Jochen Göttelmann

Jochen Göttelmann is the Chief Information Officer at Lufthansa Cargo. Over the past 18 months, Lufthansa has refreshed its existing infrastructure and applications significantly. “We’ve defined a clear data centre strategy and it will mean that every new project and application will be cloud native,” says Göttelmann. “The cloud strategy came just in time for the coronavirus pandemic. So we could seamlessly make our staff work from home with our cloud-based collaboration and communication platforms. On the business side our main focus remains on the modernisation of our sales applications and the implementation of new digital services to our clients.” End of last year the firm introduced a new dynamic pricing and has recently launched a smart booking APIs to increase the connectivity to their partner and customer network. The next big milestone will be a completely refreshed client-facing booking frontend in November. Göttelmann is also helping to renovate the internal sales systems like CRM and the pricing tools. “It’s clear our current priority lies with the sales side, however, we continue to invest in our other domains too. In handling, we got rid of our legacy host application already some years ago, and now have a state-of-the-art IT platform which is the base for customer oriented process innovations like eFreight or self-service terminals for our truckers, targeting for 100% paperless document flows. In addition, a completely new production planning system is introduced for the internal capacity planning, steering and monitoring in our Frankfurt freight hub. And last but not least we have migrated our analytics environment to the cloud and will also modernise our traditional BI and data warehouse over the next years to better support data-driven decisions. We still invest lots in IT and plan to continue that as we move forward as well.”

Göttelmann bases his leadership style around trust and affirms it's crucial to build a team-orientated environment. “Working successfully in a remote environment, you have to trust in people even more and measure the achievement of people by the completion of goals, not be counting work time,” he says. “We have started a transformation not only of our organisation and processes, but also of our working culture towards a DevOps model. We delegate as much responsibility as possible to the teams and the product owners instead of walking up and down the hierarchy ladder.” 

Aviation is one of the industries most heavily impacted by COVID-19. Nevertheless, Göttelmann remains positive to retain and attract competent people in his IT organisation. “The last months have again shown the importance of airfreight to keep up the global supply chains. Everybody in my team has also well understood his own contribution to help the company to overcome the crisis. The purpose of our job has rarely been clearer ever before. Despite the difficult outlook of the airline business I’m optimistic that Lufthansa Cargo continues to be perceived as an attractive employer for IT talents.”

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