Marc Jennings, CIO of analytics and AI, TUI
During his two-decade stint with vacation agency TUI, Marc Jennings, CIO of analytics and AI, has seen the corporate endure speedy transformation. Through a sequence of mergers and acquisitions, the German-headquartered agency has grown into one of the world’s largest journey and tourism companies.
The tempo of change has continued to extend over the previous two years, as know-how at TUI has transitioned according to the broader organisation and its shift from a agency that’s based mostly round native and regional techniques and departments to a world IT organisation. Jennings’ group-wide position covers all of the analytics and synthetic intelligence techniques, platforms and processes inside the group.
“The company has evolved dramatically over the last 20 years,” he says. “Throughout that journey, I’ve been lucky enough to work with some fantastic leaders who have guided me along the way. I have moved roles roughly every couple of years, so I’ve had new insights regularly and picked up lots of experience.”
Jennings joined TUI as an extract, rework, load developer. He progressed via a sequence of technical, administration and director-level positions earlier than assuming his present place in October 2021. He studies into TUI’s group CIO, Frank Rosenberger.
One of the large priorities in the course of the previous 12 months, says Jennings, has been rolling out some key functions that present the worldwide enterprise with pricing, yielding and consolidated knowledge held in Snowflake’s cloud-based know-how platform. This perception is used to supply key efficiency indicators (KPIs) to the board and data to the monetary markets.
Jennings says this data-led transformation is an enormous shift. The firm is transferring from a state of affairs the place particular person regional markets relied on database and reporting techniques working on-premise to a consolidated method that focuses on three core applied sciences. As properly as Snowflake, TUI’s knowledge stack contains Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud and Tableau for enterprise reporting.
“Our global transformation has begun and we have started delivering reporting solutions on time, to budget and to agreed service-level agreements,” he says. “Building the technology stack that we’ve chosen for the future of the business is certainly one of the key deliverables and successes that my team has had over the past year.”
Beyond that transformational work, Jennings says his crew has additionally “reinvigorated” TUI’s knowledge technique, which units out the data-led targets for the organisation via to 2025. “We are working through that and it’s a very much a journey,” he says.
“But you have to start to start somewhere and we’re very keen to get that initiative moving forwards. Our goal is to deliver truly data-driven decisions for the whole business. We have a plan and a roadmap to go and execute on that aim during the next three years.”
Selecting the suitable platforms
Jennings says there are a number of explanation why the enterprise selected to base its knowledge technique round Snowflake, AWS and Tableau. He says it’s straightforward to scale these cloud-based applied sciences, they can be utilized together to assist high-performing enterprise processes, and they’re simpler to assist, resulting in an affect on price administration.
Another key profit of the corporate’s shift to a three-pronged knowledge stack is functionality, he says – it may be powerful to search out staff with knowledgeable expertise in older techniques: “We have had challenges recruiting people for some of the legacy software that we used to rely on in terms of being able to use the software and go faster.”
While TUI has chosen to focus its knowledge stack on three core applied sciences, Jennings says you will need to state that it’s not a closed store. If different appropriate instruments enter the market, his crew will think about their potential advantages. However, the intention of specializing in a core vary of merchandise is to construct a steady platform for change.
“They are there for the long term,” he says. “We know the that price of migrating off an answer or having a product that you just don’t use very properly will be horrendous. I must proceed constructing a crew of individuals who can assist and develop functions, and who’re getting area information across the merchandise and the instruments they use.
“In the past, I’ve had people working all over the place, and we ended up with single points of failure where people move on and you can’t backfill that position. The tool stack I’ve created over the last 18 months has really enabled me to build a team that is fit for the future. It’s also a set of partners that work very well together – and that also really helps.”
Supporting smarter decision-making processes
As properly as his day-to-day tasks, Jennings says his precedence in the course of the subsequent 12 months is to hone the brand new capabilities that his crew are constructing throughout their strategic knowledge stack.
