology can serve. There is a history of airports having to rely on proprietary systems, and as we deprecate legacy solutions, we find each catered to a unique purpose. Siloed by nature, they served a specific process or “vertical”. When encouraging data-forward technology implementations, we explore opportunities to build newer, more “horizontally” connected solutions that integrate airport processes and support improved decision-making. Less isolated systems mean greater success toward achieving an event-based architecture, where data flows freely and safely between systems.
Can you give any specific examples of new partnerships and tech programs that have occurred as a result of the recent SFO Tech Day?
Yes, we are seeing partnerships bloom following Tech Day in our event follow-up discussions and we are excited for what’s to come. Some are new, and some are continued successes with our current technology partners, who now see our approach to technology in a new light, having a greater understanding of our operational challenges and technical needs.
Creating TIP and showcasing Tech Day alongside our business experts brought us all closer together at SFO as an organization. There is a newfound clarity on how standardizing technology infrastructure and greater ownership of airport data pave the way for elevated airport operations. As our virtual runway, TIP cements the SFO technology team as a valued strategic partner in airport development.
For SFO, technology strategy reinforces our ability to provide best-in-class facilities, programs and services as a global airport. There is no telling what this could mean for the industry. Imagining an ideal future state for prospective guests and fostering new ways to engage the industry helps create collaboration opportunities novel to aviation. It also inspires others to embark on similar journeys.
Treating technology infrastructure as a utility helps us adapt for continued growth. This is where new partnerships will thrive for SFO, internal and external, and reflects our commitment to changing the narrative of how airports interact with technology.
To find out more about how to enhance the passenger experience by creating a fruitful regulator-operator alliance, read Passenger Terminal Today’s exclusive interview with Pushpalatha Subramaniam, director of consumer affairs at the Malaysian Aviation Commission (MAVCOM), here.