Twenty-nine years from rating rules to the merged operator's systems

Mandate

Put the two companies' customers, products and networks onto one set of business and operational support systems, and close the duplicates without harming customers or the merger's business case.

Outcomes

• Moved 1.01 million mobile accounts onto the convergent billing platform in sixteen waves; the last left the old mobile platform in March 2026.
• Introduced full first-bill comparison after the third wave; 2,140 of 912,000 first bills were held and 530 corrected before issue.
• Switched off 71 of 158 inherited applications by September 2026, saving €19.6m a year in licences, hosting and support.
• Created 138 in-house billing and rating roles; tariff lead time fell from 41 to 12 working days.
• Reduced people with privileged access from 1,140 across 63 suppliers to 312 across 21.

Decisions in context

I was appointed group chief information officer when the merger completed, ahead of the mobile side's long-serving CIO, whom I asked to stay for six months to plan the closure of his own platform. The mandate was consolidation without customer harm, under a business case our owners watched closely. I chose the surviving platform in each domain on capability rather than origin: cable's convergent billing, mobile's service orchestration. I stopped the billing programme for seven weeks after its third wave overcharged 7,900 households, and rebuilt its acceptance test around each customer's own bills. I also brought rating and billing knowledge back from our integrator, retired the 2006 mobile platform only after proving we could still answer for its data, and changed how our board oversees cyber risk as NIS2 took effect. I present to the audit and risk committee every quarter and attend board meetings for technology items. I am not a director.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; completing the consolidation of the cable network's operational support systems and the 2027 renewal of the main integrator contract.

Mandate

Finish separating Tolvarra's IT from its former owner, replace a cable billing system dating from 2001 and prepare the company's systems for growth.

Outcomes

• Ended the remaining transitional IT services from the former owner in July 2020, within budget.
• Migrated 432,000 cable accounts onto a convergent billing platform in 2021, with 0.4 billing complaints per thousand customers in the first cycle.
• Moved 900 colleagues, including 520 contact-centre agents, to home working in three weeks in March 2020.
• Led IT due diligence and integration planning for the merger with Lonmara Mobile during 2022.

Decisions in context

Tolvarra was my first role as a chief information officer, and it came with an unfinished separation. Ostrevan had bought the company two years earlier, and parts of its IT still ran on services from the previous owner. I closed that dependency first, because every later decision depended on owning our own systems. The larger task was billing. Tolvarra charged customers from a system built in 2001 that could not bill a household for more than one service on a single account without manual work. I chose a convergent platform able to carry mobile services as well, at a time when no merger was planned, and migrated 432,000 accounts in 2021 with each customer's first bill compared against their history. In 2020 we moved 900 people home in three weeks. In 2022 I led IT due diligence on Lonmara Mobile, which is where I first saw how much of its billing knowledge sat with its integrator.

Reason for the move

Appointed group chief information officer of the merged company when the merger completed in March 2023.

Mandate

Consolidate three billing systems inherited through acquisitions and give a growing business dependable IT.

Outcomes

• Consolidated three billing systems into one during 2015 and 2016; invoice disputes fell by 46%.
• Led preparation for the GDPR in 2017 and 2018, reporting progress to the board's audit committee.
• Built an in-house billing team of nine, ending dependence on a single contractor who held the old rating logic.
• Moved hosting from two leased server rooms to colocation and cloud services, reducing unplanned outages from fourteen a year to three.

Decisions in context

I left Kervana to be accountable for systems after go-live, and Brennoch gave me that quickly. It had grown by buying three smaller providers, and each still billed its own customers. Business customers with several sites received invoices from different systems, and our finance team spent days reconciling disputes. I consolidated the three into one over two years, with every migrated customer's first invoice checked against their history, a practice I had learnt at Ardenmoy. I also found that the logic of one inherited billing system was understood by a single contractor, which is where my view on keeping billing knowledge in-house began. From 2017 IT reported to the chief executive, and I led GDPR preparation with regular reports to the audit committee. When a larger group acquired Brennoch in 2019 and merged its IT, my role ended, and I joined Tolvarra.

