About Sebastien Louyot
CIO of Altavia
Sébastien Louyot has led two IT transformations in radically different contexts: Doctolib during its post-COVID hypergrowth, and Altavia as it transitioned its business model. Here, he shares his convictions openly, including those that challenge conventional thinking.
“The IT department that validates everything is doomed,” says Sébastien Louyot, CIO of Altavia
By Hubadviser, exclusive interview
Most CIOs ask themselves whether their IT organization is “performing well.” You approach it differently.
You were CIO at Doctolib, then at Altavia, two very different environments. Did you apply the same playbook ?
No. And that is probably the most important lesson I have learned.
At Doctolib, IT had to support unpredictable hypergrowth, amplified by COVID. The challenge was scaling up capacity: resilience, scalability, operational performance. There was funding, record-breaking fundraising rounds, to support that transformation. IT had to follow a trajectory we did not fully control, but one driven by the business.
At Altavia, it is a completely different story. It is a legacy company moving into new business models, data, CRM, and new services, without stopping its historical activities. And without the same financial comfort. The trade-offs are far more complex: transform, yes, but also maintain. And maintaining is expensive.
I could have made the mistake of replicating what worked at Doctolib. That is a real temptation after a success. It would have made me irrelevant within six months.
The CIO role is not standardized. It is contextual. The key skill is not technical. It is the ability to read a situation, adjust posture, and manage different transformation rhythms.
We hear a lot about “IT transformation.” But what does it actually mean in practice ?
Let me be direct about something that frustrates me: transforming IT is not about changing the org chart.
You can reshuffle an organization on paper, move boxes around, rename teams, create new departments, and change nothing in reality. I have seen “transformations” that amounted to three months of presentations and a new org chart. Six months later, nothing had changed.
A real transformation is a shift in the operating model. It happens simultaneously across three dimensions:
Organization: clear roles, the right balance between governance and execution, end-to-end accountability.
Culture: autonomy, high standards, transparency. A high-performing IT organization is one where teams are accountable, not just executing. This is the hardest dimension to change, and the most critical.
Methods and tools: clear roadmaps, incremental transformation, explicit trade-offs.
Changing structure without changing culture and decision-making does not produce lasting impact. Yet it remains the most common mistake.
AI is everywhere in the conversation. Is it a real transformation driver for IT, or just hype?
It depends on the business. If AI is elevated to a strategic priority at the highest level of the company, then yes, IT must transform, and for a deeper reason.
AI is challenging IT’s historical monopoly over technology delivery. Business teams can now design, test, and deploy solutions without systematically going through IT. That is a reality.
Faced with this, I see two types of CIOs. The first tries to regain control, block, and centralize. It is instinctive, and it is a losing approach. The second repositions itself as the architect of the framework, setting the rules of the game and ensuring overall coherence. That posture gains influence.
AI is pushing IT from a producer role to one of regulator, integrator, and guardian of overall coherence. Many CIOs understand this intellectually. Few have truly embedded it into the way they operate.
And I want to stress one point: an IT organization that is technologically behind cannot lead AI transformation. If IT has not modernized its own practices, it has no legitimacy on the subject. And IT cannot drive AI transformation alone. It is a company-wide initiative, not an IT project.
What profiles become critical in this new environment?
CIOs need people who can handle complexity, not just technology.
Key roles include Enterprise Architects to maintain overall coherence in a decentralized environment, data and AI platform leaders to industrialize without centralizing usage, profiles focused on governance, security, and AI compliance, and managers capable of orchestrating internal ecosystems, especially around citizen developers.
IT is becoming a capability platform, not a project factory.
You had up to 70% external consultants in your teams. That is a figure that can raise concerns. How did you handle it?
By explaining it, owning it, and managing it. Not by hiding it.
In a context of deep transformation, it is almost impossible to have all the required skills in-house. Transformation requires speed on highly specialized topics such as data, cybersecurity, ERP, architecture, and change management. These are capabilities that IT does not always have internally, or not at the right level of maturity.
But two principles are non-negotiable for me.
The first is knowledge transfer. External consultants must train and upskill internal teams. If this is not an explicit condition from the start, it is not a partnership, it is a dependency.
The second is a clear internalization roadmap. An IT organization cannot sustainably operate in the long term with a majority of external resources. It is neither economically viable nor healthy in terms of ownership and control.
External support is a temporary accelerator, not a long-term crutch.
What is now definitely obsolete in the CIO role, in your view?
The IT organization that validates everything, centralizes everything, and slows everything down is doomed.
A CIO focused solely on technology, without a deep understanding of business challenges, has lost legitimacy.
In the age of AI, the value of the CIO lies in the ability to arbitrate, structure, and secure, not to execute everything.
A final piece of advice for a CIO looking to transform their organization?
Two inseparable elements.
First, leadership. Clearly explain where you are going, why you are going there, why it matters, and what values you stand for. Without a clear narrative, there is no enthusiasm. Without enthusiasm, no buy-in. And without buy-in, no real transformation, only surface-level reorganization.
Second, an operating model. Organization, governance, methods, and processes, all aligned with the overall vision.
Without this IT Operating Model, transformation remains theoretical.
And theory does not transform IT.
