Emirates Group, comprising the global businesses of Emirates airline and dnata, the air services provider, today unveiled its plans to undertake an enterprise-wide transformation initiative aimed at placing data at the heart of the organization, re-inventing business processes using smart technology and underpinning decisions with big data and real-time analytics. The goal is to transform Emirates and dnata into the leading customer-centric, technology enabled travel experience enterprises.

This enterprise-wide transformation strategy will see benefits cascade every area of business from customer experience, to commercial, to several back-office functions.

“While this initiative will have profound benefits across all business units, our end goal is to intelligently redefine the customer experience by developing a personal bond with individual customers at a scale which has never been achieved before in the history of the service industry,” said Sir Tim Clark, President of Emirates Airline.

“For this to work, we need to drive cross functional change across the entire company and this latest transformation strategy will help lay the foundation we require. We’ll be boldly examining new technologies and ideas to identify the opportunities they represent for both incremental improvement and disruptive change in our business model.

Big data, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, crowd sourcing and collaboration are areas we’re considering to help us establish an architecture of continuous innovation and re-invention.”

In order to execute on this transformation, the Emirates Group is establishing a centralised Enterprise Change Management team that will be headed by a seasoned senior executive with the mandate, resources and funding to drive this long term strategic change across the organization.

“The unique skills that we’re looking for to head this team and overall initiative will involve an extensive global search for the best candidates,” added Sir Tim. “We require someone with an extreme outcome and delivery orientation. This individual will be a proven leader with extensive experience in large scale enterprise transformations and be a true and passionate believer in the power of technology to shape business strategy.”