Imagine a work environment brimming with excitement about how the future unfolds. People ready for fresh perspectives and willing to hone skill sets and organizational capabilities. A culture of innovation with data and analytics driving decisions. How to build such a future fluent organization that grows through constant change?
Contributors

• • Kirti Patil, Senior EVP & Chief Technology Officer, Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance Co. Ltd.
  • Jean Christophe Lalanne, Group Chief Information Officer, Air France KLM

Download Podcast
Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, TuneIn, and Stitcher. Find other syndication channels here or search CIO Talk Network podcast on any other app.

Explore More

• Building a High Trust Organization
• Syncing Organizational Change and Leadership Development
• Preparing Organizations for Constant Change
• Organizational Agility
• Making Change Work for the Organization
• How to Build a Future Fluent Organization?
• The 3 Critical Skills for Future IT leadership: Solution Focus, People, and Narrative!
• Developing Leadership as an Organizational Capability
• 4 Solutions: Leadership in Times of Organizational Change

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:22]:

Hello, and welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com, and the topic for today is How To Build A Future Fluent Organization. So how about imagining a work environment which has got all the excitement going about how the future is gonna unfold, and you got people who are ready with fresh and new perspective about things and how do they want to go about things and are willing to step up, hone their skill sets, and ready to help collaborate and contribute towards building organizational capabilities. Then, how about a culture of innovation where you’re using data and analytics to drive decisions? and how about building such a future fluent organization that grows through constant change? Easier said than done. There are challenges. There are ways to do it, and we have two senior leaders who have been working towards it, and I’m sure they have made great progress in this regard. So I’ve got Kirti Patil, who is the senior EVP and Chief Technology Officer with Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance. Hey, Kirti. How are you?

Kirti Patil [00:01:33]:

Hey, Sanjog Aul. I’m fine. How are you?

Sanjog Aul [00:01:35]:

Very good. Honored to have you and would love to have a great conversation on this subject with you, and we also have Jean Christophe Lalanne, who is the group chief information officer with Air France KLM. Hey, Jean. How are you?

Jean Christophe Lalanne [00:01:49]:

Fine. Thank you very much.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:51]:

Very good. So as I mentioned I kinda painted a utopic picture of what that organization can be. Well, to start, Kirti, what do you think is the possibility of building something like this? Is it a pipe dream or we should still be hopeful?

Kirti Patil [00:02:12]:

No. We have to do it. There is no choice. It is not a pipe dream. All of us need to work towards building such an organization. Because while you have said it is future fluent, I think the future is already here. So we all need to work towards it.

Sanjog Aul [00:02:29]:

And, Jean, when you are looking at organization that you are running and, airlines is not for the faintest of the hearts with so many moving parts, and constant change is the way we are living our lives and how we are doing business. What do you think you are doing to get people out of their jittery nerves so that they can focus on how to be ready and stay ready for the changes that are coming ahead?

Jean Christophe Lalanne [00:02:57]:

Well, I think that you should start first with customers, so the people who are flying with us, and second point, the competition, and I think that permanently, you should focus people on these two topics. Customer centric organization, what can I do to improve customer experience and make it better? And second point, what should I do to beat the competition and be among the top players? Come back permanently to these objectives. To be sure that the question is not so much the organization by itself, but why should we change it? Why should we bring to make it more efficient? That’s for me a sort of giving a sense to any conversation you would like to start.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:41]:

So, Jean, when you mentioned competition, I mean, there’s something which, a wise person said that when you compete with others, you only get better, as good as them, but when you compete with yourself, you get to your highest potential. Should we be, given the times that we are in, even thinking of competition or we should have our own vision? Because we know that we could be struggling and so is the competition. So why we look on the other side instead of focusing on where we want to go?

Jean Christophe Lalanne [00:04:11]:

Well, I think that we should be modest in particular in our industry where things are moving very fast, and we should consider that we are never the best. Never. Even my friend from Delta, I have very good discussion and as you know, we have a joint venture with Delta. We are observing each other with a certain humility, and on a certain number of topics. I think that they are ahead on whether we are ahead. I think that it’s a sort of competition we are doing together, and I will never think that I have nothing to learn from the other. So everything starts by observing the competition and trying to get what’s good and what should help us to change and build the storyline to change. That’s what we try to do constantly.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:57]:

So, Kirti, when you mentioned that the future is already here and we’ve got to deal with it, basically it says that the intent is there within your organization to become the present fluent or future fluent in a way, but what have you done about it? How are you even approaching it? Because it cannot be a shotgun approach. You got to take a step back still and say, if we are not there yet, we got to change this big huge ship on its head, or we have to steer it in a different direction. What what’s your thought process regarding this?

