‘We’re in the process of commissioning a world-class data center to cater to our consumer and enterprise businesses’

The onus to run the IT team of country’s second largest telecom company lies with Anthony Thomas, Chief Information Officer, Vodafone India. In an interview with Voice&Data, he elaborates on the latest IT deployments, moves to make data more insightful and the key challenges.

Voice&Data: The Year 2014 saw four big trends—cloud, big data, social, and mobility changing the ICT landscape, what’s your outlook for 2015?

Anthony Thomas: Year 2014 saw an increased momentum in adoption of new technologies. Amongst the emerging technologies, Social Media, Mobility, Analytics, and Cloud (SMAC) led the pack and gained maximum traction in market. These new technologies showed ways to tackle ever changing, hyper competitive and complex market ecosystem. The new technology adoption became all the more important for telcos as the telecom sector in India is currently driving and witnessing a radical shift in market dynamics. Consumer expectations are growing with each passing day. The strategic focus has moved from customer relation management to customer experience management. Telcos are now in the path to be more agile in their approach. So, to increase strategic agility and manage such big shift changes, improving customer experience and optimizing revenue margins and costs, telcos in India are fast embracing new emerging technologies.

Vodafone India being a customer centric organization took large strides in adoption of new technologies in 2014. We implemented ‘big data’ in one of our major circles taking analytics of structured and unstructured data to the next level. We have also embarked upon the journey to create a robust Cloud Computing stack to foster innovation, enhance productivity, and garner operational efficiency. We have many initiatives that will enable us to harness the power of Social and Media to further our capabilities and customer experience.

Like 2014, organizations would keep on investing heavily on new upcoming technologies to create market differentiation in 2015 as well.

Voice&Data: In today’s hyper-competitive telecom market, how are the CIOs helping their companies to remain ahead on the growth curve?

Anthony Thomas: Gone are the days of looking at technology as a cost center and managing it as such. Today, technology is not just a necessity, or an enabler, but a key driver for the organization. The mindset has now shifted to be proactive, innovative and agile, not just cost effective. Today, telcos need to proactively put themselves in customer’s shoes and come up with offerings that meet customer’s ever-changing demands.

All solutions have to be from a customer centric view, from outside versus inside based on technology constraints. We must also leverage their customer insights more effectively and offer what the customer needs with speed. Of course, CIOs have to manage all this within the cost constraints. The aspiration to take a leap and beat the competition is making telcos more and more dependent on their IT capabilities. CIOs are working towards reaching customers in new ways, making the data contextual and insightful, bringing innovative bundled offerings in the market and easing customer experience at all touch points. All this is helping operators to manage brand perception, customer experience and improving their revenue margins.

Voice&Data: What are your IT adoption plans or initiatives and how much have you budgeted for the same?

Anthony Thomas: In the years to come, we plan to invest significantly in cloud computing, big data, analytics, information security and resilency. We are in the process of commissioning a new world-class data center that will cater to our consumer and enterprise businesses. We are going through a technology refresh to make our IT stack more nimble, capable and cost effective to operate. We plan to take our customer experience to next levels through a new CRM system, re-engineer customer facing processes and improve our retail experience, leveraging the might of technology. We have just launched brand new M-Pesa system that has market leading experience and capabilities. We plan to further enhance that to enable faster adoption of mobile money. We also plan to invest in core telco capabilities as new billing system, improved electronic bill capabilities, converged billing, etc.

Voice&Data: What outcome are you expecting with such deployments?

Anthony Thomas: The above initiatives shall ensure that our customers have the best-in-class experience, that we are competitive in the marketplace and will significantly lower our product offerings’ cost and time-to-market ability. The initiatives like digital acquisition will not only help activating customers faster but also simplify a large number of backend customer management processes. The additional investments in information security and resiliency will help us build capability to keep our business protected and run during disasters owing to distributed kind of architecture that we plan to adopt.

Voice&Data: From a telecom perspective, how are the needs of the CIOs changing from time-to-time?

Anthony Thomas: For telcos, the operating ecosystem of today is a far cry from what it used to be a decade ago, and will be radically different from the one we know today. What we know though is that it will get even more complex, requiring tremendously fast response to ever increasing consumer needs. This ever-transforming landscape is also continuously changing CIOs focal points.

