CHAPTER 04

People and Processes: Fostering a Customer-Centric Culture


The experts we spoke to for this study all agreed that the most important element in delivering enhanced service through data isn’t integration, governance or even innovation. It’s a strong digital leadership culture, that drives collaboration and ensures alignment between business and technology, while fostering innovation.

Technology leaders should understand that a customer-centred culture will necessarily involve more complexity. It will involve bringing more people together, more collaboration between competencies, and supporting them to work together in new ways. At SIXT, Stephan Hong has built new product and customer divisions.

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Within each division, we have a business owner, a product owner and a technical owner. They have to work very closely together, and are responsible for executing the service.

Organisations must invest in training to ensure this new culture is adopted, because it often involves a complete change to the way IT operates within the wider business. “There’s no point putting in all this digital, data-driven decision making if the workforce is not data literate, not comfortable with technology or comfortable with the decision-makers,” says Stuart Birrell, CDIO, easyJet. “This isn’t an IT skills issue. It’s about what technologies do you need, what skills do you need, and how are you going to help them?”

A recent success at easyJet has been in establishing a community of interest for analysts across the organisation. This has brought people together from really diverse backgrounds with a wide variety of technical capabilities to support each other in developing their skills in analysing and using data. We are seeing people develop from using Excel to learning Python, from running pre-canned reports to using professional tools and creating their own reports from different datasets to develop insight and real business value. We have had two analysts promoted into the data science team working on ML and AI projects.

Next: Conclusion

A Long Journey for the Travel, Transport & Logistics Sector

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