Kirti Patil [00:05:31]:

Sure. So I would just before I take your question, I would just like to add to the question that you asked earlier about whether we should look at competition, and my take is that competition is anywhere. So you can’t really look at your so called competitor because your competition could be anywhere. I represent life insurance, and I believe that the next competitor could be an Amazon or Google, and, therefore, organizations need to benchmark themselves not only with the competition that is perceived as competition but with anyone else. Now to answer your specific question about how we are looking at this, change is a given and change is the most difficult thing to handle. We have always believed in continuous improvement and we have used the Kaizen methodology in many of the areas which we will continue to do but the change that is expected to be done now is really radical and those methods are not really going to work. So what we have realized is the entire organization cannot really change in one go. We identify areas which are really going to make a big difference to us and in those areas we see that we have already taken zero based approach which will think radically differently and then get people who can make that work so that we are able to deliver a change because if it is small, and if we are not able to deliver, then the failure is also restricted.

Sanjog Aul [00:07:14]:

So when we are looking at the changes that we want to bring about, and I like your point about Kaizen, that we should look at Amazon, are totally a different industry, totally different type of player. You never know when they come into our camp and give us a tough time as a competitor. Now, Jean, coming back to you, when we are trying to do things which are to, like, be business as usual, like Kirti mentioned, continuous improvement, but that’s seen more as, okay, same old, same old, or you’re building a better mouse trap. Most companies cannot claim today that they are future fluent truly. So are you putting a pause on those continuous improvement initiatives, or should you and then take a step back and think fresh instead of always trying to become, be seen as a company, as a hero, that these guys are trying to change the tires of a moving vehicle?

Jean Christophe Lalanne [00:08:08]:

That’s probably the most difficult question. Certainly, we certainly cannot afford to lean back, take time, reflect, think about what we’ve done, and just contemplate, what’s good, what’s wrong. We cannot do that. Personally, after 35 years of experience, I’m convinced, unfortunately, that it is extremely difficult to be both running activities 24 hours, 7 days, extreme tension everywhere, and at the same time, being in charge of the transformation, and sorry to say, but I think that we should accept that some people take distance, observe you, maybe benchmark you. They have the right to give you some advice, but also they decide which direction you should go to change and make the organization more fluent. This is exactly what we are currently doing within Air France KLM. As you know, we have a new CEO coming from Canada, completely new culture. He came with people from his previous staff. They took time to observe us, and now they have the right to say, wow. You are very complex here. We have seen all the processes, and then you should do that, and there is this or that aspect of the business that you should do differently that can be, for instance, the fleet adjustment, choices in the fleet distribution, the way we are designing the cabin, the way we are managing the hub. These are things that should be done completely differently, and I really think that we need people even taking distance to observe. It’s a fundamental difficulty because risk is to create a sort of split between the lucky people thinking about the future and the dream and the paradise and the others with the dirty problems of the daily life, but, unfortunately, I think that it starts like this, and then the challenge will be for the first one to be embarked by the second one and the story line and the storytelling will be very important.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:22]:

So, Kirti, when you look at your environment, of course, Jean has a 24/7, 365 type of environment. You too are in some form or fashion doing it, maybe not exactly to that degree, but you’re also being watched by the customers, by competitors, by regulators, everyone else, and you got to keep your head above water and also compete and grow. All of that is not easy, and you just doing continuous improvement is not gonna cut it either. You got to take some quantum leaps. So what do you pause for you to start something bigger?

Kirti Patil [00:11:02]:

So like I said, continuous improvement will keep happening, but we have identified certain areas where we said that we will take a quantum leap. Okay? And one understands that there are customers, there are regulators, there are employees, and so on and so forth, but in an area that is identified, we should say that we will take this quantum leap. Okay? While we will not implement it all across, for example, we are implementing a new process for customer service, and it is really completely a different process. The way we look at customer service because ours is a traditional business where we take risk and we check the risk even before a customer comes to us with a service because we look at the risk angle. So if we have to really take a quantum leap there then we have to address all these. So we have done that, but we will pilot it for select customers, for a closed user group, and then we will roll it out to all other customers. That is the way in which we ensure that we are able to make the jump, but we are also not disrupting what we are already providing to existing customers.

