Leading Digital Transformation!
The telecommunications industry has seen a remarkable shift toward digitalization and automation, with a focus on integrating advanced IT solutions to streamline operations. As organizations strive for efficiency, many are adopting cutting-edge technologies to automate manual tasks, enhance network reliability, and scale their services. The sector is experiencing increasing demand for fiber infrastructure and cloud-based systems to support growing customer bases. With this, the need for skilled professionals who can bridge the gap between IT and operations is more critical than ever, enabling companies to remain competitive in this tech-driven age.
Dr. Christian Klein, an influential figure in this space, is currently serving as the Chief Information Officer and Chief Operating Officer. With a strong academic foundation, including a PhD in computer science specializing in artificial intelligence, he has been crucial in shaping IT strategies that drive operational success. Dr. Christian’s leadership is marked by his ability to understand both IT and operational needs, allowing him to create systems that are highly efficient and scalable. His passion for innovation and continuous learning has positioned him as a forward-thinking leader, contributing significantly to the industry’s development.
metrofibre, where Dr. Klein has been a key player since its inception, is leading digital transformation in the telecommunications sector. The company is recognized for its cutting-edge use of fiber-optic technology, delivering unparalleled bandwidth and reliability to its customers. With a focus on automation, standardization, and scalability, metrofibre has positioned itself as a leader in the industry, offering innovative solutions that set it apart from its competitors. The company’s commitment to modern technologies like AI-supported chatbots ensures its readiness for future growth and operational excellence.
Let’s explore Dr. Christian’s innovative leadership journey in telecommunications:
Automating Manual Tasks with IT
Since Dr. Christian started his professional career, he has always had the opportunity to work for and with senior managers from whom he could learn. He took the chance to learn from both rather traditional IT industry managers as well as from new economy modern CIOs who were native to IT. Both showed him different approaches on how to develop IT organizations and modernize architectures.
Later in his career, Dr. Klein took over operational roles where he had the opportunity to transform large organizations with a rather unstructured, non-standardized manual workload. It was a challenge to introduce standardized processes, map the data needed to the different stakeholders of the processes, and, in the best-case scenario, use IT to automate most of the previously manual tasks.
Combining IT and Operations for Success
Dr. Christian strongly believes that the roles of COO and CIO need each other to be successful. A COO can only work cost-efficiently if most of the relevant processes are both standardized and automated, while a CIO needs an IT-supporting COO to deliver the necessary capabilities.
For Dr. Klein, this is a clear added value, as he understands both the effect of IT on a business and the tasks IT performs in achieving this. He strongly believes that successful companies need to combine IT and operations to create a self-optimizing system.
This is what is being done at metrofibre, and it is probably the reason why the company leading the field in terms of standardization, digitalization, and automation, which form the basis for scalability and reliability.
Effective Leadership Based on Situations
Dr. Christian learned quite early in his career that different situations require different leadership styles.
Due to his broad responsibility with different teams, from rather strategic units like Processes, Data, IT, and Network Engineering right through to more operational units like Rollout Management, Inhouse Cabling, Network Operations, and Customer Operations.
He sees himself in all kinds of situations almost daily, which gives him the opportunity to apply most leadership styles within a single day. Does he prefer some leadership styles? He certainly does; nevertheless, he tries to apply the most effective one, depending on the situation.
Embracing Dual Roles with Enthusiasm
According to Dr. Christian, the dual roles are challenging and time-consuming. Nevertheless, he is excited to be part of metrofibre, especially since he has been with the company since the very beginning. This makes it much easier for him to invest an hour or two more in the evenings when other people are already at home for dinner.
In his free time, Dr. Klein enjoys traveling, especially to Latin America. Since his first trip there more than 20 years ago, he has been in love with the culture and especially the friendliness, openness, and vitality of the people. It is such a strong contrast to life in Germany.
Throughout the rest of the year, he practices sports such as running, swimming, and climbing, depending on the weather, of course.
Engaging with Industry Experts
Dr. Christian believes it is important to remain curious about new things that can be learned, even on regular days. There are many occasions when he realizes he is about to learn something new. This could be a chat with one of the students working in the company, just to get a fresh view on a topic.
It could also be a conversation with one of the advisory board members who are extremely senior and absolute experts in their respective subject matters. He also enjoys best practice sharing sessions with other companies that share similar challenges, whether they are also telecommunication companies or work in different areas.
Finally, there are many upcoming topics that have come to his attention over the past years. One of his favorites is artificial intelligence, a topic he has been working with for about 20 years. With today’s computing power and the capabilities that now exist, he cannot imagine anything with a higher impact on our societies of tomorrow than this. Accordingly, he takes the time to delve deeper into the topic, read and learn about new capabilities, and stay up to date with what is possible in the sector.
Driving Innovation through People
In Dr. Christian’s view, there are two factors that allow companies like metrofibre to stay ahead in terms of technology and innovation: people and IT capabilities.
