ICT Visionaries Dive Deeper in Part 3

Johan OttossonVice President StrategyArelion

“An objective for the next year is to improve problem and incident management quality. This is a team effort, including a new network operations center, refining customer support processes and a centralized IT project innovating new inventory and service impact analysis systems to empower teams with a shared understanding of the same data. Collapsing silos is a journey, but we are definitely progressing.”

Topic: Supply Chain Problems – Still?

Arelion strives to define what a world-class experience in global connectivity looks like. Our research shows that transparency is critical—especially as the industry (including Arelion) suffers from supply chain disruptions. We are working hard to deliver with the short lead times that our customers expect. On the IP side, we’re less affected, thanks to our logistics and inventory setup. But we still see lead times of 12 months for certain gear. We must be proactive about our stock, placing upfront CPE orders to ensure availability for customers. Transmission is more challenging, with two-year lead times delaying ongoing projects to light new US routes. But we do have some advantageous tools. As early investors in open optics, we offer optimized connectivity through open line systems using transponders from multiple vendors, building on gear with the shortest lead times. We must be creative, sometimes redesigning solutions while keeping a tight loop with our customers to help them execute critical projects.

Topic: Network Automation

We automate network planning, capacity, forecasting, and risk management using tools like Cisco’s WAE, open-source traffic forecasting and custom-built BI tools. This ensures we meet capacity demands without technical planning and financial overhead hindrances. We also automate network security. We were one of the first to offer Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) that protects the Internet’s routing infrastructure through automated validation. We strive to help customers use DDoS auto-mitigation by further automating service activation, mitigation requests and real-time blackholing functionality that drops malicious traffic securely.

Topic: Silos

As part of our rebranding, we engaged stakeholders to define our core values. We set company-wide objectives to align on goals, reward collaboration and ensure internal transparency. A year back, we implemented Objective and Key Results (OKR) cycles, pioneered by companies like Google and Intel. These collapse operational silos across internal focus areas and enhance collaboration between our teams. By focusing on tangible results, OKR creates a common focus and “drumbeat” for execution, providing our teams with the same transparency we offer our customers. An objective for the next year is to improve problem and incident management quality. This is a team effort, including a new network operations center, refining customer support processes and a centralized IT project innovating new inventory and service impact analysis systems to empower teams with a shared understanding of the same data. This requires sales input on customer pain points. Collapsing silos is a journey, but we are definitely progressing.

BIOGRAPHY: Johan’s career is founded on two things: curiosity and exploration. As an experienced strategist and manager, he led the development of growth strategies, M&A, and long-term corporate strategic planning across various industries, before zeroing in on communications and technology. He believes that a firm commitment to innovation is the key to staying competitive. Experience has taught him that innovation is not defined by organizational charts and that many of the best ideas come from those working with customers or engineering the network. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jottosson/

Formerly Telia Carrier, Arelion is a leading light in global connectivity services. We’ve been keeping the world connected since 1993 and today our global IP backbone, AS1299, is ranked number one in the world. Our network spans Europe, North America, and Asia with 70,000 km of optical fiber and 1,700 MPLS endpoints. Our award-winning customer service team supports our expansive customer base, who rely on us for their business-critical services. Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/arelion and Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArelionCompany. www.arelion.com

Brooks FitzsimmonsConsumer Ecosystem HealthAT&T

“This often requires employing “soft power” to help balance the cost pressures of the technology shops and the revenue, cost, and growth pressures of the business units. The key to yielding that power is empathy: spending more time in “RX” mode (listening) than “TX” mode (telling). This will let your business partners be more involved and engaged in the outcomes you’re developing with them.”

Topic: Silos

Much of my career has been spent at the intersection of technology and business. This often requires employing “soft power” to help balance the cost pressures of the technology shops and the revenue, cost, and growth pressures of the business units. The key to yielding that power is empathy: spending more time in “RX” mode (listening) than “TX” mode (telling). This will let your business partners be more involved and engaged in the outcomes you’re developing with them. Get out in the field and into the centers; join their business planning meetings; and talk with their customers. More times than not, you’ll jointly craft a solution of elegant simplicity or targeted impact.