Sanjog Aul [00:12:13]:

So, Kirti, your example of enabling a brand new approach to customer service, which means your touch points might change, your approach to the customers might change. It’s fundamentally shift, and I’m sure it is for the better outcome. It also will disrupt the experience you offer to the customers. Yes. You will start and pilot with a smaller group and then expand it, but then any disruption is also not very easy for a customer to digest, and that has its own risk as well. How do you handle that?

Kirti Patil [00:12:46]:

So the way we handle it, first of all,  I think before we go to the customers, it is very important for us to address the employees who are all the service-facing employees. Because if they are not brought on board onto this change, then it is going to be very difficult. Because while we are talking of technology implementations, it is finally the humans who are delivering this service. Right? It is therefore very important to onboard them. Once they are onboarded, because they have already talked to the customer. The technology teams are not going to directly talk to the customer if the customer feels any disruption. So we need to communicate with the customer. We need to be prepared that there may be some customers who will still complain, but we really need to keep doing this, and,  if you really ask me, customers are involved because customers are seeing this kind of a topic from other industries, and customer expectations are really different. So I don’t think there will be a challenge from a customer point of view. For us in the industry, most of our customers are acquired through distributors, and large part of the servicing also is done by the distributor. So it is important for us to also take the distributor along so that the distributor helps the customers in this journey.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:05]:

So, Jean, when you look at this particular scenario where you are trying to make things happen and in your case, very interestingly, airline customer, which is more of a B2C play. Yes. There is a B2B play also where you got the corporate travel, but eventually, an individual, when they look at the experience, they are very heavily cost sensitive lately. They are also becoming very finicky about what you serve as food. They’re also very finicky about how do you change your gates at the middle of, or are very close to when the departure time is and or the overall experience. All of that, there are so many moving parts, and you try to, innovate in that area, and if something goes south, whatever benefit you would have achieved from that growth could very well be offset based on people defecting, going to another airline and you making the news. How do you prevent that?

Jean Christophe Lalanne [00:15:01]:

Wow. It’s first of all, we should measure permanently what we call the net promoter score and the customer satisfaction to know if what we have decided is bringing benefits. That’s the first thing. Let’s be sure that what we do is going to the right direction. Second point, well, essentially, we should travel a lot on other airlines to check what the other are doing. I come back to the competition, but sometime it’s better to experiment what the other are doing, and you know that for instance, in particular for the business class, for the premium customers, there is a high level of expectation considering the price they pay, but for us, it’s complex because it takes time to change a cabin, for instance, the business cabin, the full flatbed. That is a huge expectation, that is a standout. Unfortunately, in France, in particular, we are not yet ready. What can we do? We cannot change that overnight. It’s a long process. So we have to find all the aspects to compensate and to fill the gap, and for instance, it’s transformation of our cabin crew, make them completely fluent with customers, completely customer oriented with a lot of information about customers. Because the full flat, we don’t have it. We will have it, but maybe in 1 year, 2 years. So we must find other approach to close the gap and fill the gap. That’s the idea, and from time to time, we have to think about disruption. Seem honestly complete disruption. That’s what we did with low-cost carrier and Transavia or that we tried to do with long-haul, low-cost with Joon, then we have realized that economic model is not excellent and it was confusing for customers, but yes, from time to time, we should say, okay, let’s go to another direction. Clearly, let’s change. Let’s change completely the game. Let’s give up this or on the contrary, let’s do that. For instance, we have just decided to recreate the business class for the domestic flights. That was not usually the case, but we have analyzed the situation, the competition, the margin, and we said, okay. Let’s do that. Let’s do it, and we have to do it quickly. Then execution is key.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:25]:

So let’s take a quick break. Listeners will be right back, and when we come back, Kirti, I’ll like to pose a question here about the future fluent that the very part of the topic we have future fluent organization, but when you look at future, should we have or can we have a clear vision given the dynamic shifts that we are seeing in the marketplace and in the consumer behavior and expectations and technology and everything else? Or should we be opportunistic in defining what the future is and let’s just chase that next thing? What would serve us well as a business, and what would make it practical for us to be able to do it consistently? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:18:13]:

Today, enterprise technology is both strategic and global. Each week on CTN CIO Talk Network, IT thought leaders from around the world share their experience with listeners as they discuss with Sanjog Aul how they are trimming costs and partnering with business to innovate and help IT become more competitive, better care for customers, and improve the corporate bottom line. If you want to keep up with IT thought leadership, listen to CTN, CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul at ciotalknetwork.com.

