Tech-Exec 18 - Thibaud Figueroa Brochure

THIBAUD FIGUEROA FLYING HIGH DATA

DSNA’S THIBAUD FIGUEROA DISCUSSES THE EVER-TRANSFORMATIONAL JOURNEY OF THE FRENCH AVIATION INDUSTRY.

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P H O T O: M AT T H E W S M I T H

However, he admits it’s an incredibly dataintensive activity and since the beginning of air traffic control, “we always dealt with data, but mainly in real-time, highly critical systems”.

He explains that to get an idea of what they were dealing with, you can compare it to what pilots have in the cockpit, and data being locked in those systems.

Figueroa says that when he began working at DSNA as CDO in 2020, the first mission was to be able to get the data outside of those systems, and the other one was more cultural.

“My colleagues, especially those from a technical background, would say ‘you’re not going to tell us what data is, because we’ve always dealt with it,’” he says.

“We wanted to make them understand that data was an asset, not just a subcomponent of a system: it’s something that must flow around different systems. Indeed, we are system-

centric, and my goal is to make us a little bit more data-centric,” Figueroa declares.

He oversees the data office of the organisation, and the data transformation plan. “We started to work on a data strategy because we had some business units which were pioneering data usage outside the operational context. And that started in the mid-2010s..

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It is said that the airplane is the closest thing to real magic that we have, and for Thibaud Figueroa, CDO at DSNA, the French air navigation service provider, he wants the same feeling for air traffic control.

“We wanted to have a more global approach for data governance, protection, and policy.

We are a French public administration in France, so we have some open data regulation, too,” he says DSNA began the global approach from this angle of attack of data governance. Then, “because we wanted to have some global overview of the performance of the organisation, which was very basic – the dashboards, etcetera – we began working on the global scope of data like people do in the industry. And in our organisation, we obviously have a lot of engineers and technicians – for them, data is about technical issues.

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“To me, it’s an organisational topic,” Figueroa says.

And when it comes to data, if you want it to be of good quality, he says you need to have data stewardship. “And if you want good use cases of that data, you need some strong business ownership,” Figueroa states.

“Implementing it at scale is a very step-by-step thing because you take one use case, and you go back to the data needed to deliver it.

Then you try to find who the data owner is and ensure the use case has a good level of business ownership,” he adds.

Figueroa says when it comes to taking responsibility with data, it’s much more complicated. “People are very fond of

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designing a new dashboard but they don’t really care if data quality is good or not.

They just want their beautiful dashboard; they want it to be shown to their boss.

“The problem is if you really want to have good data quality across the organisation, you must allocate responsibility. That’s very difficult because people don’t really want to take responsibility of data, they just want to create a brand new dashboard,” he reckons.

“No organisation needs hundreds of dashboards or data science models if they are fed with data quality. The more you have dashboards, the more you destroy value.

“You will have the same KPI in several dashboards calculated differently,

P H O T O: R O S S PA R M LY

For him, the key of being a CDO is that you need to “always create some frameworks and metaphors to explain your job, otherwise people don’t get you,” admitting that when he started at DSNA, he hired someone to market him and oversee communication. “It’s funny, but it’s what was needed.”

Figueroa says this is because the job is highly transformational and it’s very common to face difficulties, like “some kind of territory or border difficulties with IT and the tech in general when you drive data transformations.

So, if you don’t have a good sponsoring, you can’t succeed,” he says. And the main objective for a CDO, in his opinion, is obtaining and maintaining sponsors.

“People are very fond of designing a new dashboard and they don’t care if data quality is good or not.

They just want their beautiful dashboard.”

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and then you have no source of truth,” Figueroa declares.

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P H O T O: L E IO M C L A R E N

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“We’re trying to create some consistency step by step, to make data flow consistently across platforms. But for the time being, that’s it, because we don’t believe in a big bang, like buying a huge, brand new modern data stack,” Figueroa says.

And to be an effective CDO, for him, data is all about organisation and change management, “so you need to communicate a lot, you need to make people understand what you’re doing. However, as I feel I don’t have all the quality needed, the main issue I’m facing is that I’m not communicating enough,” Figueroa admits.

“It’s tricky at the beginning. You ask people to work on data quality and from their

“We don’t believe in a big bang, like buying a huge, brand new modern data stack.”

