An enthusiasm for technology and a love of people aren’t always the most comfortable of bedfellows, but Tony Christodoulou is the exception that proves the rule. He believes that technology has a large and growing role to play in business and society but, at the same time, that it will only fulfil its potential if it’s designed for human use and creates value.
“You can have the latest in technology, but if it’s not adopted by your end-users, it’s worthless and can even set you back,” he says. “A big flaw in most project management methods is that they end once the change has been implemented, but that’s when the real work starts. Real success is not that you delivered a working solution, but that it’s being adopted, and you can measure the business benefits from its utilisation, and that means making sure your users can not only use it, but do – and achieve results.”
Christodoulou matriculated from Roosevelt High in Johannesburg, some years after Jeremy Ord, Doc Watson and Richard Came, the founders of Dimension Data, attended. He has always enjoyed tinkering with technology, and still vividly recalls his first computer – a Compaq Presario 5510; it’s no surprise to learn that he spends much of his spare time nowadays playing around with drones and has a virtual reality system at home.
Because he dislikes flying, the technology he most anticipates is teleportation.
“I’ve always been fascinated by technology, particularly its business application,” he says. Predictably enough, he thought his career would lie in developing software, but, in the end, he realised that he actually enjoyed the people side of technology more. He completed a Bachelor of Information Systems and a B.Com in Marketing at Bond University, in the days when it still had a Johannesburg campus.
“Systems can’t be seen in isolation; they have to be rooted in the business strategy.”
His first job was with Barclays in 2003 in the IT department, but he soon transferred into a project management role. He formed part of the team that undertook the integration of Barclays and Absa when the latter was acquired.
The next step was to complete an MBA at GIBS (2007-8). He has maintained close ties with the institution and has been a member of its adjunct faculty for several years, lecturing in execution strategy and all things digital.
Like many MBA graduates, he opened his own consultancy, but ended up working for Standard Bank where he was responsible for one of its signature programmes in the Corporate Investment Banking division. Nearly six years ago, a GIBS classmate, Marek Busfy, today the COO for the Africa Region at American Tower Corporation (ATC), persuaded him to join ATC as head of IT for South Africa. Today, Christodoulou is VP of IT and CIO for the EMEA region.
Opportunities
Initially, he confesses, he found it hard to leave a large bank for what seemed to be a relatively small company like ATC South Africa. But once he had grasped its global standing, he became convinced that it offered considerable opportunity for innovative use of technology. A Fortune Global 500 company, ATC is essentially a real-estate company that owns the towers or rooftop installations used by cellular network providers. The company is growing aggressively, and its share price has almost tripled since 2014. In EMEA, it has made numerous acquisitions in recent years and it is currently negotiating another big deal in Africa.
ATC’s strong growth, says Christodoulou, is driven by several factors. One is an irresistible value proposition for mobile network operators (MNOs); ATC towers are multi-tenanted, effectively providing a syndicated service that reduces costs and removes the need to invest in non-core infrastructure. ATC will acquire or lease existing towers from MNOs as well as erect its own.
A second, major growth driver is the fact that mobile networks are the backbone of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. ATC’s service is a crucial enabler of mobility’s exponential growth.
Smarter IT
Christodoulou’s fundamental belief in design for adoption underlies his approach as CIO. It all begins with the strategic alignment of IT with the business – he has been very active on moving IT from being an ‘order-taker’ and support function to being a strategic partner, thus from cost centre to profit enabler.
“Systems can’t be seen in isolation; they have to be rooted in the business strategy,” he argues. “The CIO has to become a change agent, a partner for the rest of the C-suite and a valuable business asset. The conversation has changed: it’s no longer about the technology, but about how to transform the business.”
The next piece of the puzzle is execution. He has put strategic squads in place to undertake this, comprised of both IT and business people. Each squad is associated with one of the business’ strategic pillars, and project proposals have to be endorsed by the pillar’s sponsor to eliminate what he calls ‘aimless execution’.
“It’s very easy to lose focus and just concentrate on implementing projects, especially when a company is growing as fast as we are,” he says.
Aligning IT projects with business strategy and making implementation a joint venture between IT and the business are key elements in ensuring IT is enabling the business. The other is ensuring ‘digital dexterity’ on the part of users – that is, the ability to use the technology to change the way they work. For the successful CIO, stakeholder management is critical.
Broadly speaking, Oracle’s suite of applications makes up some 70% of its environment. It uses a specialist software package, Siterra, for managing its tower infrastructure and project workflow, and Salesforce for CRM and, in due course, for network operating centre services. Christodoulou’s internal team is looking to build a business intelligence capability in-house, drawing on all source data applications, to support better decision-making in real-time. Mulesoft provides the essential integration platform capability that makes it easy and simple to collate data from disparate sources effectively.
Globally, too, ATC incentivises regional CEOs to use enterprise systems by covering the operating expenses – resulting in economies of s cale. This has the effect of making the IT environment much simpler, more agile, and also much cheaper: globally, ATC’s IT spend as a percentage of revenue is around 1.3%, substantially under the average of 3.28% (3.7% in telecommunications).
“We see total cost of ownership through the lens of enterprise value. By implementing the principles of smart architecture, and by engaging continuously with the business to standardise processes and harmonise systems, we can design simple solutions that are agile enough to cope with constant change,” he says. “And once you have your people using it, then everything else follows.”
This article was originally published in the March 2020 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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