Speaker 0 [00:18:56]:

Whether the market’s up or down, or if you’re looking to improve your portfolio, our experts are ready to talk to you. Call now toll free (866) 472-5790. That’s (866) 472-5790. Voice America Business Network.

Speaker 0 [00:19:19]:

Today, enterprise technology is both strategic and global. Each week on CTN CIO Talk Network, IT thought leaders from around the world share their experience with listeners as they discuss with Sanjog Aul how they are trimming costs and partnering with business to innovate and help IT become more competitive, better care for customers, and improve the corporate bottom line. If you want to keep up with IT thought leadership, listen to CTN, CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul at ciotalknetwork.com. You are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul. Now back to the show.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:09]:

Welcome back. So, Kirti, we want to be future fluent, but since future is kind of fuzzy for many of us, should we become opportunistic, or should we still strive to create some definition of the future which we know is gonna be changing rather quickly given the dynamic environment we are in so what should be our approach?

Kirti Patil [00:20:31]:

See, I think we need to define the future as we think it is gonna be. Though like I said the future is not really the long-term future, it could be perhaps a few months of it and what we need to be cognizant of is that that could change. So while we need to plan for the future we should also remember that the future is going to change and we should have the agility and the ability to change tracks whenever we are required to and therefore whatever we develop now if I look at it from a technology point of view whatever we develop we should be able to and willing to let go of something that we want to develop and should be willing to choose a new path very quickly.

Sanjog Aul [00:21:16]:

But whose appetite should it be?

Kirti Patil [00:21:18]:

I’m sorry?

Sanjog Aul [00:21:20]:

So CFOs usually don’t have the appetite when you go and say, hey. I’m gonna spend $5,000,000, but it’s possible $1,000,000 of worth will be throw away.

Kirti Patil [00:21:31]:

Ma’am, that’s absolutely true. So I’m not seeing it everywhere you will be able to do it. Therefore I’m telling you to choose where you want to bring about the radical change because no one I mean it’s not only a CTO thing but an organization the entire organization cannot radically change overnight. So one will have to choose one’s battles, and even if you look at the new age organization, we believe that they are changing, but we are only seeing them change the things that are visible to us. We don’t know what is happening behind the scenes, and I’m sure that even new-age organizations are not changing overnight completely. So therefore what we decide to change is also very critical, but maybe not a $5,000,000 investment but we should be having those conversations with the CFO, and if we as an organization are not willing to fail fast, then it will be a challenge.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:29]:

Jean, what have you tried to do in this regard? Have you been able to figure out there will be a totally distinctly different future for Air France KLM? And then interestingly, you mentioned that your new CEO came from Canada. Right? Different environment, different mindset and value system, etc. How do we know what they are doing is the right thing for the company, or whatever you’re gonna do going forward is the right thing for the company. Who’s the judge here? How do we, in an absolute sense, figure out that what’s better for us is what’s being done? What’s your approach to measure that?

Jean Christophe Lalanne [00:23:09]:

I think, first of all, we must share, as I said before, the storyline. I think that’s one of the best soft skills we should have in our team. This is a storytelling soft skill. People able to tell a story. What are the goals? Where do we want to go together? What are the principles? What do we want to share? For instance, when Ben Smith, who is our new CEO, came into the group, he said, well, I want simplicity. I want only 3 brands, not 5 or 10, but 3. I want to quickly restore the profitability of Air France, and I want customer satisfaction to reach this level. So I think everything starts with where do we want to go. Concretely, I have another example in IT, purely in IT. We have decided to move to a public, let’s say, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategy, but why? So the question is not to define with a lot of details what will be the situation in 5 years. I don’t know. In 3 years, I don’t know. No. What I know is that we have collectively a certain number of things to change and to do to be better performing to serve the objectives of Ben Smith. Then to do that, personally, I would promote a lot agility, the agile way of working. We work together with different profiles. We define the minimum viable situation. We check that the proof of value is there for what we are doing, and we progress step by step, transforming progressively the organization because we know collectively where we want to go. That’s for me the most important. Give a sense.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:02]:

So the playbook that you shared is come up with a vision or whosoever the leader is comes up with a vision. You connect, like, for example, in your case, technology and multi-cloud environment. You say, we are gonna go to this route because there is a logical reason why this would be the best way to achieve what the business vision is. Use that story to get the funding. Start small. Fail fast. Fail small, and you can create some proof of concept and then scale from there, and even if things change, since you said you do not know what’s gonna happen in 3 years, even if in 3 years things change, you will go back to them again and say, oops. We were not sure what would happen 3 years down. So things change, and what we asked you as funding, we might have to relook at it, and based on this playbook, Jean, would everything go well and nobody will get fired for this?

