Where I spend my judgement as a telecom CIO after a merger

A merger between a cable operator and a mobile operator produces two of almost everything: product catalogues, order management, billing, customer records, provisioning and fault management. I decide which platform survives in each domain by asking which one can carry the combined product set, not which company owned it. At Lonmara that meant moving mobile customers onto the cable side's convergent billing platform, chosen in 2020, while moving cable provisioning onto the mobile side's newer service-orchestration tools. I publish each choice with its reasons and the objections. I sequence consolidation around the customer journeys that cross both businesses, such as a household adding a mobile line to a broadband account, because those journeys expose the gaps first. Of the 158 applications the two companies brought to the merger, 71 have been switched off and a further 34 are scheduled by the end of 2027.

I accept a billing migration only when every migrated customer's first bill on the new platform has been compared with that customer's own recent bills, and any significant difference has been explained or corrected before it is issued. Data reconciliation, which checks that accounts, balances and products arrived intact, is necessary but measures movement rather than behaviour. Customers are harmed by calculations: prorating across a changed cycle date, a discount that spans two services, an instalment plan that restarts. At Lonmara, comparing 912,000 first bills held 2,140 and corrected 530 before customers saw them. I also separate the authority to release a bill run from the people measured on the programme's schedule. Our head of revenue assurance and director of customer operations both sign, and either can stop a wave. Complaints per thousand migrated customers are reported to the executive committee for every wave.

Having spent twelve years at an integrator and twelve as a client, I do not treat outsourcing as a question of cost alone. I keep in-house the people who understand how we charge customers: rating and discount logic, the tariff catalogue and the history behind each exception. Without them an operator cannot judge an integrator's estimates or explain its own bills. I buy what an integrator's scale genuinely improves, including platform engineering, regression and performance testing, and infrastructure operation. At Lonmara we created 138 roles in-house between 2024 and 2025, with 52 filled by engineers who had worked on our account at Halvecor under a transfer agreed with Halvecor. Integrator contracts I sign now name the subcontractors who may hold access, include knowledge-transfer obligations measured by our own staff and allow us to bring work back in stages.

The EU's NIS2 directive brought providers of public electronic communications networks and services into its scope and placed explicit responsibilities on management bodies: approving cybersecurity risk-management measures, overseeing them and following training. I see my role as making that oversight possible. In 2024 I designed, with our general counsel and an external adviser, the sessions our directors attended on their responsibilities and on our principal exposures. Each quarter the audit and risk committee receives a short report built around measures it can test, chief among them the number of named people who hold privileged access to our systems and the employers they work for. I also own the operational side: our incident classification and reporting procedure, rehearsed twice a year with the executive committee, and the security requirements in every supplier contract that touches customer data or network configuration.

Old systems in a telecom operator rarely die. They are kept in read-only mode for disputes, audits and lawful requests, and they go unpatched while their licences renew. I treat decommissioning as a project with its own acceptance test. Before switching off a system that holds customer records, we build a set of retrieval scenarios from real requests and disputes of recent years and prove that the replacement archive answers each of them as the old system would. Retention periods are agreed with legal and data protection for each record type, and a deletion schedule is applied that the old system often never had. At Lonmara this approach retired the mobile side's 2006 billing platform in July 2026 after 1,500 scenarios matched, saving €2.6 million a year net of the archive's own running costs.