Bastiaan Gerrits

Teams are vital to KPN. “For many years we’ve had a culture where the teams are the ones that are in the lead, because that is where the knowledge and the expertise really is, and our leadership team is there to provide vision and set parameters,” says Bastiaan Gerrits, Director of IT Mass Market at KPN, the leading Telco in the Netherlands.

Gerrits has been at KPN since 2008, occupying several roles concerned with Business and IT. From 2017, his role was Programme Director of Business Transformation, where he was responsible for the simplification of the company’s OSS landscape. For the past three years, he’s been responsible for IT for the consumer market.

“People are key to our organisation, developers are our oxygen” says Gerrits. “We've been focusing very much on creating an engineering culture, for which our three core values are central. These are: growth, trust, and courage, andthese values contribute to our purpose: Every day we go all out to connect everyone in The Netherlands to a connected and sustainable future.

This is the ethos at KPN that directly informs its ability to remodel and transform itself to shifting markets. Telcos are successful only insofar as they are able to rapidly adapt to a changing environment and, because they serve to maintain a region’s informational nervous system, their swift adjustment is key to the survival of the entire digital organism. Due to interconnectivity, if a telco fails, the consequences can be far-reaching.

“8 years ago, we were kind of like a snail trying to cross the highway,” says Gerrits, “and the question was not if, but when this snail would be run over. So we decided things had to change drastically. We changed the setup of our IT department, recruited fresh blood, started a new front-end stack and made sure that our new developers had all the tools in hand to undergo this transformation. It was very successful.” 

“We then applied similar tactics for the BSS (Business Support Systems) and OSS (Operational Support Systems), where we had a lot of technical depth in order to clean up a complex IT landscape, in which almost every product-technology combination had its own stack. 

Around two years ago, we finished our OSS transformation, which is also quite unique in the Telco world and is really the heart of our IT, functioning between the consumers and the network.”

“Such a transformation is like open heart surgery, in that every Telco struggles with it, so many telcos never undertake it, and the ones that do tend to quit halfway,” says Gerrits. 

“This achievement has decreased our lead-times for customer connectivity and halved our order-fallout. It has also increased our time-to-market for innovations like XGS.PON with the 10gb up-and-down speed. Our OSS transformation also allowed for big brand IT integrations that would previously have been impossible.”

This was KPN’s first-wave of digital transformation, brought on by the accelerating technological landscape. Its second wave of digital transformation was accelerated by COVID and its own fallout.

“We needed to speed up the digitisation of our customer journeys during Covid,” says Gerrits. “With the central role for a digital touchpoint, the app, the web and the systems that our colleagues use at the call centre. We essentially had to rethink our strategy in the omnichannel domain, transforming from channel-specific solutions to omnichannel solutions. After good conversations with our developers ‒ who asked for six months of innovation freeze and trust ‒ we decided to go with their courageous plan (courage being a central touchstone at KPN). Indeed, after six months, the entire app architecture was not only much better than before, but it also came with bonus features like message inbox, push notifications, improved MB sharing capabilities and dark mode to improve our customer journeys. Our rating went from 3.2 to 4.5 in the Apple and Google stores and is still increasing.”

“We've recently been awarded ‘best mobile network’ with the highest score worldwide’ by the Umlaut Benchmark,”

says Gerrits with pride. “And, in the last 6 years, we have been in the top five most sustainable Telcos in the world. We don't brag about that too often in public, but I must say, I'm proud of that.”

Read the full story HERE.