Jean Christophe Lalanne [00:26:03]:

No. I think that things are not as simple as that. I think that in 3 years from now, I do not know exactly what would be the situation, but I think that the main objectives defined by the boss and by the group executive committee, and I am member of the group executive committee. So I know them. I think that it will probably not change. So the way the path will be maybe different from what I have in mind today. The goal will not be different. Then I have to be careful. Of course, the decisions are important. For instance, moving to hybrid multi-cloud means that I plan to close data centers. The 2 twin data centers we have in Air France and KLM, and 1 in Amsterdam. So we plan to close them. To do that, we have a certain number of steps, and we should check that every step is a good one, that we make the good product selection, supplier selection, that removes the high application, the high order. Because I know where I go. So, of course, I’m not rich enough to hide off and spend money for nothing. That’s my challenge. I’m paid for that. I’m paid to make the right choices, but be flexible. I need to keep a certain level of flexibility.

Sanjog Aul [00:27:29]:

Kirti, if you were to approach all of this

Kirti Patil [00:27:32]:

Can I add something here?

Sanjog Aul [00:27:33]:

Yes, please. Go ahead.

Kirti Patil [00:27:36]:

So I would like to give an example of the cloud. Okay? So we are a regulated, heavily regulated industry, and we keep evaluating public cloud. We have to have a private cloud, and like you said fail, take small risks and fail fast. So what we did is that we have to go to the cloud so we said as a possibility we are not going to use infrastructure as a service on the public cloud. Still there is complete clarity as to how this is going to be handled but we are using a lot of solutions which have helped us reduce the time to market. We are using multi-cloud using the SaaS model, the software as a service so that if it doesn’t work out, then it is easy. One, the solution is restricted to certain functions within the organization. That is what I wanted to share and to add to what Jean said.

Sanjog Aul [00:28:42]:

Sure. Now the question I had was regarding the people. Right? Because many times we would build strategies in the ivory tower, and yes, you might do a good job of including the people in the process. That’s one, but still, there is a lot to tackle with what they are doing in their regular day life. Plus on top of it, you want them to shift on a dime and or start involving themselves in innovation and all the different things, which could create overwhelmed feeling, burnout. Some people could get detached or could get frustrated, and you can kiss the execution of this goodbye if that continues to happen. How do you minimize those workforce human, regular human being issues as you try to look up and tell, okay, whatever business you tell me to do, I will somehow figure it out to get it done. You don’t want to kill your team’s morale, and physically, they are totally spent in the process of meeting business needs. Because corporate looks at it as profitability. They look at the shareholder. I’m not sure how many of them are truly looking at what’s happening to the employee or the people. So, Kirti, what is your approach to making sure, at least at your level or maybe at your management level, to make sure that shareholder value doesn’t take away your employees’ experience because they are the ones who are gonna build you or will help you become future fluent.

Kirti Patil [00:30:14]:

So absolutely. Employees are a very important part of anything that we do, and it is not just a shared statement, but I tell you what we are doing, and starting first with the adoption because like I said many digital initiatives will be focused towards the customer but we believe that if our employees are not involved and engaged throughout this journey then we are not going to be able to do anything. So I’m not talking of the technology employees but the employees across the organization. So large part of our digitization initiatives are focused towards the employee. So how do we make the life of our employee better? We don’t have to use these technology solutions only to help the customer and the shareholders, but also the employee. That really helps us. Because when we expect them to stretch, we understand that what this technology has delivered to me can be delivered to the customer so we get their complete buy-in which is generally across the organization that I’m seeing. From a technology point of view we need to communicate with the employees very regularly because like we said in the beginning, we need to do both. We need to manage the BU and we also need to do new things and the technology employees will have to do both. So we need to communicate to them as to why it is important for us to do both. That’s one. Two, we need to look at skilling of those employees. We need to look at rewarding them for the good work they have done. We need to not penalize them for the failures that they are going through. Right? Whatever I have said is very easy to say but very difficult to implement. Try the changes to begin from you as a leader so unless and until you don’t do it then they are not able to do so. If they know that the organizers are with them I am sure they will support us. Having said that there will be a churn and we should be okay with a little bit of churn. As leaders we should be okay with that.

