To drive value for companies, you must build collaborative ways of working

The Situation: Enterprise problems have become too complex to handle alone; enterprises must collaborate with an ecosystem to solve them. To drive value for companies, you must build collaborative ways of working, says Tui Airline CIO Isabelle Droll.

Growing complexity is the biggest change enterprises have faced

Droll says the increasing complexity over the last 5-10 years is the biggest change she has seen in her 25-year career at the German-based leisure travel and tourism company. Globalization, digitalization, and context shocks such as Brexit, COVID, and the war in Europe add to a decade of challenges, which had already presented GDPR, post-9-11 airline regulations, and, in the case of Tui, the need to merge five airline systems and processes.

Changes in complexity demand constant innovation to deliver a flexible response. Droll’s response—to build an ecosystem of innovation partnerships, first internally and increasingly externally—sounds like the HFS OneOffice: breaking down front-, middle-, and back-office silos to work together to deliver end-to-end outcomes. The HFS OneEcosystem in Exhibit 1 builds on this, extending the collaborative approach to innovation beyond the organization’s boundaries to connect and work with those pursuing shared goals.

Exhibit 1: The problems facing enterprises are too complex to face alone; OneEcosystem shows the way

Source: HFS Research, 2022

Background in data, change, innovation, and process management gave Droll experience with business needs and growing complexity

Droll honed her approach in her 25-year Tui career, which commenced as companies began to get to grips with advanced data and analytics. She used both to make predictions about customer demand and business needs long before machine learning was widely available. Soon she was running an internal consultancy with responsibilities for data warehousing and analytics, change management, innovation process management, and process management. The latter included a huge project engaging every employee to describe, document, and optimize processes.

This background provided a clear understanding of business needs and experience with growing complexity, which she is now applying in her role as CIO of both Tui Airlines and Musement, which delivers tours and activities available in all major holiday and city destinations to travelers around the world, including the 28 million annual TUI customers. She also runs corporate systems, SAP for HR and finance, for example, with 600 people under her leadership.

Innovation needs partnerships built on credibility and trust

Droll has championed a collaborative and flexible approach to innovation in five key ways. She:

• Focused on bringing IT and the business together by communicating the value IT can deliver. “My value-add in the IT organization is that I am able to inspire people to explain more clearly, in a more business language, what they can deliver for the business,” she said.
• Led agile ways of working, establishing an innovation process to align with airline business processes.
• Made value outcomes king. She says it is not wise to leave decisions to IT. Instead, decisions should be made in a partnership between business and IT, built on credibility and trust, and with shared goals, such as prioritizing margin and security.
• Engaged with procurement and business unit specialists to scout emerging technologies. She says that by staying close to business needs for innovation, IT can be better prepared to accelerate adoption beyond the pilot stage.
• Established Tech Talks to ensure collaboration is a two-way street. If IT team members have experience generating value with automation, for example, (which they currently do at Tui in the corporate area, but less so in the airline space), then there should be processes to share learnings with the wider business. At Tui, this includes “Tech Talks,” showcasing the latest technologies to business users.

Airline turns to metaverse to help solve the cabin crew crisis

One result of the collaboration between IT, procurement, and specialists from business units is an exploration of the metaverse. The Tui team is prototyping a range of basic training opportunities with the intent that cabin crews can learn the ropes by interacting in a safe digital-3D environment.

Extending the network of collaboration beyond the business is essential in projects such as this. Tui is building out an ecosystem of start-ups with the necessary certifications, effectively aligning with those with shared goals across the industry.

Amazon Web Services is rapidly becoming a key part of the Tui ecosystem. Tui does not just use AWS services; the companies are closely collaborating, to the extent that Droll’s team and others are preparing to adopt Amazon’s release methodology to help communicate with the business. This well-documented “work backward” method starts with the customer and a press release written for the customer as if the product is launch-ready.

For the core IT systems driving the travel business, Tui focuses on developing its intellectual property. A different approach has been chosen for Droll’s area of responsibility. For corporate and airline, the group’s strategic focus is on SaaS solutions. Eighty percent (80%) of the stack is commercial off the shelf (COTS) and then adapted to their specific needs.

Cloud enables Tui to re-engineer and recreate in a new technology environment

Seasonal demand forced Tui to maintain huge data centers in the past to cope with summer peaks. But for much of the year, Tui was saddled with the cost of over-capacity. The cloud’s elasticity provided a clear business case to shift to it, and Tui opted for the AWS stack.

Beyond the cost saved by the elasticity of supply provided by the cloud, the move has offered the opportunity to modernize legacy applications. Tui established a new data architecture with standardized application program interfaces (API) to connect containerized applications on AWS. Droll says by collaborating with AWS to standardize APIs, the common data lake will be better able to deliver data between operations and customer-facing information services such as the Tui app, which serves as a digital assistant for holidaymakers before, during, and after their vacation.

After an early summer of delays and cancellations in Europe, customers will welcome progress toward access to more complete and up-to-date information when and where they need it.

The architecture will also support a planned migration of five separate regional booking systems into one new global one.

The Bottom Line: No one owns innovation; collaboration makes it work.

“No one can claim to own innovation; it must always be a collaboration in which IT is closely involved so that if and when a pilot is successful, IT is ready to co-operate to make it scale,” says Droll.

And, as Droll points out, no one enterprise can hope to solve all the complexities it faces alone.

An open and shared approach to innovation internally becomes an essential stepping-stone on the way to developing the collaborative muscle all CIOs will need to build out collaboration across ecosystems. In an increasingly complex world, learning from other organizations and sharing best practices should be part of every innovation strategy.