This morning in Amsterdam we have taken the pulse of Aviation IT. Thanks to #AviationFest for having us chair this fascinating track. We’ve covered innovation, digital transformation, cloud, data & analytics and cyber-security. Here are a few highlights:
👉 Five years ago Kenny of Korean Air announced that he was embarking his airline in a digital transformation towards customer centricity. Today he reported the key findings and achievements: K-culture, aircraft diversion ML use case, etc. I congratulated our friend Kenny and hope other leaders will be inspired by his journey.
👉 Thorsten of GlobalDots (not related to Threedot) outlined solutions to control the volume and security of web traffic, for example coming from bots. He mentioned this was an option for airlines to manage the increase in direct search due to new distribution strategies. I encouraged him to spread the message.
👉 Arlette of KLM is the first airline manager I meet who has the job title of “radical innovation”. I like it as it sends a message to the team about the culture and ambition. She’s developed an innovation ecosystem where she’s listed all the innovation leaders. I asked her if she could share this map with travel tech startups to speed up innovation and she’s agreed 🙂
👉 Julian of IBM and Paul of easyJet shared the current agenda of an airline Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). The key message is that one CISO may feel alone when fighting against cyber attacks coming from organized crime, and the solution is to join forces with peers and to adopt the same culture as in safety. They also discussed how to raise awareness at Board level, at a time when leadership has their eyes on operational issues, financial crisis and sustainability. I asked them about the impact of digital identity (and self sovereign identity) on the risk management. While SSI will certainly help, they remain cautious as there is never zero-risk.