Sanjog Aul [00:32:25]:

So Jean, would you agree to the concept of casualties of war as you go and transform your ship, if you will? Are you willing to let some of that burnout, some of that boredom, detachment, frustration stay because that’s inevitable and not try to become a people pleaser because you’ve got a business or a job to do? How are you balancing the two?

Jean Christophe Lalanne [00:32:45]:

No. I fully support what Kirti said. I think that there are some basics. Celebrate the success, communicate permanently, communicate where we want to go, for which reason, convince middle management with good storyline, but I would add very specific topics that I have seen in my company. First, don’t forget we are in Europe and in particular in France and in The Netherlands where the works council social body plays a very important role. So believe me, if we have burnout, detachment, frustration, the social bodies will very quickly warn us, and it will become very dangerous for us as well. It’s like this. We are in Europe where still we are extremely driven by the social relationship, and we are paying a lot of attention with them. We are collaborating with them. We try to build together this future fluent organization. We have a certain number of rules and sometimes it is a law. By French law or Dutch law, you cannot do what you want. It’s extremely strict. So you cannot mitigate easily. That’s the first thing. The second thing is the patience and history of your companies. Fortunately, KLM is 100 years old company. We celebrated Centenary a few weeks ago and Air France is 85 years old. We have a long history. People, they have the passion of the airline industry. So every time there is the transformation, we are facing difficulties, economic difficulties, sometimes security difficulties when there is an accident, a crash, or things like that. Immediately, we try to recreate the link with the essence of the group and the airlines. Where do we come from? Who were the pioneers? What did they do in the past? And we continue to build the history, and it works. It works. Sincerely, it works. At least in our industry, it works a lot. Even in Delta, it’s a little bit the history of Delta’s past. It’s fantastic what they have done. So the history is a fantastic opportunity to boost the confirmation and support it.

Sanjog Aul [00:35:11]:

Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back, and Jean, when we come back, I’d like to ask you this question about data and analytics driven decision making and innovation. Now on the ground, the reality is that most organizations cannot claim today that their data and analytics function is mature. Some people have even reported not more than 2 or 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, and there’s a lot of money being spent on that, and if we are trying to get to where we want to go, there is so much data coming from all different directions. It is becoming a data swamp versus a data lake, and our analytics is also flawed in many cases. This is not the rosiest picture when we are saying we want to build a future fluent organization, which is data and analytics driven. So what on the ground are you doing to rise to help your organization rise to say 7 or 8, if not 2 or 3, so that you can claim that, yes, you are working in the right direction. What is it that you’re doing? What have you tried? What’s worked? What’s not worked? What’s learning? And what is the takeaway? Let’s talk more when we come back. Please stay tuned, listeners.

Kirti Patil [00:36:20]:

Okay.

Speaker 0 [00:36:28]:

Today, enterprise technology is both strategic and global. Each week on CTN CIO Talk Network, IT thought leaders from around the world share their experience with listeners as they discuss with Sanjog Aul how they are trimming costs and partnering with business to innovate and help IT become more competitive, better care for customers, and improve the corporate bottom line. If you want to keep up with IT thought leadership, listen to CTN, CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul at ciotalknetwork.com. You are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul. Now back to the show.

Sanjog Aul [00:37:19]:

Welcome back. So data and analytics, not easy for us to be able to master. Most organizations struggle. As you try to build, Jean, your organization to become comfortable with data and analytics driven decision making, and in fact, start using this as an ammunition, as a catalyst. What’s the journey like? Where are you in that journey? What’s working, and where are you struggling?

Jean Christophe Lalanne [00:37:47]:

I like the question a lot. Well, I would say that maybe it’s the first time, in my career after 35 years that IT and the digital technical expertise are ahead. I think that we’ve done a lot. We have created the data warehouse, the searching engine, the data lakes, all the visionary tooling. So we have a lot of things, biometrics, SPL. So we are ready to a certain extent from a technical standpoint, we are ready. We have also refurbished our back end for cargo, for maintenance, for passenger business. We have a lot of things. Good news. Well, the problem is that the businesses are like chicken with a knife. They have difficulty to structure, steer, organize the good usage, the good news of what we have put in place. On IT side, we have fortunately created 60 years ago an operational research team with very brilliant mathematician and people working for exploring data and optimizing, optimizing, optimizing because airlines is nothing but optimizing what you can optimize, but it’s not enough. It’s not enough. We really need data scientists living the strong knowledge of the business. If you are data scientist in the engine maintenance, you need to know about engine. It’s like this and the GE90 is very complex and more, and I think that, well, so I would say today we are between 0 and 10. I think we are at 5, and the challenge is now to go business per business to spend time with the EVPs, with the VPs, tell them what’s available, what they can do with that. They have gold in their hands. It’s real assets. What can they do with that to utilize, build the future, good organization, performant organization, and augmented people, helping them to make better decision. That’s such a challenge. It’s my perspective. Maybe it’s not shared, but it’s already.

