DFA hires former Vodacom executive to lead operations centre

Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) has appointed former Vodacom Business customer service operations centre executive head Carel De Nysschen as its Executive: Network Operations Centre (NOC).

De Nysschen has over 35 years of industry experience and takes the NOC reigns at a crucial time for the business.

Earlier this year, DFA customers in Gauteng complained to MyBroadband about prolonged network outages, degraded performance, and poor service levels.

DFA explained that the primary cause of the service interruptions was a network modernisation project and upgrades being conducted to improve capacity.

These upgrades included replacing older network components and preparing the Johannesburg network for improved delivery times on new links.

Compounding the problem, criminals vandalised a DFA cable in Western Gauteng, disrupting parts of the network a few weeks later.

In an interview with MyBroadband, De Nysschen explained that part of his role is acting as an interface between DFA’s operations teams and customers.

“There are some challenges that are simply a reality in the ICT field. In the telecommunications arena in particular, issues like theft and vandalism are rife across the industry,” said De Nysschen.

“In fact, the bigger the industry player, the more infrastructure they’ve invested in, and the more challenges they face as a result.”

De Nysschen said this isn’t new or unique to DFA or any other telecommunications service provider, nor is it close to being the biggest challenge the industry faces as a whole.

To ensure customers get up-to-date information about the network status, De Nysschen said there must be “a single view of the truth”. For that to happen, the NOC must support the operations team.

“The NOC can only be as good as the operations team is,” he said.

De Nysschen said the system to update an incident must be streamlined, so it is automatically updated if a technician has finished working on something.

Part of the challenge is consolidating a myriad of WhatsApp groups into a normalised, workable structure.

Although understandable that these groups spring up to quickly share operational information among the necessary people, this can leave essential stakeholders out of the loop — including customers.

“There must be a single system, single view of the truth that you can rely on,” De Nysschen said.

De Nysschen’s experience in the IT industry dates back to 1986, when he joined the Commission for Administration assigned to GovNet as a service desk agent.

At GovNet, he monitored the system responsible for all the data about South Africa’s dams.

In 1988, he moved to Infoplan as a Client Services Operations Centre Agent.

“Because I’m fairly handy — I like to fiddle with stuff — I wanted to become a hard-core techie,” De Nysschen said.

He said his heart and mind were set on becoming a technically competent resource.

However, a manager intervened and said he believed De Nysschen should pursue management.

Although De Nysschen initially fought against the idea, he said the manager convinced him over time.

When he got his first taste of project management, he set aside his ambition of being a techie and focused on developing as a manager.

As an IT manager at Infoplan, which would eventually be merged into a new government entity called the State Information Technology Agency (SITA), De Nysschen worked on projects enabling South Africa’s first free elections in 1994.

This included developing and implementing a mobile office dedicated to helping issue temporary voter cards to people who did not have IDs across remote areas of the country.

After ten years at Infoplan, De Nysschen joined Vodacom in 1998 as Executive Head of Enterprise Support Services Division: IT Group.

From there, he moved to Vodacom Business’ Customer Service Operations Centre Division in 2011 as executive head, focusing on technology solutions for Large, Medium, Public Sector and SMME customer segments.

He received two CEO awards for service and excellence in his time with the business.

De Nysschen said his dream is to build a “NOC of the future” while at DFA, with probes and elements all over the network, giving them a proactive zero-touch environment.

However, he said the customer is always before technology.

“With technology, anything is possible,” said De Nysschen. “But if you forget about the customer, you might as well leave it.”

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