Korean Air’s IT is like the invisible engine that keeps its aircraft in the sky. From reservations to air traffic communications, every service runs on tech systems operating behind the scenes. Here, CIO Heejung Choi details how the nation’s flagship carrier manages this vast ecosystem.
Korean Air CIO and managing VP Heejung Choi is quick to address a common misconception that the airline’s IT division is too conservative and lags behind tech trends, making it vulnerable to competition. But its partners and employees tell a different story, that the carrier effectively leverages current tech to create new value and strengthen its IT. “Through leadership transitions, we’ve become a younger, more dynamic organization,” she says.
The airline industry has always been closely tied to IT and, specifically, Korean Air launched the country’s first airline reservation system in 1974. But a long IT history doesn’t automatically translate into strong technological capabilities, considering decades of accumulated legacy systems. According to Choi, large full-service carriers have struggled against other industries in modernizing tech precisely because of the burden of legacy assets. But Korean Air has spent the past decade steadily investing in transformation, with a focus on modernizing. While consumers may have noticed improvements in the website or mobile app, the real work was in fundamentally overhauling the backend infrastructure.
The starting point was the cloud, but the decision to embark on full-scale cloud migration sparked intense internal debate. The central concern was stability. Moreover, existing cloud services couldn’t accommodate Korean Air’s massive legacy data. The right provider had to expand server capacity in Korea specifically to meet the airline’s needs.
“There had been partial cloud migrations before, but Korean Air was the first full-service carrier to move its entire suite of legacy systems to the cloud, including ERP, payroll, and core airline operations,” says Choi.
Despite internal concerns, Korean Air’s decision to embark on a large-scale, cloud-centric transformation was backed by a clear business strategy. As an airline that couldn’t remain confined to the Korean market, it had long needed to maintain close ties with global sales channels. So to efficiently manage and expand its complex international routes, it was essential to strengthen not only aviation service capabilities but also digital capabilities in order to stay viable.
Unique to the industry
The specialized IT environment of the airline industry also plays a major role. Airlines must continue supporting employees and providing services without disruption, even when faced with war, accidents, volcanic eruptions, or sudden changes in flight and immigration procedures due COVID-19 or SARS. Plus, each country operates different air traffic systems, IT environments, and internet infrastructures, which require robust systems that can function reliably under such unfavorable conditions.
Airlines must also defend against increasingly sophisticated security threats that endanger passenger safety and the protection of customer data. Ultimately, the clear conclusion was to respond flexibly and quickly to these multifaceted demands, and innovation had to start at the infrastructure level. Only then would further transformation be possible.
With such a dynamic environment to manage, Choi made sure to prioritize leadership support during transformation. “When an organization needs company-wide change, leadership backing is vital,” she says. “Our group chairman, president, CEO, and business division executives all showed an open attitude toward IT, which was a huge source of strength. We held many change management sessions with C-level executives to build consensus, and our teams approached the project with a positive mindset. That’s how we were able to complete it.”
Ironically, the Covid-19 pandemic created an opportunity as well. With flights and passenger numbers dropping to unprecedented lows, the burden of ensuring nonstop stability was eased. “The decision was made before Covid, but when the migration was completed, the pandemic was in full swing and air travel demand had plunged by 75%,” Choi says. “Paradoxically, the reduced traffic eased concerns about disruptions or downtime, allowing us to focus more fully on the cloud transition.”
Small steps, big gains
The three-year project started small and gradually scaled up. In practice, this meant building a minimum viable product first, using incremental wins to build confidence. Korean Air’s first step was a staff meal management app. By digitizing what had been a paper voucher system and rolling it out to more than 20,000 employees, the airline gained real-world experience in operating cloud systems, while simultaneously developing skills in SaaS and cloud technologies.
Korean Air has now gone beyond cloud adoption to pursue application modernization, customer data integration, AI projects, and predictive platform development. And this year, it launched technologies such as an AI Contact Center and a passenger data analytics platform. “At the start, we weren’t directly preparing for the AI era,” Choi says. “But because we already built a solid cloud foundation, we were able to continuously expand into a variety of technology projects afterward. For Korean Air, the cloud migration wasn’t just an infrastructure replacement, it became a critical inflection point that created new growth drivers, and even reshaped our organizational culture.”
From relying on to growing through outsourcing
Today under Choi, Korean Air’s IT strategy departmentoversees the airline’s entire digital transformation, covering infrastructure technologies such as cloud, networks, and devices, as well as applications, data, AI, and ML. Around 150 employees are organized into nine teams, executing dozens of projects of varying scale each year. Over time, both the size and goals of this organization have evolved.