Topic: Retaining and Retraining Top Talent

Macroeconomic conditions continue to keep this top of mind. Having a deliberate labor strategy that contemplates the dynamic ecosystem, (contractors, MSPs, interns, mid-career transitions, and deep technical/business expert practitioners) is critical to a firm’s success. External partners can “lean in” to impart new/novel competencies on employees, while still being rewarded for new or “transitional’' engagements. For new or mid-career transition employees, I’ve found that being forthcoming with context and your time through “office hours” has borne fruit in terms of resource productivity, talent retention, and creative solutioning. Finally, our company has evolved their compensation approaches to remain market competitive with salaries, employ long-term compensation to incentivize multi-year strategic thinking, AND monthly/quarterly bonuses for in-year results.

Topic: Honesty

I’ve been listening to Deepak Chopra’s book, Abundance, and the question posed reminds me of the abundance mindset. Dr. Chopra said, “Good luck is opportunity meeting preparedness.” Put simply, you and your teams could be plowing forward with grit, gumption, perseverance, and diligence, but if you can’t lift your collective heads up to be mindful and receptive to the opportunities around you, you’ll miss them. I’ve encountered this a lot in my transformation roles. Oftentimes there is abundant “fuel” for change, including technologies, engineering talent, and customer needs, but lacking the “spark” of mindful receptiveness, those coincident opportunities could remain dormant. Net, net, be ready for those “luck” or “coincidence” moments, so you may manifest them into “good luck” and “fortuitous coincidence” successes.

BIOGRAPHY: Brooks leads the Ecosystem Governance Team accountable for examining and optimizing the end-to-end health of their sales and service support ecosystems, working across organizations to develop a comprehensive understanding of vulnerabilities and opportunities. He will lead the coordination and prioritization efforts to ensure end-users—both internal and external—are receiving an optimal experience. His team is driving site reliability engineering (SRE) for the consumer ecosystem. Follow Brooks on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tbfitzsimmons.

Kevin TusingApplication EngineerClearfield

“Throughout my career, some of the best engineers, managers, directors, officers, and executives have been those with the drive to be the best, who sought to absorb knowledge from others, and who retained it. Some who have also stood out as exceptional had little or no formal higher education yet were the best I ever had the privilege to work under.”

Topic: My Take

To retain our highly skilled workforce, we need to expand their promotional opportunities. As a result of taking for granted those outstanding workers with experience who know how to erect towers, place hardened facilities, engineer, troubleshoot, splice, install, and repair all the different type of builds, we are seeing a mass exit of knowledge, as they feel as though there is no occupational growth. Instead, people who have a degree, yet no industry experience, are getting hired above them.

Throughout my career, some of the best engineers, managers, directors, officers, and executives have been those with the drive to be the best, who sought to absorb knowledge from others, and who retained it. Some who have also stood out as exceptional had little or no formal higher education yet were the best I ever had the privilege to work under. Generally, those who came from the field got the respect of the employees under them, they knew how to speak the language and relate to what the technicians were saying. In the military, it was about being a team and relying on the person next to you. We need to focus on building true teams from within our companies. By retaining a highly skilled workforce with all their on-the-job certifications, this will help make and keep our companies successful.

Topic: Scaling Fiber

With a deficiency in highly skilled industry labor and consumers demanding more bandwidth along with record-breaking requests for service, scaling timelines are getting shorter. Our secret for assisting customers in accelerating their builds with minimal skill levels is presenting a true plug-and-play solution. Furthermore, our solution allows for a speedier restoration time, reducing their operational cost in the future. This approach reduces the need for highly skilled laborers along with decreasing the scaling time drastically. Our goal is to get customers out of the business-as-usual mentality to make these builds become a reality…faster.

