CIO Spotlight: Jamshid Rezaei, Mitel

As CIO, Rezaei is responsible for driving Mitel’s IT initiatives, as well as developing and executing the company’s digital transformation efforts. He joined Mitel in February 2014 following the acquisition of Aastra Technologies, where he held various leadership roles in IT and business operations. Here he discusses Mitel’s digital transformation, the goal of improved customer service, and how he measures success.

What was your first job? As a new graduate, I worked at an architect firm where I was a member of a team that was focused on structure design for a new building project. This is where I learned about the importance of teamwork, adapting to change and building a strong foundation for every initiative and project I was a part of. In my view, a solid foundation will allow you to expand and be scalable for the future. 

Did you always want to work in IT? Not at the time of my first job. I chose IT when I immigrated to Canada which coincided with the Y2K hype in the late 90s. As a new immigrant, I needed to re-educate myself and get familiar with the new society and job market, and it was also an opportunity to choose a new field of profession. There were many promises in the IT job market that I found very interesting, particularly given IT is all about how technology will change our lives through new innovation.

Tell us about your career path. I have been at the forefront of technology and innovation for nearly two decades. I graduated with a degree in civil engineering and worked in the space for a few years before immigrating to Canada. As a new citizen, I went to school to become educated in IT just as Y2K was causing a huge buzz. While studying IT in the late 90s, I founded a startup that offered IT professional services and webhosting. After divesting the business, I took a job as an IT engineer and moved on to management and leadership roles, which led me to my current role as CIO of Mitel. In this role, I oversee the execution of the company’s IT initiatives; I also develop and implement our digital transformation efforts. I work with my team to drive change and transform Mitel’s existing IT landscape through innovation to ensure customer success. 

What business or technology initiatives will be most significant in driving IT investments in your organization in the coming year? Business transformation through digitalization will emerge in the coming year as driving the most IT investment in our company. This will be about connecting people, tools and information for an awesome customer experience.

What are the CEO’s top priorities for you in the coming year? How do you plan to support the business with IT? Our CEO Rich McBee’s top priority for my team is furthering digital transformation to support our greater business transformation. IT will support this through automations where we empower our people to spend more time with customers rather than dealing with manual work. This will make it easier for our customers to work with us, while also enabling a 360 degree view of their journey when doing business with Mitel.

Does the conventional CIO role include responsibilities it should not hold? Should the role have additional responsibilities it does not currently include? We are in such a digital era that I don’t agree with anyone being a “conventional CIO.” Today, CIOs are the head of technology and should consider themselves to be true business leaders, spending more time working to understand what business strategies are, what the customer’s goal are and how technology can empower those goals.

Are you leading a digital transformation? If so, does it emphasize customer experience and revenue growth or operational efficiency? If both, how do you balance the two? Absolutely. Our digital transformation emphasizes both the customer experience and operational efficiency. The balance needs to be based on customer experience as this should be the ultimate goal of every digital transformation initiative. Operational efficiencies are the enabler of a successful customer experience.

Describe the maturity of your digital business. For example, do you have KPIs to quantify the value of IT? At Mitel, we began our digital transformation journey four years ago. We started by focusing on driving innovation and change for an awesome customer experience. Our entire journey has been about our customers and their experience when dealing with Mitel. We had to understand what their experience is like and how we can improve it. To do so, we looked at the inventory of our tools available for them to use, and we quickly realized we needed to consolidate these tools and harmonize our processes. We also looked into how long it takes to complete an action, task or even a click so we can reduce that from days, hours and minutes to real-time. We created a group within the IT department called the IT Business Technology Group. This team’s primary goal is to lead and digitize existing business functions and transform our existing application landscape.

We are now at a point where our employees do things in real-time. This saves time and resources by avoiding manual processes, and in turn lets our teams dedicate more time to serving our customers better. In the past it would take a day to submit orders with Mitel or do common tasks like expense reporting. Today it is all real-time, easy as snap and submit. We reduced IT and business TCOs by consolidating from many ERPs, CRMs and agreeing on our business processes. We automated our entire Book to Bill subscription process and have transformed our business from a transaction-based business into a subscription-based business by going through our digital transformation initiative.

What does good culture fit look like in your organization? How do you cultivate it? People that thrive in Mitel’s culture are collaborative team players and customer success advocates. We cultivate this culture from the C-suite through empowerment, enablement and engagement.

What roles or skills are you finding (or anticipate to be) the most difficult to fill? Security practitioners, data analysts and scientists, business intelligence strategists.

What’s the best career advice you ever received? In order to remain competitive, you must be a visionary and a change agent.

Do you have a succession plan? If so, discuss the importance of and challenges with training up high-performing staff. Yes – as a successful leader, you always need to plan for a successor. The challenges with training staff for such a high-level role will be in identifying top talent and making sure he/she has all the platforms and capabilities to fully mature into the role.

What advice would you give to aspiring IT leaders? Computing is the fastest moving element of every business. Utilize your technology and computing strengths to drive value for the business. Understand your company and its requirements with a business hat on and lead through change. And remember, IT touches every corner of a business, providing a great platform for leadership. An approach that focuses on just the technology won’t cut it – you need to supplement an IT focus with an emphasis on your company’s broader business goals, or you risk setting yourself up for failure.

What has been your greatest career achievement? My greatest career achievement is actually the role I’m currently in. Being a CIO for $1.5 billion corporation that is leading through digital transformation with a business mindset and not just technology is definitely my proudest moment to date.

Looking back with 20:20 hindsight, what would you have done differently? I can’t identify anything I would do differently, as it all got me to the place where I am today.

This interview is part of CIO’s regular Spotlight series, which focuses on the career paths of IT leaders. If you know someone (or are someone) with a story worth telling, please contact kate_hoy@idg.com.