Sanjog Aul [00:40:04]:

Alright. So thanks so much for your candor because,  you’re saying that you’re at 5, so I’m sure there is a lot of work ahead of you. So, Kirti, when you look at your organization, I’m sure you’re trying to do something similar. Where do you stand, and what’s been your journey in this regard?

Kirti Patil [00:40:23]:

So I would also stand, we would also stand at the same place as Jean has mentioned. So I’ll tell you how we started this journey. We did not start by investing a lot of money in the technology or in the people. What we did is we said we will hire from outside. So we’ve worked with partners initially, and we brought expertise from outside. We took specific use cases, and we said we will deliver on the use case and we will show that it works. So some of the use cases that we have worked very effectively is one in persistency. The other one is fraud analysis. Third one is cross sell and we are identifying more and more use cases. So what is happening with data analysis is because there’s so much data available that people analysts will get carried away by doing analysis, but unless and until there is a clear use case as to what are we going to achieve after doing the analysis, it doesn’t make sense in doing any analysis, and that is the approach that we have taken. Now we are building a team so that we bring those skills internally. Now people also talk about quality of data. People talk about big data. So people talk about implementing data lakes or data streams to handle the need of data and analytics. We said we will start small whatever data we will have we will build on it and then we will look at the need for having an enterprise wide data lake.

Sanjog Aul [00:42:06]:

Lead. So the way you describe that you got this yeah. Go ahead.

Kirti Patil [00:42:11]:

Go ahead. No. I’m saying the other thing that we said is that it is important that in the critical business functions we have people who understand the importance of data. It’s not so much about having data scientists in those teams but how can data help them analyze because it is important that we start collecting the right kind of data. We start working on the quality of the data and then we will eventually go to analytics. While we have not got there that is the way to go. We would need to either hire people with those skills in critical function or train existing people to look at things differently.

Sanjog Aul [00:42:51]:

So you tried with the best intent that you want to rise up beyond, say, the scale of 1 to 10 above 5. Right? Like what Jean is trying to do, which in a way tells that there is interest among the people, there is interest among the stakeholders to be able to get there, but it looks like the nature of the beast is such that you’re not able to move past that level. Is someone looking at this and saying this is a problem we ought to crack because there on the other side of this problem lies a great opportunity? And put the right type of investment, not just more money, just not throw more people and money at it, but take a step back if you have to or look at it differently so that you crack this problem so you move forward. Is that how we are approaching this, or we just come across as tired warriors that we’ve tried whatever best we could try, and this is the best we could get to?

Kirti Patil [00:43:50]:

No. I don’t think so. We should do that, and we are doing that. There is a business problem that we need to tackle.

Sanjog Aul [00:44:00]:

Jean, have you looked at things, so say, to 2020, would you do anything different with your data and analytics function given that you gave yourself a rank of 5?

Jean Christophe Lalanne [00:44:11]:

Well, I think that, first, we will spend more time with each and every business to elucidate the governance. That is the first difficult question. You know the airline is very centralized from a data and IT point of view because you share a lot of data. Everything is connected with everything. So the question of transversality is key, whereas the organization is by silo. So IT is probably the only place and area where by nature and in particular as far as data are concerned, transversality is key. So we will spend more time to elucidate with EVPs what they can do if they work more transferfully. We did last week the data strategy presentation in the EXCOM in France. We will do the same in the EXCOM KLM and at the group EXCOM in January, and the conclusion of this presentation is we should spend more time in-depth business per business to see where is the value, where are the good use cases? But we have already a lot of examples. I said 5 because I try to be realistic, but we are doing, for instance, predictive analysis for engine maintenance or aircraft maintenance. We are doing recommendation. We are doing turnover optimization by using data science, but we can do more. How to monetize this asset, and one day, maybe, in the future, that would be part of the balance sheet. It will be an asset like an aircraft or like a package. Today, the software is an asset. Maybe tomorrow, our data will be an asset. I would love to show that to the CFO. To tell him, look. In your balance sheet, there is something new with a lot of value. This is the data of the group. This will be, I think, a big chance if we do that.

