Optus outage: Will Kelly Bayer Rosmarin survive crisis, and where’s Gladys Berejiklian?

For the second time in just over a year, Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has found herself in the hot seat as the telco faces a fresh reputational disaster.

Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin is in the hot seat for the second time in 13 months after the telco’s national network collapsed.

For the second time in just over a year, Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has found herself in the hot seat as the telco faces a fresh reputational disaster.

Bayer Rosmarin was appointed to run the Singtel-owned company in early 2020 after spending 14 years at Commonwealth Bank in several executive roles, including running its institutional banking and markets division.

She left CBA in early 2018 after missing out on the CEO role to Matt Comyn, and now her future has been thrust into the spotlight again after Optus’s national network collapsed on Wednesday, leaving customers unable to make or receive phone calls – even to 000 on landlines – sparking chaos across the health system and public transport networks.

The crisis comes 13 months after cyber criminals hacked into Optus’s database of almost 10 million customers and published a trove of personal and identity information, leaving customers exposed to a raft of financial crime. That led to some customers moving to its rivals Telstra and Vodafone, which could happen again.

It is the second time a crisis has unfolded under Bayer Rosmarin’s watch when the board of SingTel, and chairman Lee Theng Kiat, has been in Australia.

The last time SingTel directors – who include corporate lawyer John Arthur and former Westpac boss Gail Kelly – were all in Australia was when a cyber attack hit Optus and are here again ahead of SingTel’s financial results on Thursday.

Bayer Rosmarin has been at pains to say Optus was the victim of crime during the cyber attack – a tactic that has appears to have done little to assuage customer distress. The fact that there was another crisis so soon after the last has fuelled further anger, naturally directed at the CEO, given the buck ultimately stops with them.

And if Singtel directors decide that it is time for Bayer Rosmarin to go, despite boosting staff engagement and corporate culture – it leaves a narrow field on who could potentially be her successor.

Among Optus’s current executive ranks, there is one candidate who stands out: former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian.

Optus executive and former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian. Picture: Ray Strange

Optus hired Berejiklian in February last year with a remit of focusing “on unlocking a greater share of the multibillion-dollar enterprise, business, and institutional markets”.

But the former Premier was missing on Wednesday, despite being in charge of handling the telco’s relationships with its big corporate customers, which were left paralysed from the outage.

Further, if there was ever a need to trot out Berejiklian – a savvy politician, well-versed in managing crises – it would have been on Wednesday.

But instead, Optus waited until midmorning to unleash Bayer Rosmarin as the crisis spokesperson.

Normally in the corporate crises playbook, media duties are initially delegated to a spokesperson with the CEO not stepping in until either, it’s understood what is going on; have resolved the issue; or a scandal has blown up so big that a CEO needed to take control.

But those who are familiar with Bayer Rosmarin’s leadership style, it was hardly a surprise. At recent public and private gatherings, Bayer Rosmarin has given the impression that she is a people person, skilled at building and fostering relationship, with a keen focus on corporate – details have rarely been discussed.

But it would be foolish to think that Bayer Rosmarin is not across the details.

In fact, it’s the opposite. Bayer Rosmarin is across everything. But a consequence of that – as one person who has worked with her is quick to highlight – is Bayer Rosmarin can at times take some of the agency away from her direct reports.

And this is why it was no surprise that Berejiklian was nowhere to be seen on Wednesday, regardless of her crisis management skills.

A potential handicap in the way of Berejiklian’s potential ascendancy at Optus after running NSW could be the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s finding that she engaged in serious corrupt conduct while in office – a finding which she is appealing.

Instead, a more likely scenario would be for Singtel to parachute one of its own from Singapore like when it appointed Allan Lew to run Optus, who during his five-year tenure stabilised earnings before handing the reins to Bayer Rosmarin.

In the past year, it would be reasonable to expect Optus, like other corporates, would regularly war game and perform training drills to prepare for worst case scenarios – i.e. a national collapse of its network. That way, when a crisis eventuate, the gears are finally tuned and click into action.

Indeed, this approach worked for Medibank after its cyber attack last year, with the health insurer running regular drills simulating data breaches, some of which lasted for more than two days, in what is considered “best practice”.

So when Russian hackers accessed Medibank’s customer base, it knew exactly what to do to mitigate the fallout, and in the 12 months since the number of its policyholders have rebounded.

Optus, under Bayer Rosmarin, on Wednesday gave the impression it was still scrambling.

Originally published as Optus outage: Will Kelly Bayer Rosmarin survive crisis, and where’s Gladys Berejiklian?