Comair CIO Avsharn Bachoo has a quiet determination about him and a leadership style that drives change and provides a clear path for his team to follow.

The focus of this episode is digital transformation. Where others seem only to be talking about it, Bachoo has enabled transformation at Comair, collapsing on-premises data centers, building a common cloud platform to dynamically spin up or down workloads to cater for customer requirements, and keeping the team invested in the change process.

Bachoo touches on making mistakes as a first mover and how that is managed in his context of risk management in a cloud architecture. “Get the applicable workloads into the cloud, then you can start optimising for performance; soon your cloud will outperform on-premises legacy.” But there are lessons to learn…

The transformation strategy was adopted to provide agility and enable responsiveness to customer needs, and Bachoo is quick to point out that unless the customer is central to the change there will be no benefit to them. “Customers are digital and mobile friendly, so our channels need to enable that,” he says.

Bachoo is clearly passionate about his team and company, giving great insight into the world of a CIO in the airline industry. He also reminds us that, when allowed, it’s safe to fly!

Enjoy the discussion!