Andrey Ivashin, CIO, Dyninno Group, describes how he cultivates leadership within his IT team, ensures that IT strategies align with overall business goals and shares his vision for Digital Transformation.
How do you cultivate leadership within your IT team and foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation?
It’s about encouragement. First, we encourage people to take leadership by allowing them to make their own decisions and clearly defining the scope of their responsibilities. We outline what we expect and what they are responsible for, and then we let them define the target and how to reach it. Along the way, we support them and adjust if needed. If they struggle with making decisions or if a project is at a standstill, I get involved to understand what is going on and help them move forward by coaching and asking questions, so they start to think in another direction and find the answer.
Second, we encourage growth by creating an environment where people can make mistakes without fear and learn from those mistakes. For instance, we have postmortem practices after launching projects or completing complex maintenance. Even if everything went well, we hold a postmortem meeting where everyone involved exchanges opinions on how it went, what we can do better next time, and what procedures or expertise we might lack. This helps us move forward and improve.
Micromanagement is something I dislike with a passion; it stifles both learning and innovation and is impractical. If I need to resort to micromanagement, it’s a red flag indicating the person might not be suitable for their role. Micromanagement is also not scalable. Leaders should create a scalable structure where not all decisions are made by them. Some strategic decisions, of course, but operational decisions should be made without the CIO’s involvement. The CIO’s role is to define a vision and strategy and then keep track of moving accordingly.
How do you measure the success of your leadership and team development initiatives?
The main metric for me is the growth of people. This indicates we are creating the right kind of environment. By growth, I mean someone joining the company in a regular position, like a developer, then becoming a senior developer, and later moving into management or leadership. If this happens, our environment is good for people who want to grow here. If people leave because they don’t see opportunities for growth, then we are doing something wrong.
Another criterion is scalability. If we can support business growth by doing and achieving more with the same number of people, that’s another indicator of successful leadership, inspiring and maintaining a more effective workflow.
In most cases, when we promote someone, it’s because they showed leadership potential, not just management skills. There’s a difference between a manager and a leader. A manager co-ordinates people and workflows, but a leader defines strategy and encourages people to follow. People should trust leaders and want to follow them, which is not necessary for a manager. Leaders should have managerial skills, of course. But nonetheless: managers manage; leaders lead.
What are the key challenges in maintaining a balance between day-to-day IT operations and the pursuit of innovative projects, and how do you navigate these challenges within your team?
It’s a challenge to balance implementing new technologies with maintaining existing ones. And this is becoming harder since every day new technologies appear on the horizon, and IT people are naturally curious to try new things.
For example, Artificial Intelligence. It’s tempting to try applying Machine Learning everywhere, but we should always remind people of our main target and ask what problem exactly we aim to solve. Our group is now two decades old, so we still have some technologies from 20 years ago, including systems written 10-15 years ago. Some old systems inevitably create problems, while others work fine without issues. We change technologies gradually and focus on areas that really need innovation, rather than trying to fix something that is not broken just for the sake of innovation. Sometimes it’s tough to explain this to IT people. We remind them that we are not just a lab; we also don’t sell our technology – we use it to support the business. So we try to refocus their enthusiasm on areas where we need actual innovation.
How do you ensure that IT strategies align with overall business goals and contribute to the organisation’s success?
It is actually a rather straightforward process because annual IT strategies should always depend on business goals. We define key projects based on business goals, like profitability and opportunities for growth. In parallel, we continually optimise our IT expenses to be more profitable and invest in growth. Clear business goals reflect on IT activities – this keeps things practical.
It’s important to ensure this connection between business and IT. Sometimes there is a gap between them due to broken communication. Business people might approach IT with urgent requests without presenting the problem’s value or impact. It’s important to show the tangible end results of requests to maintain motivation – what value for customers it brings, how it helps the company grow, etc.; otherwise, it might lead to a lack of trust and support. We should act as a common organisation, not as a collection of departments with separate goals.
How do you foster a collaborative environment within your IT team, especially when integrating new technologies or methodologies?
If teams have common targets and values, they understand and support each other. In Trevolution, our travel-tech division, we are switching to project-oriented collaboration. We create virtual teams for key projects with people from different departments and teams working towards a single goal. This reduces communication and co-operation problems.
We organise teams around these projects with specific deadlines and milestones. People from different departments participate, collaborating through regular meetings. This approach is still in progress, but we recognised that the previous service-oriented collaboration model didn’t work.
What do you believe are the biggest challenges and opportunities for IT leaders in the evolving digital landscape?
First, avoid a hype-driven approach. Of course, currently there’s a lot of hype about AI. Some companies say they provide AI solutions when there is no AI at all. It looks attractive to potential customers and investors, but it’s AI-washing. A practical approach would be to recognise areas where existing tools are insufficient or too expensive, and then see if AI can solve those problems more efficiently. Companies shouldn’t adopt AI just because of hype. Developers often want to try new technologies just for the sake of it. This is hype-driven development, it should be limited – we allow people to research and experiment, but we always agree on the terms in advance: the time allocated for the first stage of the research and based on the results we define the next stage. By this more iterative approach we can spend our time and resources much more effectively.
Secondly, take cybersecurity seriously. As we digitalise, we become more vulnerable to attacks. It’s a never-ending story, but we must stay vigilant and protect our systems. Hacking-as-a-service is becoming more prominent and available on the Dark Web, increasing the probability of attacks. The attacks are growing both in scale and numbers, so it is and will remain an on-going challenge.
Can you share your vision for Digital Transformation within your organisation and how you plan to achieve it?
Our group is 20-years-old, so, as I mentioned, we need to automate and update outdated processes, as well as make sure the tech corresponds to our growing scale. For example, introducing self-service for our travel customers so they can get notifications about their itineraries and can manage their journeys by themself, reducing the work for our customer support.
Another example is using our own in-house AI for call quality assurance or implementing AI-driven answering machine detection for call handling in our call centres, avoiding unnecessary connections to agents that would be otherwise left on hold. In all cases, it saves valuable human hours. We optimised business routines with technology, improving efficiency and value. Automation and new technologies help us maintain quality and efficiency, and – at the end of the day – grow our business.
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