Sanjog Aul [00:46:17]:

Kirti, when you look at your partners in the ecosystem, I’m not sure what’s your partnership? I know in Jean’s case as an airline, they definitely have to work with a lot of partners. Not sure what’s your partner ecosystem and your customers. So, Kirti, when you look at them and you say, I want to take our organization forward and make it future fluent, and mister customer and mister partner, both of you could benefit if you came along, and let’s work closely, but they may have their own agenda. They could customer could defect easily. A partner may have their own balance sheet to handle and or profit and loss to handle. How do you take them along?

Kirti Patil [00:47:00]:

Sanjog, before going to your question, just two points I wanted to add on the earlier question, two things that we are doing. One is enrichment of data. That is very critical, and whenever we are looking at building any solution, now the technology teams are also looking at data because otherwise, earlier, we would build an application or a solution and data would just come along. Whereas now there is a focus on acquiring data and enriching data. Now coming to your question about partners it is absolutely essential for us to work with our partners and I completely understand your question. Priorities for partners and priorities for us could be different and we need to work very closely with our business folks because the business folks are talking to the partners and get alignment. At times we have had to change our priorities, at times we have had to push back the partners, convince them, coerce them to work with us. Is that something that needs improvement? Yes. It certainly does need improvement, and I think you were asking about the B2B partners. Correct? So very recently, we worked with Xiaomi, and it was a wonderful experience. So the business folks were talking to the business folks from the other side and the technology team is well aligned and so we always take a two-pronged approach business talks to business and technology talks to technology and we have been able to make it work but like I said we need to be flexible. We need to realign our priorities because some things may not work as per our plan because partner may have other priorities, and some partners may just come by, which was not planned in the beginning.

Sanjog Aul [00:49:05]:

So, Jean, have you done anything creative or new or different which will make the partners and customers follow your lead? Or are you having to urge them, hey, folks. Come along.

Jean Christophe Lalanne [00:49:17]:

Well, I will maybe concentrate my answers on partners because we are extremely engaged with partners. As you know, we have the SkyTeam Alliance that we have some joint ventures, very important joint ventures, and what we do currently, we have built programs that we call get rid of themes. The pain for our customer is to experience themes between the different partners. We would like the new customer experience to be completely fluent from A to Z. To do that, we need to eliminate themes. For instance, if you book a seat with Aeromexico, from Mexico to New York and then from New York to Paris, it should be completely fluent. So we develop standards, APIs, the spine, we call it digital spine that is a sort of hub where all the partners are connecting together. They are connecting on the hub, and the hub is distributing the request and the replies with standards like NDC APIs, the new distribution capability APIs that is standard in the industry, and we are steering that. Just before this call, I was attending the monthly steering with the other CIOs, the CIOs of Aeromexico, Delta, and Aeroflot. All the CIOs together, we see how we can mobilize technologies and in this case, APIs mainly to get rid of themes and to create this fluent perception for a customer from origin to destination. That’s a very concrete example.

Sanjog Aul [00:51:01]:

1 minute total I have, so 30 seconds each. If, Jean, you had to give a message to the folks, fellow leaders, CIOs, and other business leaders to do, say, one main thing which will help them become better at building a future fluent organization, what would that be? What would be that one top thing?

Jean Christophe Lalanne [00:51:26]:

For me, the most important is, as I said before, storytelling. Build, elaborate, structure your storyline. Where do we want to go together for which reason? What are we targeting together for mutual benefits, and I think that the moment you will have a clear story, shared, simple, convincing, then I think you will start a very enjoyable endeavor.

Sanjog Aul [00:51:55]:

Can you see?

Kirti Patil [00:51:58]:

I think we need to take an outside-in view, and when I say outside, it is not within the industry at all. That’s one. Two is learnability and adaptability to new ways of working is what we should subscribe to.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:16]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, thanks so much, Jean and Kirti for sharing your thoughts and insights about the steps that organizations should take and the changes leaders should bring about so that we can build future fluent organizations. Thanks so much both.

Kirti Patil [00:52:33]:

Thank you very much. Thank you, Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:36]:

And hope, listeners, you got some nuggets. This was a very fantastic and an intense discussion on what we can do to build future fluent organizations. Please like us on Facebook. Search for CTN CIO Talk Network, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week. Take care, and God bless.