Reason for the move

After Brennoch's acquisition in 2019 its IT was absorbed into the buyer's; I accepted the chief information officer role at Tolvarra.

Mandate

Lead Kervana's billing migration for Ardenmoy Telecom, then build the Irish telecom practice.

Outcomes

• Led the Ardenmoy programme's recovery after 31,000 incorrect first bills in 2010, completing refunds within six weeks.
• Rebuilt the remaining Ardenmoy waves around comparison with customers' own billing histories; later waves produced no material billing errors.
• Delivered two further billing and order-management programmes for Irish operators.
• Grew annual revenue from Irish telecom clients from €11m to €19m between 2011 and 2013.

Decisions in context

Kervana sent me to Dublin to run the Ardenmoy migration, a two-year programme to move a fixed-line operator's customers onto a new billing platform. The first cycle after cut-over sent 31,000 customers bills that charged line rental twice for a part month. I spent weeks in the client's contact centre, wrote the refund rules with their finance team and rebuilt our testing so that each migrated customer's first bill was compared with their own history. The later waves were clean, and Ardenmoy kept Kervana for two further projects. From 2011 I ran Kervana's Irish telecom accounts, which taught me how integrators price change requests, staff peaks through subcontractors and report progress. I also completed an executive MBA part-time. By 2013 I wanted to be on the side of the contract that lives with a system after the integrator leaves.

Reason for the move

Wanted to be accountable for systems after go-live rather than until it; joined Brennoch as a client-side IT director.

Mandate

Deliver mediation, rating and billing implementations for fixed and mobile operators across the Benelux and northern France.

Outcomes

• Delivered nine mediation and rating projects on four different vendors' platforms.
• Promoted to delivery manager in 2005, leading projects of up to 35 people.
• Introduced a standard regression pack for rating rules that Kervana reused across clients.
• Moved to Dublin in 2008 to lead the firm's largest Irish billing programme.

Decisions in context

I joined Kervana to work across many vendors' platforms after Quarmont's product was frozen. In Brussels I implemented mediation and rating systems for fixed and mobile operators in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and northern France, working in French, Dutch and English. As a consultant I configured rating rules and wrote test cases; from 2005, as delivery manager, I ran projects of up to thirty-five people and negotiated their change requests with clients. I learnt to estimate work I had not yet seen and to recognise when a client's requirement was really a commercial decision that nobody had made. I also wrote a regression pack for rating rules that the practice reused. These years made me fluent in the way integrators think, which has been useful ever since I started buying from them.

Reason for the move

Asked by Kervana to move to Dublin in March 2008 to lead the Ardenmoy programme.

Mandate

Write and test rating rules and mediation for new operators entering liberalised telephone markets.

Outcomes

• Configured and tested rating for eleven operators, including four that launched services in 1998 and 1999.
• Wrote the mediation module that collected call records from three makes of telephone exchange.
• Led a team of four engineers from 2000.
• Reduced rating defects found after release by about two-thirds with a test harness built from real call records.

Decisions in context

Quarmont was a small Brussels company selling billing software to the operators that appeared when European telephone markets opened in 1998. I joined straight from my engineering degree and spent four years turning tariffs into rating rules: per-second charging, off-peak bands, calls to other networks, the first bundles of minutes. Each new operator wanted to launch quickly, and most of my working days ended with a test run of real call records against the rules I had written that day. That habit of testing against real traffic rather than invented cases has stayed with me. I also built the module that collected call records from three makes of exchange. When a larger software group acquired Quarmont in 2001 and stopped developing our product, I decided to learn the work from the implementation side.

Reason for the move

Quarmont was acquired in 2001 and its product frozen; I joined Kervana to work across many vendors' platforms.