Telefonica UK CFO says utilise cloud and focus on innovation

TelefonicaUK CFO Mark Evans said the company’s current strategy is to utilise the cloud and shared services in order to drive innovation at the operator.

Speaking at the Maximising the Value of Information Technology event hosted by the Financial Times, the former Vodafone CFO was among a host of finance directors discussing technology and digital transformation.

“We are investing less in hardware and leveraging the cloud so we can move at the pace of change and the customer,” Evans said.

“Building, developing and owning our infrastructure is probably not the right strategy for us.”

Evans said that the company’s current goal was to minimise capital expenditure and investing in operating costs, which at the moment was offering a better opportunity to increase revenue and profits.

“IT has a big part to play in the investment of our business and isn’t just about driving efficiencies,” he said.

“And with sharing you don’t need your own infrastructure, it allows you to be agile and move quickly.”

At the CIO Summit in September Telefonica UK CIO Brendan O’Rourke told the audience that to succeed in modern business it was necessary to become a digitally mature business.

Technology innovation is a key focus for Telefonica and Evans, who said that the organisation was comfortable with failure.

“We don’t have to do business cases with innovation,” he said. “We want to trial things, and if we fail then we want to fail quickly and cheaply.

“If you’ve never failed you’ve probably never innovated enough either. As a CFO I’m happy to write off some money for the chance that in other scenarios they will be good investments down the line.”