With its long history of developing IT capabilities in-house, Korean Air’s IT division was much larger in the early 2000s than it is today, when Choi first joined the company. But as outsourcing became an industry-wide trend in the 2010s, the company reduced its internal workforce, citing the presence of IT resources within its affiliates. More recently, however, the company has been rebuilding its internal capabilities and expanding headcount — a shift that gained momentum with the company’s move to the cloud.
“Many external vendors that participated in our cloud projects were able to grow their technical expertise through Korean Air, but inside the company, the question of what do we have left for ourselves kept surfacing,” says Choi. “Our employees felt their IT capabilities remained at past levels. We also wondered whether vendor proposals were always the best solutions, and whether simply following their advice was the right approach. So we needed the ability to make our own judgments through investment in building in-house expertise and strengthening our capabilities.”
Based on this perspective, Korean Air has redefined its work with outsourcing and SaaS providers not as simple subcontracting, but as a springboard to develop internal technical strength. To institutionalize this approach, the airline established centers of excellence and an early adopter group.
These CoEs function as expert groups in specific technology domains, directly leading projects in partnership with external vendors while building hands-on experience. Employees undergo training in advance, then work with vendor teams, eventually growing into seed personnel who anchor expertise within the organization. “In technology organizations, a few exceptional people can exert tremendous influence,” Choi says. “A CoE plays a critical role in nurturing talented employees with potential into those influential contributors.”
Catalysts for change
CoE participants are selected through open applications or recommendations, and junior employees are actively included. “The CoE thrives when its members debate and collaborate on their own,” Choi says. “In terms of growth, openness, and proactivity, junior staff are often stronger, which is why we deliberately include them in the CoE.”
Meanwhile, the early adopter group has been instrumental in improving IT literacy and shaping the work culture alongside new technology adoption. For example, when Korean Air rolled out Google Workspace to shift operations to a cloud-based model, the company didn’t simply issue a directive saying to use this technology. Instead, it assembled a group of several hundred employees by selecting key personnel from service-user teams outside IT and naming them the early adopter group.
These members were tasked with spreading know-how within their teams, accelerating adoption, and serving as champions of change while also experiencing the sense of achievement that comes with driving transformation themselves. Thanks to this structure, Korean Air was able to foster a more agile and IT-friendly organizational culture.
Transforming employee experience with IT
A key technological outcome sparked by Korean Air’s cloud project was the launch of its business to employee (B2E) initiative.
According to Choi, the airline declared a new vision during its 50th anniversary in 2019 to become an airline truly loved by customers. At the time, leadership emphasized that employee satisfaction in the workplace directly translates into better customer service. This mindset led to changes such as relaxed dress codes and greater flexibility in working hours. In the same spirit, the B2E initiative was introduced.
“After the cloud migration, we took a closer look at our internal systems and realized just how little attention was paid to the employee experience,” Choi says. “Customers already live in a mobile-first era, but many of our internal systems were still stuck with client/server PC-based UIs.”
Korean Air quickly launched an application modernization project with the goal to align the employee experience with the customer experience. For the first time, UX experts were brought into the field to identify the IT needs employees had. One result of this effort was the redesigned employee ticketing service. Previously, service suffered from inconvenient payment processes, outdated interfaces, and a lack of integration with the airline’s customer-facing mobile app. But through the B2E project, the new system was rebuilt as a fully integrated mobile app, dramatically improving usability. Employees can now also participate in satisfaction surveys and propose improvement ideas, just like customers.
This project became a case study of how improving the IT experience for employees not only boosted workplace efficiency but elevated the overall quality of customer service.
A clear sense of leadership
Choi emphasizes attitude first and natural ability in a distant second. Today, she extends that same principle to relationships with external partners. Korean Air collaborates with more than 500 partner personnel, and she believes that completing the airline’s IT environment would be impossible without them. “Partners are colleagues working for Korean Air as well,” she says. “Whether senior or junior, everyone should approach partners and customers with the mindset that they represent Korean Air.”
Her perspective has also shifted since stepping into the CIO role last year. “When I was a team member, my own growth and goals mattered most,” she adds. “But as CIO, I see things I couldn’t see before. Naturally, I focus less on individual performance and more on understanding the company’s organizational direction, and aligning goals and execution strategies accordingly. The leadership of those who guided me has been instrumental in bringing me to where I am today.”
To build a healthy organizational culture, hiring good talent isn’t enough either. CIOs must ensure that core employees are given opportunities to grow and drive internal change. “I’m always thinking about how to give our people more opportunities to gain experience,” she says. “I want to help them feel they’re growing through new challenges.”
