The African continent faces a significant digital divide, and as CDOO, Prenesh is on a mission to address connectivity issues and ensure minimal disruptions to business operations.
Prenesh Padayachee’s role as group chief digital operations officer (CDOO) at Seacom is anything but traditional.
Whether by design or coincidence, the role embodies Seacom’s tradability ethos – a CIO’s dream of being at the forefront of leadership, instigating progress across organisational functions in multiple regions.
Prenesh has the CIO, CTO, COO, CISO, and head of data at Seacom all reporting to him, while he reports to the CEO. This, as more technology leaders yearn for leadership roles that enable them to partake in strategic organisational and industry development.
“In essence, I’d say that my role is quite unique, as I’m more a digital officer in a service provider environment rather than a digital officer in an enterprise environment,” Prenesh explains.
With over 30 years of experience under his belt in technology, communications and internet services for global IT giants including IBM, Internet Solution, Dimension Data, and now Seacom, where he started off as a chief digital officer, Prenesh also sat on numerous boards across Africa, including the Internet Service Providers Association, and is currently the Vice Chair of the Internet Exchange committee of South Africa.
Tradeability: a CIO’s dream
Prenesh says that while Seacom launched the first privately owned submarine cable system on the coast of South and East Africa in 2009, and continues to operate a wide network, the ICT company does “loads more than that. Our vision at Seacom is to empower Africa for a digitally connected future, and that’s the ethos of what we drive,” he says.
With this ethos in mind, the organisation offers connectivity services, cybersecurity, cloud services, backup services, and value-added services at different levels of maturity across different sectors including corporate, FSI, petrochemicals and mining.
“And then, if you look at it from an end-user perspective, we also serve clients that serve consumers.
“So, as much as we don’t have a direct consumer play, the products and services that we build allow our clients to go and serve that market. And the choice for us in that particular sector is deliberate. Serving the consumer market is quite a people-intensive organisation,” he says.
Prenesh’s team delivers tailored services in South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Mozambique, France, the Netherlands, the UK, and Lisbon.
“Because we fully understand the various components that make up tradeability in an organisation, and we know how to design networks that allow your tradeability to be up 100 percent of the time, or 10 percent of the time that you need it. It gives us that ability to scale between various things because of the multitude of clients that we have across various sectors and businesses, irrespective of what sector you work in,” he explains.
Challenges in the dream role
As expected, when operating across territories in varying stages of developing economies, the role faces challenges that, at times, may be out of his control – including the weather conditions, which make travelling across regions difficult due to ageing road infrastructure
“Some of the places we work in don’t have proper road infrastructure. So something that will take you 15 minutes to get to Johannesburg, in another territory may take you six hours to get on a good day. On a day when it’s raining, it may take you 12 hours to get there.
“So, you need to be able to scale and address the challenges that you have in the territory or relevant to the territory that you’re operating. This is why you’ll find that many entrants have tried to come in from a global perspective to make inroads in Africa, and they failed miserably,” he says.
You cannot paint Africa with one paintbrush, he says, noting how “it’s different strokes here for different folks” and vital to understand the environment in which he operates – knowledge that he’s gained over the last 25 years of operating across the continent.
Attitude can’t be taught
The responsibility of mentorship comes with a tough decision when choosing the kind of mentee to guide.
To build the right team, especially in a skill-starved environment, Prenesh believes in looking for more than the basic technical skills from a mentee’s skill set.
“Aptitude can be taught. I can send someone on a course. I can show them how to run an IP network. I can teach them about cyber security. I can teach them how to build a server, how to run a Microsoft environment.
“Those things can be taught. Attitude can’t be taught. Attitude and passion come from the individual,” he says.
For a wider industry perspective, Prenesh reads a wide range of industry publications on a variety of topics. “The reason I don’t have a fixed publication on the technology side is there is no fixed publication that covers all the areas that I look at. Something will cover cybersecurity, another publication will cover IP and engineering, and something else will cover how to run a proper global operation. So, I tend to be varied in the publications I read on the technology front,” he says.
However, his leisure reading has a lot more variety. “I enjoy books about strategy, and specifically strategy based on war. Autobiographies are an important thing for me, specifically on prominent leaders across the world, and what they’ve done, whether it’s presidents, CEOs from Fortune 500 companies, or a CEO that’s just written a book because they’re passionate about something or the other, it doesn’t really matter. And I tend to make sure I read from those CEOs that are from diverse environments,” he says.
Away from work, Prenesh spends his time on the art of baking bread and experimenting with what he calls ‘the science of bread’. “I make my own sourdough yeast and experiment with varying temperatures, varying flours and fermentation methods.
“I suppose it’s because it’s all natural. It fascinates me how you can take a few things, put them together and create something both tasty and interesting,” he says.
His downtime is also filled with woodworking. “It allows me to totally switch off from the IT environment because, in woodworking, you have to focus. With the power tools that you use in woodworking, you could do some serious bodily harm if you’re not focused. So, it gives me a way to shut down from work and focus on something totally different,” he adds.
On the sporting front, Prenesh enjoys volleyball and playing golf, especially conversations and relationships built on the golf course. “Golf allows you that ability to create a relationship. So, the person on the other side knows when they call you, they’re phoning someone that they have some kind of relationship with. That person is going to listen to them and not just make them a number, because you’ve connected to that person. So that’s why I love golf,” he says.