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So, DSNA created a data office, a central entity, designed as a competence and service centre, to capitalise on activities of DSNA’s leading teams and rationalise, mutualise, and then modernise if needed. “The idea is to make the entire organisation, or at least the people involved in data in some way, to gravitate around it,” he says, adding that it takes a lot of communication, acculturations, and change management.

perspective, you make them lose time.

But from a global perspective, the organisation is not losing time when it’s working on data quality.

“You should be able to orchestrate roles between business and IT. You must be the middleman, and it’s very complicated, not only for CDOs, but for data teams in general,” he says.

“As a leader, I try to give them the big picture and purpose, so they have full responsibility to follow it. The problem is when you are creating something from scratch, especially when you are creating a data office, you must streamline things.

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“For some specific topics, it’s totally the opposite than giving the big picture. It’s just like saying, ‘Okay, this is a red line, you need to respect this.’

“And from time to time, it’s very frustrating for teams because generally you say to them, ‘I’m just leading by purpose. I’m giving you the global picture and goal, and you manage yourself.’ But sometimes you must draw a line.

“It’s not easy to find balance because you are managing things that are under construction. When you are building things, it’s a little bit more complicated to lead only by purpose, as it must be constructed one way only,” Figueroa declares.

Environmental performance is a key driver for transformation; how the team assesses impacts of air traffic control, like CO2 emissions. Safety and airspace capacity performance, or flow management, are other classical drivers.

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When he started his job as DSNA in 2020, as well as taking on the ever-transformational strategy, another starting point was societal expectation regarding the environment. “People, especially those living around airports, want full transparency about planes flying above their heads, annoying them, and disturbing them during the night. They are very demanding regarding transparency of data,” Figueroa explains, adding that France has been a little bit more advanced regarding open data regulations since the 2010s. One of DSNA’s pioneer business units specialised in managing mass data use – “basically our environmental office responsible for dealing with those topics,” he quips.

P H O T O: S A F W A N M A H M U

Another newer driver Figueroa tries to follow is defining and having good quality data, defining single sources of truth. “We had some difficulties when I started at DSNA because there were no data policies.

We didn’t know what we were able to do with that data.

Were we able to share it with that partner? Do we have to keep it in a safe? At some point, it was complicated for the teams to perform because they were in some kind of blur,” so Figueroa ensured he worked on that as it was a “blind spot. At the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021, I was reaching the ceiling of what I was able to do this way.

“So, I started work on sponsorship of data transformation,” he says, and launched a more ambitious data transformation plan, which included the 14 3

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creation of the data office. The tricky part about creating this kind of strategy is the value and impact of it, which seems to be challenged by top management at some point “as they feel it costs a lot. It’s very complicated to make the value real to them,” Figueroa explains.

Creating value from data is as well related to how you can partner. “With some people, you give them your data, they create value, and then you share value,” he says. “If you don’t have this state of mind, then you keep your data in a safe in your organisation, and you don’t create any value from it. So, we improved securing our partnerships based on data sharing.”

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The teams are currently working with Cloudera and on a data catalogue designed by a French startup, DataGalaxy. “We are also working with Elasticsearch on a solution mainly about exploring some data – it is very powerful and useful, especially for operational use cases. Regarding BI and business intelligence, we use Qlik. And generally, regarding data pipelines and some data storage, we use some open-source solutions as well as non-commercial.

“And we have tech partner Gartner for help with transformation, acculturation, and insights. In some ways it replaces consulting, which is very expensive and not always very efficient,” Figueroa states.

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“When you buy consulting, you get some kind of intelligence or frameworks and some capacity to do things. Realistically, most consulting firms we worked with were overselling their capacity to provide efficient frameworks. They were making you pay for a tailored design framework that wasn’t very useful,” he reckons.

Figueroa believes that what will be useful is the team’s development of reference tools which contain good data quality to help DSNA. “We are mutualising, rationalising tools, technical platforms, etcetera.

“Regarding those tools, we capitalise on platforms operated directly by some business units, on a best effort basis.

Now what we want to do is capitalise on what those business units did. We want to especially improve the service level agreement of those tools and platforms. So, this is a huge part of what we are doing today and what we want to do in the next month.

“Related to that, we need to provide better visibility about what we are doing.

So communicate, communicate, communicate.

That’s been my main learning in my data transformation journey,” Figueroa concludes.

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