“That’s all about delivering great decisions to the business,” he says. “We have an announcement internally that claims, ‘no weasel words’. We attempt to keep away from – and I always hammer this dwelling to my crew – simply saying issues are slower or quicker, and as a substitute to make sure that they at all times present context for the change.
“So, that contextual information might be a percentage increase or decrease and it will relate to a KPI. We try and do this internally in my team, and then we are trying to educate the rest of the business to be able to do this as well. But to do this effectively, you need data.”
By having the ability to take advantage of of Tableau and different specialist knowledge applied sciences, Jennings hopes his crew can create a set of easy-to-use interfaces that allow different components of the enterprise to begin doing their very own knowledge evaluation work on a self-service foundation.
“That’s about asking, ‘How do we make this work easier for them, so that they can go and do things for themselves?’ We don’t want to be a bottleneck and neither should the technology be a bottleneck,” he says.
“Our goal is very much to work through and understand the tools, the techniques and the processes to establish self-service analysis in the business. Filling that gap between either end of the spectrum is our challenge. We want people at TUI to be able to be informed in the decisions they make.”
Keeping prices below management
Jennings says the outcome of the digital transformation programme thus far is that line-of-business staff now have entry to a spread of helpful companies that present a wealth of data. He says transferring from disparate and localised techniques to a consolidated date lake through the Snowflake Data Cloud means the enterprise could make extra knowledgeable selections.
“In the old world, when we were looking to update data and prices on the website, it used to take two hours,” he says. “If a booking was made, and we wanted to reflect the impact of that booking and make any price changes on the website, it would take in excess of two hours. Now it takes less than 20 minutes.”
Jennings recognises that creating an built-in knowledge stack does carry its challenges. IT leaders who should not cautious will see compute calls for spiral out of management in a short time. At TUI, data-led jobs can run for hours, so Jennings makes use of a twin method that focuses on communication and forecasts to maintain prices below management.
“Everything we do needs to be visible and communicated,” he says. “So, when you’re working a efficiency take a look at, ensure that its affect is assessed and communicated, so individuals are watching the way it takes place. That’s about offering the guide oversight, so everyone seems to be conscious of what is occurring.
“We also have built-in automated forecasts. So, we have modelled out our forecasts, we’ve set alerts and targets, we’ve built dashboards and reports, and we do that across all of our environments. This process means we know how much we should be spending in development. That has clearly taken a while to build up, but it’s critical to our success.”
The key message for different IT leaders who want to hold prices in test is to make sure the enterprise is aware of what knowledge processes it’s working via a sequence of guide and automated checks, says Jennings: “Understand what you’re doing, impact-assess it, set a target, measure it and optimise – that’s our approach.”
Adding tactical options to enterprise challenges
Jennings appears to be like again on the work his crew has achieved up to now few years and says that regardless of speedy progress, there may be nonetheless extra work to do. While the technological foundations are in place, he expects his crew to supply different technological options to the enterprise’s knowledge challenges.
As properly as Snowflake, AWS and Tableau, he expects to deploy different cloud-based companies when the time is correct. “We know they are not going to be the only tools we use as we build more sophisticated applications and insights,” he says.
One of the important thing issues that Jennings’ crew has discovered, nevertheless, is that any know-how buy should be accompanied by an intensive analysis course of. He says one of the issues his firm has suffered from up to now is a preconceived perception that off-the-shelf merchandise will probably be carried out and used simply and successfully. This is a standard downside for different IT leaders and Jennings says you will need to keep away from making hasty procurement selections.
“My advice is, don’t buy too many systems,” he says. “A salesman will come over and say, ‘This is going to be the latest and greatest thing’, but it often solves such a small challenge. And over time, your ability to be able to use it and support it effectively diminishes, and then you’ve got an overhead around your neck that you’ve got to carry.”
The intention, says Jennings, will probably be to search out applied sciences that complement the present stack, which generate perception and permit TUI’s staff to really feel extra assured concerning the selections they make. He provides: “The ability for us to source and consolidate information into one place gives us the ability to deliver new insights that we didn’t have before.”
