Stéphane Perrier, Head of Transformation Office, Secure Land Communications, tells Intelligent CIO about the company’s main IT achievements, utilising IT to enhance the customer experience and leveraging technology for business growth.
As part of Airbus, a global leader in aeronautics, space and related services, Secure Land Communications has established itself as an international player with customers in more than 80 countries served by around 1,150 employees in 17 countries.
As an Airbus Business Unit it offers advanced communication and collaboration solutions enabling its customers to gather, process and deploy intelligence.
Its portfolio is tailored to the needs of professionals from public safety and Transport, Utility and Industry (TUI) and it includes infrastructures, devices, applications and services based on Tetra, Tetrapol and Broadband technologies.
With an eye to talk about this rapidly expanding business Intelligent CIO, spoke to Stéphane Perrier, Secure Land Communications’ Head of Transformation Office, to find out more about the company’s development.
Could you provide some background details about your current position?
The Transformation Office of Secure Land Communications was created in January this year. The mission of my organisation is to drive people, processes and tools transformation through a wide set of digital initiatives.
The three main goals of these initiatives are to support business transformation, improve customer experience and promote digital culture.
What have been the main IT achievements of your organisation in the past year?
My organisation being only six-months old, it is a bit early to draw a long list of achievements: most of the digital projects are still under way, with a delivery planned in the second semester.
I can however mention two projects, one already completed and one in its last mile: a new portal for our channel partners, which has been operational since May, and an online store to sell our application Tactilon Agnet 500 in a Software-as-a-Service mode, with the first pilots being planned.
In what ways do you use IT to enhance the experience of your customers?
Customer experience is a top priority for Secure Land Communications, and it was the decisive factor when we had to prioritise the digital projects for this year.
In addition to the two projects mentioned above, which are both oriented towards our customers, three others aim even more directly at modernising customer experience: We are developing a web customer portal and an e-training platform, and are about to send our first surveys using a new customer feedback tool.
What are the main challenges of your current role?
In my opinion, the main challenge is to reshape our end-to-end processes in order to leverage the potential of digital technologies. It can take time, as it implies some deep analyses and a lot of transversal co-operation, but it is clearly the road to a successful transformation.
Another challenge is, of course, to choose the right priorities among the endless possibilities offered by digital technologies.
How is technology impacting your industry and how are you leveraging it for business growth?
The critical communication industry has entered in a transition phase from narrowband to broadband technology. While this transition will last long, as narrowband systems will be used for at least one more decade, the shift to data centric operational models has already started in both mission and business critical organisations.
With its state-of-the-art portfolio of narrowband, hybrid and broadband solutions, enhanced by a growing ecosystem of partners, Secure Land Communications offers a smooth migration path to its customers while bringing them new applications to benefit from the latest innovations.
How is your company developing the skills of its employees to progress their career?
Our Human Resources department has designed a comprehensive training and certification programme to make sure that our employees can develop the right competencies, for instance in IT integration, virtualisation, cloud, IoT, analytics or Artificial Intelligence.
We are putting a strong focus on this programme, as we consider our people as our first asset.
To implement your plans and strategy what kind of talent would you be looking for?
At Secure Land Communications, we are looking for all kinds of talents in all our sites: as we are engaged in a major transformation, we are permanently bringing on board new people with fresh ideas.
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