Telstra casts net for CIO as John Romano exits

Telstra is looking for a new chief information officer after John Romano was let go by the telco after a two-year stint.

John Romano is leaving Telstra.

Telstra is looking for a new chief information officer after John Romano was let go by the telco after a two-year stint.

Mr Romano’s exit will see the veteran executive end a 30-year relationship with Telstra. He took on the CIO and the chief digital officer role in 2016.  Earlier, Mr Romano was in charge of the Telstra Property Group looking after the telco’s network facilities.

A Telstra spokesman told The Australian Mr Romano’s roles would be filled by chief technology officer Hakan Ericsson until the telco found a permanent replacement. “The decision was Telstra’s and John’s departure is not related to any other leadership changes at Telstra,” the spokesman said.

Mr Romano’s tenure as CIO saw him lead the telco’s digitisation program as Telstra strove to improve its customer service and digitise its processes and functions.

The digital makeover is a big part of Telstra’s $3 billion investment in transformation, with about $2bn of that allocated to digitisation.

Mr Romano’s tenure saw the decommissioning of a number of legacy systems at the telco and the internal implementation of cloud systems such as Salesforce and ServiceNow.

So far, the program has delivered several initiatives for improving customer experience, including Get Help, an automated NBN fault resolution process; the Notify messaging platform and the Service Status Page that keeps customers informed during network outages.

Improving customer experience is critical for Telstra in a highly competitive mobile market, especially as it looks to maintain its price premium. It is also looking to make inroads in the more budget-conscious segment of the market and relies on a high degree of digitisation on the back end to keep costs in check.

Telstra posted a 5.8 per cent drop in net profit for the first half of fiscal 2018 to $1.7bn.

Mobile revenue growth was flat for the period despite the telco adding 235,000 retail mobile services in the half. Mobile revenue was up 0.8 per cent on the prior corresponding period. However, earnings margin were squeezed by a drop in average revenue per user in the postpaid market.