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American Airlines to offer employees PCs, portals
zdnet.com
By Grant DuBois, eWEEK
May 11, 2000 11:29 AM ET
Like Ford Motor Co. and Delta Air Lines, American Airlines Inc. plans to bring its offline employees online. The difference is that American will also give them a personal portal to interconnect them.
The airline announced this week that it will spend $15 million per year for the next three years to provide PCs, printers, Internet access and personal portals for its 100,000 employees. For their part, participating employees will pay $12 per month for 36 months.
"We want to connect them better to the company and also give them access to information that some of our employees might not be able to access because they don't have PCs," said Marty Heires, a spokesman for American Airlines in Fort Worth, Texas. "This is a great opportunity for employees, especially those with small children to offer them the educational opportunities that come with having a PC in the home."
American Airlines is currently reaching about 15 percent of its employees through its corporate intranet, but "with this program, we can probably reach as many as 70 to 80 percent of our employees," Heires said, adding that employees will be eligible to purchase the PCs in mid- to late July.
The airline's package includes a Dell Computer Corp. Dimension L PC with an Intel Corp. 500MHz Celeron processor, 64MB of memory, a 4.3GB hard drive, a 56K-bps modem, 15-inch monitor, Hewlett-Packard Co. DeskJet 610CL color printer, and three years of technical support and Internet access. The airline will announce an agreement with an ISP (Internet service provider) later this month
Employees as 'new kind of customers'
CoVia Technologies Inc. will provide American with the portal, which will include Internet and intranet content, commerce services, employee benefits and collaboration. American will customize the portal, and employees may personalize it to create their own portal view of content, CoVia officials said.
"We're building a community in the broadest fashion by allowing employees to communicate [with the company and each other] and to contribute information," said Deidre Paknad, founder and president of the Mountain View, Calif., company.
"There's an enormous amount of momentum on the employer side to implement these types of programs," Paknad continued. "If the goal is a work/life balance for the employees, then the program ought to be about work and life, and just having a PC doesn't get you there.
"What's driving the trend is that customers are king, and employees are a new kind of customer. We're creating a constructive, cooperative environment at work and at home." |
