If the gauge of an IT leader is the business value he or she delivers to the organization, Stephen Tame hasn’t done badly. During his stint at IndiGo he has exploited a generation of competitive technologies like big data, analytics, IoT and mobility to keep IndiGo soaring high well into the future.
Tame landed at IndiGo in the summer of 2014. As the Chief Advisor IT & Chief Digital Officer, he had his work cut out for him: implement IT to catalyze business advantage and chart strategic direction. But that was not nearly enough.
As the digital custodian of the largest domestic low-cost carrier, he had to embark on a multidimensional effort to reengineer its core business applications to help digital permeate through them. Net result: creating business value through digital initiatives.
And Tame was undeniably the right man or the job. He had logged miles of experience in the airline industry, including a decade long stint with Jetstar Airways as its CIO, Head of Group Information Technology. This breadth of experience helps him weigh business objectives and apply innovative solutions to realize them.
That's no mean feat. IndiGo needs innovative technologies to keep up with its fast pace of growth. Since its inception in 2006, IndiGo has soared with speed. With a market share of 39.6 per cent, IndiGo has emerged as India’s fastest-growing carrier and the largest domestic passenger airline. It operates in 49 destinations including 8 international destinations and has a fleet of 155 aircraft.
Consider some figures. The low cost airline reported its 9th consecutive year of profitable operations in 2017. It has doubled its domestic market share in last 5 years from 20.3% in FY12 to 39.6% in FY17. The company witnessed a growth of 31.5% in its passengers during 2017, and a growth in capacity of 27.5%. The total revenue increased by 16.3%.
The scale of its ambitions can be gauged by the fact that IndiGo’s current throughput is close to 1,000 flights per day across 49 destinations (41 domestic and 8 international) carrying an estimated 4.4 million passengers every month. That explains why it is the largest domestic passenger airline and the fourth largest low-cost carrier in the world.
Technology is indeed IndiGo’s passport to profitability. In an interview with ETCIO.COM, Stephen Tame, Chief Advisor-IT & Chief Digital Officer, IndiGo reveals the digital route map that will help the low cost airline outfly its competitors.
Can you talk to us about the various ways in which you have shaped the digital strategy at IndiGo?
I work with business functions to see how we can execute IT capabilities, digital dexterity and the various processes for the website, mobile apps and digital marketing and operations.
There are two parts to digital transformation- external which is customer facing, digital marketing, customer outcome and internal digital transformation which is around employee productivity and operational efficiency.
One of the first activities we completed at IndiGo was the restructuring of the IT service delivery model. We sought out and engaged business partners as part of a sourcing strategy. It wasn’t outsourcing as a goal; it was building capability, quality of service delivery and scale that we needed to ensure we could deliver the business outcomes. We implemented an SMO, Service Management Office, to focus on how we can continuously improve our service delivery. Lastly internally we then focused in building the business technology services functions, to better engage and deliver to our business areas.
Over past two years, we have been building and delivering our digital marketing programs, based primarily on the Adobe digital marketing suite of tools. However, technology is only the enabler of any digital program; the true value is in developing the culture, teams and capability to be able to have the meaningful digital conversation with the customer. Once we have the tools and team we then need to be able to deliver this to our commercial, sales and customer services businesses The digital team needs to take on an additional responsibility to actually show the outcomes, to demonstrate the value and to educate the traditional non digital parts of the organisation on what can be done, on what is now possible. Lastly, though very important for the digital team is to agree to KPIs; sign up for the accountability and prove that meaningful digital conversation with customers is a profitable business activity.
To develop the roadmap for what our website and mobile application should look like, and what functions we should build we started with the traditional ideation process. We ran internal innovation workshops with a broad spectrum of IndiGo business team members we then surveyed five thousand customers and asked them; we got lot’s good ideas, though we remained concerned we were still limiting our thinking.
We asked our community, with our 6Eappsters program, we engaged the best and brightest minds across India. Offering at the time 5 prizes, first prize 100 IndiGo tickets anywhere to anywhere across India, we received amazing community inputs to drive our innovation programs. This is a strategy adopted today by many business, generally though they run what is commonly called hackathons, targeting developers; we were more interested the innovation ideas rather than development, so 6Eappsters was open to all community members with a great idea. In digital marketing content is king, to be able to deliver content, blogs, photo’s, videos to our social channels Facebook , Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc.. We need content, not advertisements, nor polished corporate content either; we needs culturally aligned community content.
Through our 6Eexplorer program, we looked for an explorer for every state and territory across India and then sent them on four-six journeys every year so that they can explore their state and other IndiGo destination to be able tell stories of their travel adventures in words, pictures and video that we can share with our customers. This year we have 30 6Eexplorers active across India generating content and telling great travel stories.