Bharti Airtel has appointed Andrew Kossowski as chief information officer for its pan African network. Kossowski, whose appointment will take effect on May 15th 2015, will take over from George Fanthome the previous CIO. In his new role, Kossowski will be responsible for driving Airtel Africa’s IT strategy including bettering its execution capabilities, in the 17 African countries that Airtel operates in. Prior to Airtel, Kossowski was the vice president operations - strategic accounts in Latin American and Caribbean for Ericsson, where he worked for over 4 years. He was also the director of global programs at NII Holdings from June 2007 to October 2010, before he joined Ericsson. At NII he led the initial market deployment of the 3G systems, postpaid and prepaid modernization. Other than this Kossowski has also worked as the senior manager of network and IT services for Sprint Nextel between 2003 and 2007. Before this he was employed at Verizon as the manager of software support and development for over five years. He had started his career as a quality assurance manager for the US Air Force, where he worked for over 12 years. Airtel Africa’s turbulent timeline: - Airtel Africa’s voice revenue and overall growth suffered because of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC)’s ban on conducting sales promotions in Nigeria, Airtel Africa CEO Christian De Faria mentioned during Bharti Airtel’s Q2-FY15 earnings conference call in November last year. This ban had come into effect on March 31, 2014 and was lifted the same year…
