TONIA’S AMBITION FOR A LEGACY

After two decades of working for successful companies blessed with great leaders, Tonia Mutiso-Kariuki learnt enough to be a startup herself, an experience that triggered a restlessness to leave a legacy – in all caps writes Molly Wasonga after speaking to her about how exactly she intends to do so and nurture her baby - a relatively new cloud venture.

As a trained lawyer with over 23 years’ worth of experience in different fields spanning law, IT, HR and marketing. Tonia Mutiso-Kariuki is now the Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) and co-CEO of Tellistic Technology Services, a born-in-the-cloud software engineering firm solutions partner. It comes with specialised skills in infrastructure management, automation, data analytics and software engineering.

Currently, Tonia also serves on the advisory boards of two high-growth startups, the Africa Digital Media Institute (ADMI) and Echo Mobile, and is a member of the Intellecap Impact Investment Network (I3N) and the Independent Audit Committee of the Future Awards Africa. The most accomplished Tonia formerly served as the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for GE Healthcare Africa where she drove growth for the company across Africa through investments in the private and public sectors.

Drove Growth

Tonia also served in various roles at Microsoft Corporation. Interest and fun fact: she was the first ever hire when Microsoft came to Kenya in 1996. Her most recent role at the multinational was as the CMO for Microsoft 4Afrika where she focused on inspiring next-gen Africans through affordable, local, innovative and practical technology solutions to develop skills, empower small and growing business to spur economic growth across the continent.

With such a versatile career it comes as no surprise she collected enough experience and curated enough competencies she dived into a startup. Her skills range from determining market expansion strategies to building a channel in untested markets which made up much of Sub-Saharan Africa in the early 2000’s. From recruiting and developing extraordinarily smart, creative and resilient talent, many of whom are running some of Africa’s biggest businesses and multinationals today, to coaching senior leaders on culture and strategy.

Birth of a Legacy

From launching countless products and driving market share growth to creating awareness around the value of protecting great ideas through intellectual property policy advocacy, to building brands and telling beautiful, human-centric stories about their impact on people’s lives, she moved into growing entrepreneurs in Africa’s budding startup ecosystem, in what she says was a phenomenal experience.

“During my last 6 years of employment, my work with startups has triggered a restless ambition in me anchored in the vision of a highly prosperous Africa. If I could do all that for Microsoft and (briefly) GE, could I do the same for local startups addressing Africa’s challenges?” she says. “I want to leave behind something that my daughter and my future grandchildren could be proud of – a legacy.”

Come January 2018 and Tonia would take a leap of faith, leaving GE Healthcare Africa to build Tellistic Technology Services, a software development and analytics practice. This would mark the start of a legacy. Together with her partner, they had envisioned building a great software development company and that was a dream come true.

Collaboration platform

Tellistic is using Microsoft Teams to build and integrate apps and services to improve productivity, make decisions faster and create collaboration around existing content and workflows.

“With Teams as a default communication and collaboration platform and particularly with the power of SharePoint for document management and sharing, it has worked very well for us over the years. Also, it is an Office 365 environment that has resiliency built in and is protected from network attacks like DDoS by Microsoft on our behalf among offer.” The pair are currently developing a Microsoft Teamsenabled virtual help-desk built off Microsoft Power Platform virtual agents, which will to allow IT to support remote users efficiently.

“On the control side of things, we are seeing customers reviewing their enterprise security to ensure that their information is secure from increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threats due to the huge increase in remote workers,” says Tonia. “With the bulk of end users now working remotely, legacy network architectures that route all remote traffic through a central corporate network are suddenly under enormous strain. The result has been poorer performance, productivity, and user experience.”

Exploded Digital Landscape

The digital landscape just exploded beyond control, and there is an urgent need for a holistic approach to security, across identity and access management, information protection, threat detection, network infrastructure design and security management. Fortunately for this cloud service company, its’ team deploys the distributed model allowing them to work from anywhere, meaning an easy transition to work remotely.

But like other businesses, she says that there are pain points, one of which she says has been connecting and engaging their customers as most of them are only just pivoting into an online construct. She however points out the use of their CRM –Hubspot, to drive customer engagement online through this period. “The biggest impact in this WFH period will be seeing customers through a seamless transition to this new world of work leveraging our own experiences and capabilities to provide the right level of support.”

The Catalyst and Accelerator

Declared a pandemic by the WHO in February 2020, COVID-19 has wrecked the system of life globally. It is however, turning out to be a blessing in disguise. Though Tonia is doubtful if the pandemic has ignited the digital transformation agenda, she is certain it has accelerated it.

She adds that the spread of the virus has led to many cloudbased solutions from remote/ virtual meeting tools and business continuity, planning on ensuring disaster recovery and redundancy solutions activated in the cloud.

The immediate next phase as she foresees, will be the ability to empower sales and marketing teams to meet their commitments to their customers and to the organisation so this is the time to think about automating business processes and ensuring you have the right tools to support a remote sales organization and such.

Going To The Cloud?

There has never been a better time for cloud computing. The September 11 attacks and their aftermath that compounded their impact, and the 2008 financial crisis have a common thread; recessions and crises that ultimately accelerated the digital economy.

Now, with schools, retailers, leisure facilities and commercial premises shut down, and travel all but grinding to a halt, there is an increase in remote work, video conferencing and streaming, distance learning and online gaming. Behavior is changing and it looks like it could stick. “The focus is on putting this humanitarian and economic crisis firmly in the rear-view mirror while we look forward toward the continuing digital transformation of the economy, powered by an accelerating shift to the cloud,” she says.

Tonia has observed that cloud datacenters are some of the most protected properties during this pandemic and therefore urges potential consumers of such services to take the leap. “Operators have stripped down to core personnel to avoid risk of infecting the highly trained workers who tend to the care and feeding of the sophisticated equipment and network connections. Companies are taking their workers’ temperatures to check for fever, limiting visitors and laying in food, water and other supplies to ensure that operations that have just become even more trade that is important to global can withstand any shocks from the pandemic. Interesting, isn’t it?”

Theory on Cyberattacks

Suddenly employees are WFH, bringing about an increase in cybersecurity risk. While employees in this new remote work situation will be thinking about how to stay in touch with colleagues and co-workers using chat applications, shared documents, and replacing planned meetings with conference calls, they may not be thinking about cyberattacks.

Some employees have work laptops they use at home, so it is likely organisations will see an increase in the use of personal devices accessing company data for one reason or another and this presents a security risk as well.

Tonia’s advice to employees is to require more than just providing tools and enforcing policies. It will be a combination of tools, transparency, and timeliness. Some best practices she says include enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) to increase authentication assurance. As best practice, MFA should be applied to all employees, all the time, control authorised user access, and educating employees.

She leaves with solid advice to East African companies that have had to shut down due to the pandemic. She emphasises communication with employees, customers, vendors, suppliers, lenders, landlords and tenants regarding business operations and status to help ease the stress and alleviate uncertainty caused by these unique and uncertain times. “I cannot imagine having to make the decision to shut down my company, and my heart goes out to anyone that has had to make that decision. As a business owner myself, it is a thought, and a possibility that is on my mind every day – there will be blood.”