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Not so at McCarran, where the process bar has been set high by airport director Randall Walker. With an accounting and IT background, he's hell-bent on everyone in IT knowing that good execution and a focus on business objectives are what matter. Technology is a priority. "We found that when we had common use, we got more 'turns' out of that gate," he says. "The only way we could figure out how to do that is through technology."

Of course, the technology to perform these vital functions simply has to work, no excuses. There's plenty of evidence that technology at McCarran is well-planned, not implemented willy-nilly. There is documentation for just about everything, and there are works-in-progress documented in almost everyone's office.

Walker does acknowledge that there's no such thing as 100 percent uptime, which again brings up the Slammer worm. "How do you, as an IT guy, go up to your boss and say, 'Well, they did send us the fix, but I just never had time to install it'? The guy is sitting there calculating how much money they lost," Walker says. "As an IT guy, that's a hard discussion to have with your boss. I expect my guys to stay on top of it."

McCarran's systems, according to Bourgon, easily boast an uptime of 99.995 percent. So what's the control mechanism to ensure that staffers, not just equipment, continue to deliver? Are there pages and pages of standard operating procedures, or is it cultural?

Any organizational behavior textbook will tell you that culture is one of the most effective control mechanisms, and Walker confirms that. However, fostering a culture of teamwork is no easy task. The key?

"Our guys have a lot of fun," he says.

In interviewing his employees, it became obvious that he is correct--as long as you adopt a geek's-eye view of what constitutes fun. At McCarran it means going to training at least once a year, working with new technology and cross-training, all of which prevents boredom and provides "fault tolerance" expertise among the staff. Walker says he used to worry about making such a big investment in training because it made the IT staff so marketable to other employers. But he seems to have gotten past that.

CUTE Network click to enlarge

The alignment between upper management and IT staff is most telling in a comment that Johnson makes when discussing project justification: "It's the confidence in our team, in our people; they've got the same vision. They wouldn't have suggested something that was frivolous or outlandish." That enviable trust between business leaders and IT makes for the best business technology implementations.

Jonathan Feldman is director of professional services for Entre Solutions, an infrastructure consulting company in Savannah, Ga. He has worked with and managed technology in industries from health care and financial services to government and law enforcement. Write to him at jf@feldman.org.