To mention some of the big shifts that happened; today abundant availability of affordable smartphones, consumer friendly mobile applications, and fast uptake of data services has shifted the focus of telcos from voice to data.

Similarly, telcos have moved from managing customer relation to managing customer experience. Delivering bundled and innovative user-friendly products has become the norm to remain competitive. Telcos today are more than a telephone company. In addition to the mobile and fixed line capabilities, telcos offer payment capabilities, enterprise capabilities such as cloud and machine-to-machine connectivity, among others. So, telcos today are a true end-to-end services organization. For such big shifts or changes to happen, IT has been the primary enabler.

IT teams today manage communication records, browsing sessions, social media information, sensor networks, web logs, whose size, variety, velocity, and complexity is beyond the ability of commonly-used software tools to efficiently capture, manage, and process the data. Further, billing process has undergone a paradigm shift to accommodate accurate data billing. Not only this, there are flurry of other initiatives that CIOs are focusing on to tackle the ever changing market dynamics.

Further, particularly in the telecom industry the lines between IT and Networking domains are blurring fast and tending more towards IT. This will bring in additional responsibilities that a CIO will have to focus on. Also, as we leap frog into the future the organizations are moving towards digital era driving growth by converting traditional analog business into digital ones there by bringing in paradigm shift in the CIO roles. Some organizations could adopt CDO (Chief Digital Officer) who will focus on driving digital strategy for the organization.

Voice&Data: Being the CIO of India’s second largest telecom firm, what are your biggest challenges?

Anthony Thomas: The biggest challenges are: Create a culture of innovation and customer experience in all parts of the organization.

Create a future fit IT strategy, by diverting spends from ‘keeping lights on’ to transforming the business.

Bring in path breaking innovations to help business and consumers.

With advent of new technologies like big data, cloud, there is shortage of right skillset in market. Balance data accessibility with security.

Keeping the IT estate lean and mean including proper data management and application portfolio management.

Voice&Data: What are the cultural shifts that you are noticing in today’s ICT world? How are you managing the change with these shifts?

Anthony Thomas: Over the last decade, telecom sector in India has undergone a sea change. Customer acquisition centric approach is a thing of the past. All strategies are now being built around customer retention and experience management. Telcos are constantly on a look out to improve customer experience by proactively reaching out to them and trying to engage more effectively. This has made operators heavily dependent on their IT capabilities.

Our motto is to exceed customer satisfaction and achieve customer delight. This is what distinguishes us from our competitors and gives us headway in terms of brand perception in minds of customers.

On BYOD policy…We have implemented BYOD for mobile devices and we have established Mobile Device Management (MDM) capabilities to facilitate that. We also have Applications on your Own Device (AYOD), where relevant applications have been made available to the field force agents to enable faster provisioning of services to customer. We are also in the process of enabling other critical applications like leave management system, SAP and even our trouble ticket management system on handheld devices.

Voice&Data: What are the key focus areas of a CIO?

Anthony Thomas: The key focus areas for CIO would be:

Building a world-class team: IT is ever changing and we need the smartest and the brightest minds to keep it ahead of the curve. So, finding the right talent, grooming them, and providing them the right environment to be effective is a key priority for any CIO.

Take IT from Engine Room to Reception: IT is beyond a back office function today and CIOs will have to be at the front and center in business conversations, not only in providing enabling capabilities and support, but leading strategically and providing additional revenue opportunities leveraging the Digital capabilities and SMAC. This will require a culture shift not only in IT, but across the organization and see the CIOs as the Chief Digital Officers as well.

Innovation: Innovation would be the key differentiator for operators in time to come. CIOs today are looking for implementation of path breaking ideas that have the potential to change the way organizations operate. The focus should be shifted to smaller, high value solutions that provide results sooner rather than long-term transformation programs that take years to yield results.

Adoption of new technologies: Year 2014 saw uptake of Social Media, Mobility, Analytics, and Cloud (SMAC). Extending this trend, adoption of new technologies would be a key focus area on 2015. In this pursuit, the CIOs are also considering more and more open source technologies which not only help lower the overall IT spend intensities but also provide equal or even better performances provided by traditional OEM-based technologies.