Organised by Interpromedya, ICT Summit NOW’13 brought together the IT professionals and business people with the motto ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing!’ during its 13th year.

Turkey’s leading global brand in the airport operations sector, TAV Airports was at the summit held at Haliç Congress Centre. TAV IT Services General Manager Binnur Onaran and TAV Airports Corporate Communications Director Bengi Vargul shared their experiences at the different panels took place as part of the summit.

‘Creating a competent human resource in IT is everyone’s responsibility’

Guleryuz Onaran spoke during the panel titled ‘Do You Have Sufficient and Competent Human Resource in the IT Sector for Mega Projects?’ organised by TUBIDER.

Starting her speech by expressing the transformation from an industrial society into an IT society, Guleryuz Onaran said: "The global aviation today is a large and rapidly growing sector involving 20,000 commercial aircraft, five billion passengers and 2,000 commercial airports and airlines. As of 2012, TAV IT Services, a main player in such a large sector, offers 20 different companies and 22 airports in three continents local and global airport solutions by analysing the data received from many channels and addressing them under a single roof. Making our business partners and passengers happy in a sector with such large numerical values is our primary mission.

"We can tell that there is a very big system and team working in the background for us to be able to complete this mission. Thanks to our competent and fully equipped human resource, we are able to achieve all these and ensure that the system works completely, on time and regularly. Creating a qualified human resource for the IT sector and gaining them to the country’s economy should be everyone’s responsibility from the education system and non-governmental organisations to the local authorities and private sector."

‘We listen to what others say about us and get involved in the conversation’

Speaking during the panel titled ‘Crisis in Social Media and Perception Management’, Bengi Vargul stated that social media offers an important opportunity in order to follow the passenger expectations at airports, which is considered as social living areas, and develop solutions.

Vargul continued "As TAV Airports, we regard passenger satisfaction as the focal point of all our operations. We have an active place in the social media which we see as one of the main channels to communicate with our passengers. According to our follow-up reports, we see an average of 5,000 messages a day in the social media involving the word ‘airport’ and over 3,500 contents on the web. Whilst such data clearly indicates to us what is talked about our brand, it also enables us to see the initial signals of any potential crisis. Today, everyone has a real-time access to information and differentiates the facts from mispresentations.

Therefore, being a necessity instead of trying to sell, and ‘either being as you appear to be or appearing as you really are’ is becoming more and more important for brands. Becoming influential in the social media depends on generating contents that people can relate to and communicating them correctly.

Being connected all the time requires social skills and intelligence. Services, products and solutions that generate multipurpose and multilayer networks which are related to each other stand out amongst others. As a ‘smart’ brand that focuses on innovation, TAV Airports adjusted itself to this evolution and therefore develops practices and services that create added value for our stakeholders. What lies behind the ‘adjustment to change’ is continuous communication"