Every endeavor is driven and realized by the people who had a vision, turned it into a strategy, and finally realized their idea against all odds by trying, fighting to make it a priority, pushing it through against other topics, and finally investing hours and hours of their lives in it. This is why it is the most important ingredient. The right people in the company are needed to drive innovation.
The second factor is more technology-based: IT capabilities or the overall IT sector. Whatever the requirements are, time and cost are the most crucial factors in adding innovative new features to an IT landscape. Therefore, it is important to maintain a state-of-the-art IT landscape and cloud-based, scalable systems with easy-to-integrate interfaces.
Since metrofibre is quite a young company, with only 3 years since its foundation, it has had the chance to recruit the best colleagues in the market to deliver the first factor, and since it, fortunately, does not have any legacy IT in the company, it is also top of the class in the second factor.
metrofibre is therefore well prepared for the coming years, and it is sure to see above-average growth in comparison to the sector.
Scaling Operations for Customer Growth
To enhance operational efficiency and ensure seamless network and IT operations, Dr. Christian believes the best starting point is to have a comprehensive overview of the company’s entire value chain. This should ideally be represented in a process map, detailing the revenue and costs generated at each step and, most importantly, measuring the scalability of each process step.
In Dr. Christian’s opinion, many companies take a much too simple approach, driving revenue growth and cost reduction without taking the interdependencies between the two into consideration. Imagine a company that doubles its sales activities, leading to a customer base that is twice the size. Every CFO would be happy with higher revenue without increasing the cost of operations.
If the customer process relies on operations at later stages of the customer lifecycle that are not fully automated, how should the latter unit cope if it is not allowed to scale as well? This is impossible and needs to be adapted either by scaling the whole process chain in terms of headcount or by investing more in digitalization and automation in some parts of the process chain to enable those units to stay operational with the same headcount and operational costs.
This is how productivity and operational efficiency are measured at metrofibre. They have a very good forecasting mechanism, so they know how high their operational requirements will be in the future, and they enable their operational units to meet the needs of their customers with both IT capability and highly skilled staff.
Staying Ahead with Modern Technologies
metrofibre is the only player in the market that uses a point-to-point fiber infrastructure all the way into the housing or business units, including the public access network and the inhouse cabling.
This combination with the latest PON (passive optical network) strategy allows metrofibre to provide bandwidth offerings throughout its footprint that cannot be found anywhere else in the market. Here too, the fact that metrofibre is new and without legacy systems gives it a kickstart. metrofibre will be ahead of its competitors for several years in that field.
At the customer touchpoints, a similar picture is seen. Since metrofibre has the chance to build everything from scratch, it is already thinking through most potential use cases for modern technologies like AI-supported chatbots.
This will help metrofibre to automate most of the customer requests that are expected in the future. metrofibre is AI and cloud-native, which is probably the blueprint for successful companies in the decades to come.
In his role as the CIO and COO, Dr. Christian sees himself as the facilitator when it comes to introducing new technologies to reduce operational expenses, generate more revenue, or create new revenue channels in the future.
Promoting Technology in Workplace Conversations
His advice to aspiring professionals is to focus on leadership experience and functional knowledge. For him, a successful manager in technology and operations must have a solid background in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, as well as in business administration, finance, and, of course, leadership skills. All of this can be acquired through studies or during their professional careers.
The reason for being strong in both fields is that, on the one hand, managers need to be able to communicate with their colleagues in the respective units and understand the challenges the employees face every day to evaluate potential solutions. On the other hand, managers must also be able to integrate these into the overall situation of the company, understanding the business needs and the impact of decisions on the financial situation.
In summary, Dr. Klein strongly believes that a managerial role in technology and/or operations will also be a good choice throughout the decades to come. Highly skilled profiles are hard to find, and the demand will remain high.
There probably is one last piece of advice he would like to add, especially for young talents from the STEM disciplines: spend at least 10% of your working time explaining and/or selling your work to your colleagues from other disciplines. Make sure technology is as much a topic in conversations in the company as, for example, sales or marketing are. “Don’t sell yourselves short!” he states.
Vision for Advanced Fibre Network
metrofibre’s strategic goals for the coming years, particularly in the rapidly evolving telecommunications sector, are to become one of the top fiber network operators in Germany, especially in the FTTH sector. The target is to provide the most advanced fiber network to all the inhabitants within its footprint for free, without any charges.
Furthermore, metrofibre is committed to the open access principle, allowing all internet service providers to access its network and to sell their services to customers via its fiber network, enabling them to deliver the highest possible bandwidth and the best possible service.
metrofibre’s network is also already prepared for most machine-to-machine scenarios, like smart city applications.
Dr. Christian believes there is a lot to come, and metrofibre is in the right place at the right time. He cannot wait to make the company’s vision become reality.