Topic: Honesty

I believe my career success grew due to a mixture of perseverance, grit, and a bit of luck. Sticking to your gut feeling and taking chances while not knowing the outcome played a big part in getting me where I am today. As well as having a passion for the job, I am always focused on the long-term goal despite the minor setbacks that I am faced with. Lastly, in this small industry where everyone knows everyone, success works best when you stick to the facts and avoid the temptation to embellish your accomplishments.

BIOGRAPHY: As a Clearfield application engineer, Kevin Tusing leverages his extensive experience in network design, OSP engineering, communication technology, fiber optic systems and field operations. Prior to joining Clearfield, he spent over 2 decades in the US Air Force and ANG as a Senior Non-Commissioned Officer leading teams in various telecommunication engineering and installations around the world. Kevin also spent 15 years at Cincinnati Bell telephone working as a cable splicer and then manager.

When it comes to distribution, consolidation, management and protection of fiber, nothing comes close to Clearfield’s streamlined, practical approach. With labor lite technologies and products designed for scalable deployment, craft-friendly operation and unsurpassed performance, Clearfield innovates to reduce your pre-engineering and skilled labor requirements while delivering the lowest total cost of ownership.

Whether you’re delivering fiber-to-the-business, home, or cell site, Clearfield has the flexibility to deploy the product platform for your entire range of applications. www.SeeClearfield.com

Ryan KorteSenior Director, Product ManagementLumen

“…we decided we needed to coordinate time across our team of a few hundred people for upskilling. The end result is that we blocked, via a calendar invite from the leadership team, the same 2-hour time slot each week across the entire team for upskilling. The feedback so far is that most employees have more consistently been able to plan for and use this time to learn new technologies and skills due to the coordinated time.”

Topic: Network Automation

I transitioned from 20+ years of being a part of the Technology Architecture team to lead our Cloud Connect product at the start of 2022 because I believe the use of automation is extremely important in this industry. For Lumen’s Cloud Connect product, the key differentiator is our automation to deliver Network as a Service on demand. We have initially enabled this for our Ethernet and VPN connectivity to Cloud service providers and the goal is to fully automate our standard Ethernet and VPN services for any location to an on-demand capability within the next 18 months.

Topic: Retaining and Retraining Top Talent

We got feedback from within our team that individuals were blocking time that worked for them on their calendars to upskill, but that time would frequently be booked over by others, including the leadership team, and as a result, the time they planned was constantly disrupted. As a result of the feedback, we decided we needed to coordinate time across our team of a few hundred people for upskilling. The end result is that we blocked, via a calendar invite from the leadership team, the same 2-hour time slot each week across the entire team for upskilling. The feedback so far is that most employees have more consistently been able to plan for and use this time to learn new technologies and skills due to the coordinated time.

Topic: Honesty

I think my success, and most others success, comes from perseverance toward a goal. At the start of my career, perseverance meant learning a skill and working through the method to achieve the goal. However, perseverance as I have grown in my career has evolved to using my contacts, within and external to the company, to connect others to meet the final goal. I’m guessing that luck, whether that is being in the right place or at the right time, is involved in success as well, but luck alone is not enough.

BIOGRAPHY: Ryan Korte has more than 26 years of experience in developing and managing advanced fiber-optic network and systems architecture for both Fortune 500 enterprise companies and nationwide telecommunications carriers. In Ryan’s current position, he and his team are responsible for the Lumen Cloud Connect product with connections to all major cloud service providers, 2,200+ public and private data centers, and over 160,000 fiber-enabled on-net buildings.

Learn more about Lumen’s network, edge cloud, security, communication and collaboration solutions and our purpose to further human progress through technology at news.lumen.com, LinkedIn: /lumentechnologies, Twitter: @lumentechco, Facebook: /lumentechnologies, Instagram: @lumentechnologies and YouTube: /lumentechnologies. Lumen and Lumen Technologies are registered trademarks of Lumen Technologies, LLC in the United States. Lumen Technologies, LLC is a wholly-owned affiliate of CenturyLink, Inc. www.lumen.com

“One problem/challenge I’m passionate about solving for the ICT Industry is digitizing outside plant construction management. The immediate goal is near automation for capture of production, in-field construction changes, hard surface disturbances/restoration, and quality control.”

