CASE STUDY passenger at the airport . Technology is important everywhere . It ' s really an opportunity to improve our industry and we are also using technology to reduce our carbon footprint and our impact on the planet . We have to become sustainable and technology will help us to achieve this .
What are some of the main challenges you face as a business and how does technology help to overcome these ?
The biggest challenge we face is that we are a global industry – we have to reach everybody in the world . We have to reach alignment between all the parties . For example , when we are talking about safety measures , we have to work with the civil aviation authorities in all the countries . And so , when you realise that we are representing about 290 airlines and about 150 countries , you can understand that requires a lot of advocacy .
We are a global organisation like ICAO or EASA in Europe , or the FAA in the US that are civil aviation authorities . But these organisations can only provide standards and best practices , so everything ends up at the nation level , which means that we have to deal with all the member states of ICAO . The diversity of our supply chain and the fact it ' s not only beyond the airline area of responsibility means we have to deal with airports , we have to deal with air traffic management systems , to give only two examples . The complexity and the spread of the players in the industry are really the challenge that we have to face , and technology is helping us in terms of communication and collaboration .
How do you manage change , such as that brought about by COVID-19 , and how does this enable you to improve in your role ?
The change is the essence of what we ' re doing . So , for example , when we introduced the electronic ticket 10 years ago , this is the standard that we are using to give you an electronic boarding pass on your mobile phone . It took us only six months to define the standard , but it took us nine years to implement it . We had to push the change across the industry and we had to make sure that every player was able to deal with the new standard .
60 INTELLIGENTCIO EUROPE www . intelligentcio . com