ISE Magazine, August 2019

AUGUST 2019 WWW ISEMAG COM 33 ISE EXPO 2019 By Sharon Vollman ISE Art Nichols VP of Architecture and Technology Topic YOUR ROLE Whats the most challenging thing about your role and what is the most gratifying What is the greatest thing youve learned thus far and how do you plan to move the needle in your position this year Nichols As is often the case the most challenging aspect of my role is also perhaps the most gratifying Having responsibility for tracking and charting the technology course for the company across a wide breadth of disciplines from OSP to cloud requires the role to understand monitor and evaluate a tremendous number of technologies Its interesting to me to follow the commonalities and dissimilarities across them e g distribution v s centralization multi tenancy v s virtualized single tenancy etc Its also quite challenging to stay abreast of all the latest trends and advancements across optical security video routing switching etc Ive had to learn to rely far more heavily on and listen more to the amazingly talented team by which Im surrounded If our team and company are to advance at a pace commensurate with the industrys velocity a tremendous level of empowerment and trust is required Perhaps the greatest lesson Ive learned is people are capable of far more than either they or I might realize if theyre given the autonomy and empowerment to grow and thrive Topic YOUR IDEAL DAY Please describe what you like most about your job and what an ideal yet realistic day looks like for you Nichols I love that my role affords me the opportunity to learn constantly an aspect I view as a key indicator of professional and personal satisfaction An ideal day for me has a complete absence of status meetings and affords time to collaborate with and learn from others Perhaps spending the morning talking to teammates or peers on ideas for how to improve the organization or how we can better serve our customers Maybe the afternoon would provide an opportunity to recognize individuals for recent accomplishments and coach someone on how to tackle a difficult challenge differently and perhaps conclude with a session to learn from a successful individual or company outside of our industry in a way that highlights potential applications for Windstream Topic BEING ALL THINGS TO ALL USERS A significant challenge for service providers today is the need to simultaneously service consumers and industry verticals including transportation high value manufacturing healthcare agriculture Smart Cities etc The range of options puts pressure on networks to be all things to all users What is your advice to other telecom providers about this challenge Nichols As both a rural ILEC focused on broadband expansion and a nationwide CLEC with an industry leading business product set Windstream is in a somewhat unique position with regard to serving a diverse customer base My advice for others in attempting similar scenarios is to first and foremost focus on the end customer experience Too often we service providers jump to push the latest network investment or technology into the face of our customers with little pause to consider how to solve problems they may not even know they have Vis a vis these network investments it can be challenging to coalesce multiple business cases that can create an ROI But lest critical investments never see the light of day I think its important for Engineering teams to educate and evangelize potential applications for the Product and Sales Teams and to help tie together multiple BU benefits I would encourage others to really think about their core competencies as well as areas they need to mature while being very intentional and protective about maintaining focus Its so easy to chase after the latest buzz laden trend from a product standpoint when the right answer may be to focus on being the best in the business at what you already do