Topic: Supply Chain Problems – Still?

Industry leaders fully expect supply chain concerns will continue and the companies that know how to deal with them will be the most successful. What we have learned at TDS Telecom is that alignment between our internal teams and external supply chain partners is critical. Providing and managing to an accurate long-term forecast has helped to ensure availability to our construction partners.

Topic: My Take

In order to move forward in the ICT Industry, we have to find ways to speed up construction while not impacting quality and effectiveness. TDS Telecom is passionate about digitizing outside plant construction management. The immediate goal is near automation for capture of production, in-field construction changes, hard surface disturbances/restoration, and quality control. Of course, it is easier said than done but this type of management will be instrumental to successful fiber builds, which not only is better for the company and our future success but also the communities we serve will be happier with the efficient build and our responsiveness to any problems that may arise.

Topic: Silos

In order to reach business milestones, it’s essential to identify issues that may be impeding success—and removing silos may be one of them. What we have found at TDS Telecom is that it’s critical to leverage competitive energy by creating shared goals. Having common end state objectives and key results tend to drive collaboration and naturally tear down silos. It’s important to have frequent communications about progress on achieving these goals and an analysis on whether there are issues that can be addressed across the business and not just one problem at a time.

BIOGRAPHY: Wade has been with TDS Telecom for nearly 30 years, beginning as a network technician. He currently oversees the successful deployment of fiber-to-the-home in out-of-territory markets. He provides leadership to internal outside plant construction, route acquisition, and colocation teams, as well as 4,000+ external contracted resources supporting builds in 40+ municipalities across 5 states. He earned a Bachelor of Business Management and an MBA from Herzing College and his associate degree from the Wisconsin School of Electronics.

TDS Telecom, headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, employs 3,000 people and is a subsidiary of Telephone and Data Systems, Inc. (NYSE: TDS), a Fortune 1000^® company. Founded in 1969, Telephone and Data Systems provides wireless, broadband, video, and voice, as well as hosted and managed services to approximately 6 million connections nationwide through its businesses: UScellular, TDS Telecom, and OneNeck IT Solutions. www.tdsinc.com and www.tdstelecom.com

“…any effective, long-term collaboration is built on a foundation of trust that they will conduct business ethically, but also be empowered to work directly and accountably with our customers as a direct extension of our team. We want partners aligned with our values and principles, especially in the areas of corporate responsibility and ESG practices.”

Topic: My Take

I would challenge our industry to maintain the entrepreneurial spirit needed to stay innovative in a world of emerging technology applications. The broadcast industry is a perfect example. Traditionally, major broadcasts have been delivered through dedicated connectivity—proven, but also expensive and complicated.

The Internet has emerged as a reliable, high-quality, and cost-effective option—for last-mile delivery or end-to-end broadcast workflows. Our Internet Delivery Network (IDN) matches a network technology to a market need. The cloud-based platform transports high-quality video content and live broadcast streams to registered endpoints across shared networks like the public Internet. Broadcasters can produce and deliver content from anywhere, while avoiding the costs and logistics associated with fixed connectivity and on-site production.

Customized network options—deployed as a standalone model or combined with other distribution methods—are the future, for broadcasters or any organization with diverse audience and delivery requirements.

Topic: Vendor Collaboration

I encourage open collaboration and third-party partnerships, however achieving those successfully requires a mix of organizational dynamics.

Partners need to have the right expertise, resources, and skills. But more important, any effective, long-term collaboration is built on a foundation of trust that they will conduct business ethically, but also be empowered to work directly and accountably with our customers as a direct extension of our team. We want partners aligned with our values and principles, especially in the areas of corporate responsibility and environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices. Yes, efficient operations are important but so are service to our communities and a commitment to the planet. 

