Enabling the extraordinary starts with a unified airport technology improvement programme

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San Francisco International Airport (SFO’s) Technology Improvement Programme (TIP) launched in January 2025, establishing the Airport’s first three-to-five-year Technology Roadmap. SFO’s TIP seeks to ignite technology innovation by establishing the technology team as a valued strategic partner while pursuing airport asset optimisation. By fostering new ways to engage the industry, SFO aims to create collaboration opportunities novel to aviation and inspire others to embark on similar journeys. Underpinning technology as vital infrastructure elevates airport operations, reinforcing SFO’s ability to provide best-in-class facilities, programmes and services as a global airport. 

A transformative framework  

A technology-forward improvement programme at airports will provide a framework to stay ahead of industry trends and redefine technology adoption. For SFO, a unified programme is necessary to set priorities while transforming the design of airport technology infrastructure, strengthening cyber defenses, augmenting the guest experience and helping the greater airport community embrace emerging technologies. It brings business problems to the foreground but also attempts to change the narrative: to challenge the way the industry approaches technology implementations.  

TIP promotes our technology strategy and includes a three-to-five-year roadmap divided into four key focus areas:  

1) Infrastructure enablement: implementing cutting-edge technologies that drive operational efficiency, reduce siloes and enable real-time data visibility  

2) Augmented guest experiences and revenue enhancement: creating a more connected and enjoyable guest experience as soon as travellers choose SFO as their preferred airport, while also expanding our non-aeronautical revenues  

3) Technology upskilling: empowering our people and boosting decision-making capabilities to deliver an exceptional technology experience 

4) Cyber-security: optimising each airport journey moment through the lens of safety and care.    

TIP is how we imagine leveraging technology to position ourselves as the airport of choice at any point in the passenger’s journey.

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Today, the passenger’s journey starts long before setting foot at an airport and arguably long after. SFO wants to be part of that journey, to build loyalty through trust for our prospective guests. Reliable technology is integral to such an experience. Still, it applies to the future of our operations as well. Standardising SFO’s technology infrastructure and taking greater ownership of our data builds a more proactive, resilient and agile foundation, ready to adapt and support continued growth.  

Committing to change  

Regardless of hub size, a pain point the TIP plans to resolve is ‘shadow technology’ deployments that tend to occur at airports through complex activations or tangential implementations. 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 better reflect the airport and allow for improved decision-making. This aligns with our goal in how we implement technology going forward, which will apply to everything from our network deployments to any future technology ‘endpoints’ transiting data, whether that is equipment at gates or cameras installed across the airport. 

Successful adoption of this programme at SFO came from consensus on the need for a unified technology programme across SFO, catalysed by a commitment to cultural and organisational change relating to technology adoption. When the call for interviews went out to airport stakeholders, every division answered, embracing the request for input and offering support. Creating TIP alongside our business experts brought us all closer together at SFO as an organisation; there is a newfound clarity on how technology strategy paves the way for elevated airport operations. As our virtual runway, TIP cements the SFO technology team as a valued strategic partner in airport development.  

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A pivot towards outreach 

Airports cannot reach for the extraordinary in isolation. Achieving a desired future state for SFO includes providing a platform to inspire innovation, augmenting guest experiences while introducing new non-aeronautical revenue streams, improving scalability and flexibility for future growth, and promoting agility and collaboration with our vendor community.

It is important to break down barriers and mend knowledge gaps which in the case of SFO comes from being a public, geographically constrained, bold and ambitious airport.  

To draw excitement about TIP from within SFO and across the industry, SFO hosted its first Tech Day. The goal was to welcome a broad spectrum of representatives from aviation and technology firms, local small businesses, as well as academia, to learn about SFO’s business challenges and upcoming technology pursuits. 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 given SFO is a department within the City and County of San Francisco. Tech Day turned out to be a day to celebrate the creativity of SFO’s teams that come from pursuing bold innovative improvement programmes like TIP and offer a forum to foster new ideas whereby vendors can see themselves working alongside SFO to innovate for the future.

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Iyad Hindiyeh leads SFO’s Technology Team with over 20 years of experience in aviation. He has expertise in expanding and deploying large-scale airport infrastructure and developing technology-forward business strategies. 

Iyad understands the impact of digitisation on airports and the need to change how the aviation industry embraces and leverages innovation. He has a proven track record of delivering results to leading airports, airlines, ground handlers, technology companies, industry regulatory bodies and governments across the globe.

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Ana Živanović oversees San Francisco International Airport’s strategic initiatives rooted in technology for the Chief Digital Transformation Office. She has a passion for technology strategy and business process improvement; she loves to find creative ways to solve organisation-wide problems leveraging her background in engineering from the University of California, Merced, her training in enterprise architecture and self-guided interests in user-centric design.

Ana understands the impact of digitisation on airports through her decade of working closely with stakeholders at SFO as well as on the industry level through her involvement with the Airport Council International. Inspired by continuous learning, Ana recently completed her MBA from the University of California, Davis.