An integrator's engineer who moved to the side that lives with the system

The bill that taught me most was not one I wrote. In January 2010 I was programme director at Kervana Integration Services for the migration of Ardenmoy Telecom's fixed-line customers onto a new billing platform. We had tested for eleven months. The cut-over weekend went to plan, the reconciliation balanced to the cent and Ardenmoy's steering committee thanked the team. Three weeks later the first bill run charged 31,000 customers twice for part of a month's line rental. Our reconciliation had compared totals between two systems. Nobody had compared any customer's new bill with what that customer normally paid. I spent much of the next two months in Ardenmoy's contact centre, listening to calls and writing the refund rules, and I have built every migration since around the question we failed to ask.

I was born in Liège in 1974. My father maintained signalling equipment on the railway through the Meuse valley, and his working life was a long argument for testing a change on the line before trusting it on paper. I studied engineering at the Institut polytechnique de Marchevelle, graduating in 1997 with a thesis on collecting call records from telephone exchanges, and joined Quarmont Systems in Brussels that September. Quarmont sold billing and mediation software to the new operators appearing as telephone markets in Belgium, Luxembourg and France opened to competition from 1998. I wrote and tested rating rules, the logic that turns a call or a session into a charge, for eleven customers. When Quarmont was acquired in 2001 and its product frozen, I joined Kervana to work on implementations across many vendors' platforms.

My twelve years at Kervana were an education in how integrators work and are paid. In Brussels I moved from consultant to delivery manager on mediation and billing projects across the Benelux and northern France. In 2008 Kervana sent me to Dublin to run the Ardenmoy programme. After the 2010 failure we rebuilt its testing around customers' own billing histories, and I stayed in Ireland to build Kervana's telecom practice there, completing an executive MBA part-time at Drumcarra Business School in 2012. By then I knew how an integrator prices a change request, staffs a peak through subcontractors and writes a status report designed to reassure. I also knew that I wanted to be accountable for a system after it went live, not only until then.

In January 2014 I joined Brennoch Business Communications, a Dublin provider of connectivity and voice services to small and mid-sized companies, as director of IT and billing. Brennoch had grown through acquisitions and billed its 21,000 business customers from three systems. Consolidating them took two years and taught me what clients lose when they cannot explain their own invoices. I also led Brennoch's preparation for the GDPR, reporting to its audit committee. When a larger fixed-line group acquired Brennoch in 2019 and absorbed its IT, I accepted the chief information officer role at Tolvarra Broadband.

Tolvarra had been bought by Ostrevan Infrastructure Partners in 2017 and still relied on its former owner for parts of its IT. I finished that separation in 2020, moved 900 colleagues to home working in three weeks that spring, and in 2021 migrated 432,000 cable accounts onto a new convergent billing platform. That migration was the first in which every customer's first bill was compared with their own history before it was sent. It produced 0.4 billing complaints per thousand customers in its first cycle, and I began to think we had learnt the lesson permanently.

We had not. When Tolvarra and Lonmara Mobile merged in March 2023, I was appointed group chief information officer over Gareth Lyndon, who had run the mobile side's systems for nine years. I asked him to stay for six months to lead the mobile platform's closure planning, and he did, disagreeing with about half of my plan in writing. Our integrator, Halvecor Solutions, argued that comparing every migrated mobile customer's first bill would be unaffordable at mobile volumes, and I accepted a five per cent sample. In November 2024 the third wave overcharged 7,900 households that held both our broadband and our mobile services. I stopped the programme for seven weeks, introduced full first-bill comparison and gave the head of revenue assurance and the director of customer operations the power to hold any bill run. The remaining thirteen waves were clean, and the last mobile accounts moved a quarter late.

People who work with me would say that I write decisions down, including the objections I overrule, and that I ask our engineers and the integrator's engineers the same question separately. I read a sample of billing complaints every Monday morning. I am more comfortable switching systems off than most CIOs, and I insist on proving that we can still answer for the data before we do. I am less comfortable with programmes declared finished on the day of cut-over.

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