We also look for diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is important to us that we have an internal team and partner network that are representative and as diverse as the customers we serve all over the world. Vendor collaborations are key to success for us and our customers, and the organizations we partner with must demonstrate and reflect our values every day to the industry.

Topic: Your Forecast for 2023

We’re seeing the growing importance of network flexibility and stability, allowing professionals to connect to the type of network best suited to their needs, while scaling up or down as bandwidth fluctuates.

Many remote regions, typically served by low- to middle-grade networks, will soon need higher-capacity infrastructures—whether it’s through LEO satellites, subsidized rural broadband, capital-intensive projects (like Telstra’s inter-city project in Australia*) or any combination. 

Seamlessly extending network connectivity options to underserved areas requires both strategic investments and collaboration among telcos, satellite operators and carriers. The recent announcement between Starlink and T-Mobile for remote connectivity is one example of the “shared service” partnerships we’ll see more of into 2023 and beyond.

Single-technology solutions are quickly giving way to an amalgamation of satellite, broadband, 5G or fixed line. It's no longer “either/or,” it's “both” or “many”.

*https://exchange.telstra.com.au/how-were-building-the-fibre-network-of-the-future/

BIOGRAPHY: Noah is responsible for sales, business operations, further expanding Telstra’s portfolio of technology solutions, continuing to accelerate strategic partnerships, and leading the company’s future direction within the region. He has a successful background in telecommunications leadership with diverse experience in the international communications space, building best-in-class performing teams, and aggressively scaling in high growth environments.

Telstra’s heritage is proudly Australian with over 70 years’ experience of helping international businesses connect. They operate in every major market and have an unparalleled network and presence in Australia and Asia Pacific. Follow Telstra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/telstra-enterprise and Twitter: https://twitter.com/TelstraEnt. www.telstra.com/americas

“When you structure your organization around a common mission, you naturally break through silos to accomplish your objective. Each team member should understand the organization’s North Star and how they contribute to it. It’s also important to instill a culture of collaboration within the organization. Each member should feel empowered to work outside of their group to help accomplish the organization’s goals.”

Topic: Silos

When you structure your organization around a common mission, you naturally break through silos to accomplish your objective. Each team member should understand the organization’s North Star and how they contribute to it.

It’s also important to instill a culture of collaboration within the organization. Each member should feel empowered to work outside of their group to help accomplish the organization’s goals.

Topic: Vendor Collaboration

Vendors are an extension of our business and are essential to our success. We are always excited to work with vendors that have the knowledge and ability to develop world-class solutions and are invested in our mutual success.

Beyond fulfilling your promise and delivering the services agreed on, we also expect a high level of integrity and ethics of all our vendors.

Verizon maintains high standards for our vendors and requires them to adhere to a strict set of guidelines.

Topic: Balance

Your physical and mental health are everything. Understanding what a healthy work/life balance is for you is essential. It’s up to each employee to establish boundaries for themselves and that differs based on the person.

Climbing the corporate ladder by sacrificing yourself, your family and friends is not sustainable. The first thing you need to do is recognize what provides you that balance. For some it’s long weekends, some need a week, and others need two weeks.

I know a lot of people that it literally takes them days to unplug and start enjoying their time off. I know others that find the stress of returning to a mound of work makes the idea of taking 2 weeks unthinkable. There is no magic solution for everyone. We are all unique with different needs and tolerances. Once you know what you need to reenergize, to come back to the office without feeling you compromised other parts of your life, you have found your balance. 

BIOGRAPHY: The Network Assurance team is accountable for the reliability, performance, and security of Verizon’s Wireless network. Mary’s team of experts monitor and manage the various networks and applications that are the foundation for Verizon Wireless’s consumer and business services. More specifically, the team is responsible for managing the Verizon Wireless radio access, transport / IP networks and customer experience. Contact Mary at [email protected] and follow her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maryfiocco.