Sam Charmand, the CIO of Qantas Loyalty, has learned the valueof going after innovation – and has seen first-hand how the development oftechnology (including personalisation) has the power to dramatically change abusiness.Over the past 12 months,Qantas Loyalty has continued to grow and diversify into new areas with thelaunch of its first own-brand credit card – Qantas Premier – and the QantasMoney app, and the addition of life insurance to its suite of Qantas Assureinsurance products, supported by the Qantas Assure app.“Innovation and technologyhas underpinned Qantas Loyalty’s diversification and new ventures, whileinvestment has continued in the core coalition loyalty business (the QantasFrequent Flyer program and Qantas Business Rewards) and adjacent businesses(such as the prepaid travel money card – Qantas Cash),” Charmand says.In 2017, he articulated anew ‘ecosystem’ business model to reflect the evolution of the Qantas Loyaltybrand from a Frequent Flyer program to a lifestyle brand with nearly 12 millionmembers all with different interests.“I managed the technologyportfolio that supported this evolution and developed a modern, modular andscalable technology stack that has enhanced consumer and partner propositions.”With a focus on coretechnology values, he says he scaled the organisation to support these enhancedbusiness and technical capabilities, while holistically adopting cloudinfrastructure, hosted platforms, service enablement, and bespoke build inchannels for differentiation through UX, personalisation and contextualexperiences.TopachievementsOver the last year, Charmandhas made significant inroads in transforming the organisation to a digitalentity as continued to lead the replacement of an aging and legacy coreplatform.Rather than a “big-bang”replacement, he advocated and planned a piece by piece migration, with eachstep balancing the mitigation of identified business risks, with the ultimateobjective of modernising the platform and eliminating enterprise technologydebt.Meanwhile, Charmand wasalso instrumental in the delivery of the Qantas Premier credit card andcompanion app, Qantas Money’s first product.“Qantas Money is anentirely cloud based platform, stitching together AWS applications andinfrastructure, partner data services, and bespoke innovative channels led bythe Qantas Money mobile app,” he says.Charmand led the technologydelivery for this venture, which he says is at the forefront of cyber security,compliant with industry standards and audit attestations.“The venture was deliveredwithin time and on budget, and with the required quality and rigour ofoperations practices to support a fully-fledged financial services business,”he says.“Collectively, theseprojects help strengthen the foundations of what is now a digital business thatneeds to be able to compete and differentiate itself in the age of consumertechnology.”From an operationalperspective, he set about ensuring the technology organisation is in place tosupport program delivery and growth. As an example, within the technologyfunction, he set up and grew a technical engineering and operations function,scaling with partnerships, but with centralised thought leadership.And with these and otherprojects under his belt, Charmand says he has been able to champion cloudtechnology with AWS, workplace productivity through Google, position and frameboth AI and personalisation, and lead the development of the Qantas Group datastrategy.Powerof personalisationCharmand says 2017 has beensignificant in that he adopted an innovative mindset, and was formally chargedwith driving the innovation portfolio for the business.Charmand, in concert withthe innovation team, helped design and implement the AI-driven personalisationalgorithms supporting ‘The Hub.’“This team is responsiblefor driving the next wave of Qantas Loyalty’s growth, leveraging newtechnologies, new business models, and considering strategic advantaged assetsto attack and compete in new industries,” he says.As such, he sponsored ‘TheHub’ project, aimed at bringing Frequent Flyer member features and personalisedcommunications into a multi-channel architecture, to be consumed throughQantas’ online channels – first stop, the enhanced Qantas App.“The app introduced andconsolidates a host of member features, such as points activity, a newstatus credits widget aimed at eliminating member confusion on what it takes toretain tier status, and the ‘feed’ of personalised content among others. These featuresare backed by a powerful and innovative AI engine, marketing content interface,programmable triggers and consumable services – which the team will soonleverage to deploy these features into the sky through inflight-wifi in thevery near future,” he says.“The introduction ofpersonalised and contextual communication channels (such as The Hub), used topromote Qantas, partners and associated businesses, is a key engagement toolfor our vast and diverse member base. The Hub allows Qantas to add value tomembers even when they’re not flying with us, ensuring brand presence andopportunities to inspire for future travel.”The uniqueness isdriven by the data driven personalisation algorithms, the content, as well asthe channel experience, which is not found in any competitor airline or loyaltyapplication.”Trustyour gutAnd while Charmand haslearnt a thing or two from a range of tech projects, he emphasises that some ofhis biggest lessons learned in his time as CIO is to listen to your own voice andbe firm in your convictions: “Trust your instinct, and don’t be afraid to makehard and/or unpopular decisions.”He says his biggestachievement is in creating a technology organisation that has not only enabled,but driven the growth of the Loyalty business.“Having commenced with asmall number of committed generalists, we went about building a wholly ownedspecialist team with class-leading data, digital and software engineeringcapability. A significant milestone was the recent achievement of ISO27001certification for our new Qantas Money venture, which is testament to thepractices we have in place.”Asked what it takes to be a‘modern-CIO’ Charmand says today’s IT leaders need to be key drivers of valuecreation for their organisations.“To achieve this, they musthave both influence and credibility, garnered through strong engagement withtheir executive peers, strategic nous and advocacy for the customer, theability to make incisive decisions swiftly and deliver results, whilst buildingscaleable technology capabilities that create advantaged assets. In thisendeavour, CIOs need to ‘think big, start small, and pivot often’“CIOs also need to beastutely aware of cyber security requirements, and be at the forefront ofmanaging threats and controls in alignment with risks. This is distinct fromprevious eras where the CIO was focused on ‘keeping the lights on’, desktop andnetwork infrastructure, and managing costs down. This led to conservativetechnology leadership which tended to be inert and change resistant, oralternatively bogged down in process over results.”Jennifer O’Brien