A cultural melting pot
September 22, 2006Gerald No Comments »How do you handle the culture of an organisation that employs 4,600 people of 140 nationalities, who speak 70 languages and work in 220 countries? Oh and there’s no national base and so no ‘parent’ culture underpinning everything.
This is the challenge that an outfit called SITA has faced since it was founded in 1949. It’s an extraordinary business, a co-operative with its legal bases in Belgium and the Netherlands, global offices in the UK, US, Czech Republic, Singapore and Lebanon and its administrative head office in Geneva. Nothing to do with the UK waste management company of the same name, this SITA stands for Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautique. It owned and operated the largest data communications network in the world, but few people have heard of it. SITA provides the crucial telecoms networks and IT applications for the air transport industry. Owned by more than 600 airlines, SITA has always kept its light hidden. Shame, because it pioneered a number of technical developments we now take for granted, including the first ever website (for the airline British Midland, now bmi) where you could both select and buy an air ticket.
SITA has just been through another re-organisation, an inevitable fact of life for any business today, but doubly so for a business such as SITA, which is at the meeting point of air transport, telecoms and IT. The challenge, of course, is to harness the extraordinarily rich cultural mix that has developed over the past 60 years, including a powerful sense of community and to ensure that SITA’s diverse family of employees are focused on common aims that are firmly fixed on the future. I have been working with SITA for a number of years on both corporate material as well as collateral, so I have a clear interest in what happens in the months ahead. That apart, SITA would make a fascinating subject for a detailed study of the impact of external and internal cultural change on organisations….
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