Barry Evans, chief technical officer at Virgin Mobile Australia, admits he doesn't do as much hands-on technical work as he used to, but still finds it satisfying seeing a system up-and-running.
Evans is a CTO with a technical background--he holds a degree in computer science and has worked his way up to his current position from a start as a Unix administrator.
At Virgin Mobile Evans sees his role made up of three areas, because of the technological focus of working for a telco.
He's head of networks, which covers the switching infrastructure and areas like SMS--basically, what is needed to keep the telco's mobile GSM customer network running.
Evans is also responsible for all the back-end infrastructure, which supports functions like billing, financial systems, the telco's Web site, and its warehouse. In addition, this also includes its call centre and other infrastructure, such as the LAN and WAN.
Being part of the senior management team is also part of Evan's role. He described this as being involved in guiding business strategy, such as budgeting and forecasting, and also covering areas such as technical and product strategy.
CIOs and IT managers being involved in senior executive teams is a trend Evans believes will continue in Australia. "I think that the senior technical role in any company for a long time has played a role in senior management," he said. "Because of the fact that technology is seen as way of achieving greater and greater efficiencies across an organisation."
Evans said that especially in sectors such as the telecommunications space technology was a core competency of the business, which added to its importance within the organisation.
With staff effectively working in either the IT group or the networks group at Virgin Mobile Australia Evans has 40 full-time employees reporting to him, and also a number of contractors working for the telco.
According to Evans, the networks group looks after parts of the business such as the customer voicemail platform and supports its short message service centre (SMSC). In addition these staff look after the home location register (HLR), which effectively holds the attributes of a customer in the GSM network, Evans said.
For the IT group at Virgin Mobile its core tasks are to support areas such as post-pay billing, financial systems (for example, accounts payable, accounts receivable and general ledger) and to also support the warehouse's inventory control system.
"They also support all of our corporate infrastructure which is e-mail, desktop PCs, LAN, firewalls and security," Evans said. "Then they support our call centre, where there are 200 people taking inbound calls."
In addition, the IT group manages Virgin Mobile's e-commerce Web site, and provide business reporting for the telco's board, senior management and the sales and marketing team.
What about technologies Evans is keeping an eye on? Because the telecommunications environment is so diverse, he doesn't believe that there's any one vendor which offers a "silver bullet solution that covers it all".
However, Evans said that he was looking at areas like real-time, for example for billing. "With prepay it's absolutely vital you can bill someone as close to real time as possible," he said. "There's a greater movement towards all services being pushed as close to real time as possible."
