Case Study 81 Air France/KLM Airlines

Air France/KLM Airlines, headquartered in the Netherlands, is one of the world's leading international airlines. In 2019, they reported that during the previous fiscal year they carried 101.4 million passengers and had staff totaling 41,180.ⁱ The challenging business environment since the 9/11 terrorist attacks has caused many airlines to transform their operations, and Air France/KLM's story of repeated transformation is quite revealing.

In 2004, after KLM's merger with Air France, the CEO appointed Boet Kreiken as the new CIO. The CEO decided to make a structural break from the past in hiring Kreiken, who was from the operations area, clearly outside of IT. Three priorities included examining outsourcing IT, creating a board of business and IT representatives, and fashioning a process for governance of IT that is shared between the IT function and business units.

The result of the ensuing efforts over several years was to create four levels of committee governance: An executive committee kept an eye on matching the business strategy with IT strategies; A business/IT board, which was composed of the CEO, CIO, and all business unit executive vice presidents, was formed to manage the portfolio and budget; an IT management team worked on tactical planning for the business/IT board; and finally, the CIO/information services management team planned and managed IT operations. Air France/KLM also established a set of key principles and practices and developed a standard business case template that had to be used whenever requesting an investment greater than 150,000 euros.

Air France/KLM experienced five benefits attributed to the governance structure: reduced IT costs per kilometer flown, increased capacity for IT innovation, better alignment of investments to business goals, increased trust between functional units and the IT organization, and a mindset of the value of IT. In 2017, Kreiken moved on to become Executive VP of Customer Experience at KLM.ⁱⁱ

JeanChristophe Lalanne is the newest CIO of Air France/KLM. Lalanne appears to have had some influence from Kreiken's interest in customer experience, as he tries relentlessly to promote customer intimacy. The watchword is "digital transformation," which Lalanne says will help "manage the customer journey from door to door." Digitization now receives the highest priority from the executive board.ⁱⁱⁱ

Lalanne provided surprising detail about business case drivers, costs, and benefits in Air France/KLM's 400 million euro bid for digital transformation. For instance, providing 40,000 tablets for cabin crew and ground staff has a cost of 12 million euros, with projected benefits totaling more than 39 million euros. Benefits include revenue increases of over 35 million euros from sales of ancillary goods and services and paid upgrades. The tablets are projected to provide an employee reduction of 280 fulltime equivalent personnel as well as cost decreases of 4 million euros. Those cost decreases include providing online manuals and making lounge access and flight changes more efficient. Other projects include adopting new Human Resources (HR) selfservice software and moving toward paperless and realtime cargo processes, costing another 17 million euros but resulting in over 29 million euros of advantage.^iv

Those projects show how business cases for IT investments can show significant returns, in spite of the size of those investments. By undertaking a threestep process, Lalanne is showing movement toward extending KLM's business model, to complement its products and services to great advantage. The goals are to understand customers better, to provide greater value over their lifetimes, to optimize their journeys, and to reach customers everywhere. To accomplish that vision, KLM sees IT as central to the firm's mission.

Question:

Use one paragraph describing why the change in the Business/IT Maturity level occurred from 2000 to 2017