"Institutionalize 'Active Customer Interfaces' and carry out targeted surveys to get feedback and analyze and do course corrections to get the desired outcomes"

Francis Rajan
VP- ICT, BIAL

Francis is a well networked and result oriented ATI Industry professional with 30 years of rich experience with a very good mix of 7 years in Airport and 23 years in Airlines, He is currently heading the multi-disciplined ICT streams with an in-sourcing model. He has been discharging the role of CIO, CISO and CTO. He has created the vision to progressively deploy SMART Airport frameworks in place to enhance customer experience and value creation and this has also resulted in getting International and National Industry recognition and IT and CIO & CISO awards.

Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations

The big challenge for enterprises is how to address the customer experience and aspirations and make business grow? Consequently some of the technologies that enterprise are now forced to adopt if they have not already done is “Mobility solution” in different form factors and adoption of “Social Media” frame work to different customer segments.

Expectation from technology service providers– between traditional CAPEX and on-site vis-à-vis off-site/ remote and OPEX offering, there needs to be a paradigm shift in costs and service conditions and provide end to end solutions.

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier

In the airport segment, there are many niche applications running on common IT infrastructure to meet passenger and airline and concessionaire services, and there’s always pressure to ensure IT security with NO breaches be it on wired or wireless networks.

With passengers and aircrafts on ground, disruption in ICT services has high ripple effect and an immediate customer dissatisfaction results due to impact in business meets and planned schedules and hence this is a constant pressure point to ensure business continuity in ICT services which are the backbone to the “services”.

From a technology stand point, to a very large extent solution mix does exist, but one needs to balance between needs and value propositions as budgets would be limited and need to prioritize and hence would always be in the boat that some good solutions are yet to be “boarded”. Normally we don’t get to harness the solutions deployed!

Technology trends impacting enterprise business environment

Self-services are dictated by anytime and anywhere access and life style needs. Also a customer experiencing such self-services in one geography expects to be served in similar ways. From Travel experience now the current day passenger doesn’t want to stand in “Q”, but allow him/ her to avail the service. Hence to deploy a slew of self- services at all touch points in the travel journey is a great challenge as it is capital intensive. Customer adoption levels and how to monetize the solution are true challenges that needs to be addressed.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

Year on year, with new technologies impacting the way business is done or the way customers need to be accessed and the life style impact of customers that needs to duly calibrated and best access modes based on a given business vertical. CIO in the current juncture needs to bring more innovations to the table and also need to strategize and choose the right mix of technologies which brings better value propositions to all its stakeholders. So for the current day CIO, it is a heady challenge but a very interesting one though as it would be very full filling.

Lessons learned and advice for fellow CIOs

• Adherence to the best industry practices and raising the bar in terms of service standards and quality of service
• Institutionalize “Active Customer Interfaces” and carry out targeted surveys to get feedback and analyze and do course corrections to get the desired outcomes
• Empower end users with BI and analytics to take informed decisions and avoid postmortem and bring in a regime of pro-active interventions