“I guess I’m not your typical CIO.  My background is mainly on the business side of things.  For example, I was previously CEO of the Standaard Uitgeverij, a book publisher, and have a background in marketing, mainly quantitative marketing.  And I’ve taught a great deal.  That’s been a red line throughout my career: teaching, imparting knowledge, motivating people, working with young people.  Those softer issues are important to me; you could say that education informs my approach to life.  This also holds for my leadership style; I try to inspire people, I’m still teaching. 

 

At the Standaard Uitgeverij I developed some technical competencies but marketing was still the priority.  My main achievement at Standaard was to guide the organisation from a product orientation to a customer orientation. Later I was appointed MD of Cronos, an IT company, and after that I spent five years as CIO at Vanbreda International & Vanbreda Risk & Benefits, an insurance company. It was the chairman of Vanbreda who was instrumental in guiding me into the CIO role, an inspiring man. But I took my baggage with me: I kept thinking from the perspective of the customer and the business; I positioned IT as an enabler. 

 

A short stint at ING followed. It was at that point that I reassessed my career and life quite fundamentally. My partner and I had separated and I suddenly had the responsibility of co-parenthood. I’m totally passionate about my role as a father and wanted to be available for my kids. So I took the decision to quit my job at ING. But a new opportunity emerged reasonably quickly: my current position as CIO of Thomas Cook Belgium.  

Firstly it’s important to note that technology is absolutely critical to our business. As a result, I’m a member of the executive team and I take part in setting the company’s strategy. The main technology trend impacting on our business is obviously the internet and all it implies. The internet is changing our entire business. For example, for every 100 euro spent on travel these days, only 30 is spent via tour operators like Thomas Cook and Jetair. The other 70 euro consumers spend independently of the tour operators; it goes direct to flight bookings, hotel bookings, apartment rentals, etc. That is a key strategic challenge for us.  How do we reclaim a share of that 70 euro from the non-organised travel market? 

 

The second major change has occurred in the way our suppliers—the hotels—are managing their prices. They’ve adopted more flexible pricing, to play into changes in demand more effectively. But our business is based on the wholesale purchasing of capacity for an entire season, which we subsequently resell via our e-commerce platforms, our call centres and our agent network. In other words, we work with longer-term contracts that are based on an entire season. We work with allotments; and fixed prices. The prices published in our brochures are fixed. But now we’re seeing that the hotels are beginning to ‘yield’ their prices during the season. Therefore, we need to adapt; we need to make the transition to more flexible pricing, a more flexible business, and we’re investing massively to do so. The point is to make sure that consumers still book with us, and to give our suppliers the opportunity to manage their prices within our system. This obviously has an impact on our IT systems but it also implies a new way of doing business, a new way of contracting with our suppliers.

 

The third major shift is in online sales. At present we have multi-channel sales strategy: we sell via our call centre, our travels centres and via the web. But it is the online channel that has grown significantly, and continues to grow. As a result, we’ve had to build multi-farm web portals for our main brands—Thomas Cook, Neckermann, etc. The back-end systems for these sites are tremendously complex: they process more than a million unique visits and thousands of transactions, and that across multiple portals, including those for the call center and retail outlets.  Finally, there is the emergence of social media. Again, we’re trying to think this through, incorporating Facebook, Twitter, user ratings of travel destinations, etc.

Our role is one of enabling. We ‘enable’ the company’s strategy. This is the opposite of being a pure utility or ‘butler’, where cost leadership is paramount. This means that we’re in constant dialogue with the business lines and that our programmes are all anchored on the company’s business strategy and managed via our balanced scorecard system. That’s a crucial point. But it also means that our IT organisation needs to handle a fair amount of complexity. We can’t work with simple divisions or even a matrix organisation; in fact, you could say that we’ve become a 3D organisation. We’ve needed to build an organisation that is highly flexible, that is based on self-steering teams and a real entrepreneurial spirit. The cultural aspect is critical here. Our people are given a lot of autonomy, but we expect them to understand the business and our strategy, and to work together well in teams, sharing information and skills. Hence the importance of the three Cs: culture, communication and competence. As CIO, that’s what I focus on. My job is to enable our people. We don’t have a lot of hierarchy here. Enabling is a cultural dimension.

 

Practically, our IT organisation is split in a demand and a supply side. The supply side is our IT factory, managed by the IT manager. That’s where the infrastructure is managed, and where the various IT components are built and managed. They need to ensure that quality is guarded, and that costs are optimized. They also work more with outsourcing.

 

On the demand side is the programme management office. It all starts with the strategic programmes that emerge from our strategic planning process. Our project managers, who work from within the business lines, begin the translation work to IT, from business components to processes, and ultimately to functional- and infrastructure architecture. And there’s a third layer in between the two—our Enterprise Architecture team—who make sure that the bigger picture makes sense: they define standards and ensure that the IT landscape is harmonized.

 

Both the supply side—the IT factory—and the demand side report to me. It is a complex setup but it is all managed formally using our strategic management system. Our strategy is executed via programmes and projects, and the whole lot is evaluated and tracked using KPIs. But the softer elements are equally critical here: defining what sort of culture we need; developing competencies; and communication off course.