Finnair Approach to Data as an Asset

Part of a recent scan of how companies are looking at data as an asset

Finnair Unlocks the Business Value of Data with Data Catalog
by Ron Powell in b-eye Network

This article is based on a podcast Ron Powell conducted with Minna Karha, Head of Data for Finnair, where she is responsible for enabling her business units to maximize the full potential of their data assets. Prior to Finnair, Minna held positions in BI, data management, analytics and data warehousing.  Ron is an independent analyst and industry expert for the BeyeNetwork and executive producer of The World Transformed Fast Forward Series. His focus is on business intelligence, analytics, big data and data warehousing.

Minna, Finnair is the largest airline in Finland and has been consistently recognized as one of the safest airlines in the world. Let’s begin by having you tell us more about Finnair?

Minna Karha: Finnair was established in 1923, so we will soon celebrate our 100th year of operations. We also are the national carrier of Finland and one of the world’s longest operating airlines. For the tenth consecutive year, Finnair has been selected by Skytrax at the World Airline Awards event as Northern Europe’s Best Airline, which makes us very proud.

Currently we carry more than 13 million passengers annually and have 6,300 employees. We have 19 destinations in Asia, 18 in the Americas and more than 100 in Europe. We are also a member of the One World Alliance.

What is your role at Finnair?

Minna Karha: My role is to help our units maximize the full potential of our data assets. The starting point, of course, is to understand that data in a modern business world is currency. We need to understand and manage the value of our data assets. This will enable us to unlock the business value of our data, thereby allowing us to continuously increase customer satisfaction. This means, of course, providing tools and best practices and also building the mind-set on new roles within the organization.

I realize that your goal is to become a data-savvy, data-driven organization. To do that, everyone must have access to relevant data. Also, the data literacy rate within your organization must be high. What initiatives have you put in place for people and processes to support your vision?

Minna Karha: Two years ago we started by establishing the role of Head of Data. That was when I joined Finnair. One of my first things was to get to know the organization and understand which roles and skills were lacking. I needed to determine what kind of team I should build to support the already existing organization and be a steward of the roles already in our company. So we ended up building a data solutions development team. We hired data engineers, data architects and data asset product owners. All of these roles were completely new to the company. Also, close cooperation with our analytics and data scientist teams is extremely critical. My data solutions development team is focusing on being a task force that can help different teams of different maturity levels in different situations use data and analytics. We try to help each team when they need help. Sometimes they need more help accessing the data so the data engineering team comes in to help. Sometimes they need more help in data utilization or understanding the inventory or just help to use already existing tools and dashboards, for example. Not only have we added these roles, but we have also started to build a tool. We are currently building a modern data platform that enables collaborative data and analytics work, supporting both machine learning and real-time analytics. .... "