Māris Ozoliņš, CEO of Swedish-Finnish TietoEnator's Latvian subsidiary, is moving to become head honcho of Lattelecom Technology, formerly known as MicroLink.
The IT unit of what is becoming the Lattelecom group will play a critical role in the group's future strategy and Ozoliņš was probably the best choice (though at a bad time). He brings very useful skills and experience from serving the IT needs of banking and finance, including designing entire card and payment systems (which is what the Latvian unit of TietoEnator does, among other things). But why a bad time? As this blog has noted (I also telegraphed the CEO change a few posts ago :) ), the integration of MicroLink, its sudden name change, has been less than smooth. Jānis Bergs, the head of MicroLink in Latvia and a member of what was once the pan-Baltic MicroLink's upper management team, left to go into business for himself (buying out a small unit of MicroLink in Latvia). He had been expected to stay on with Lattelecom Technology. It appears he and other long-time MicroLink staffers were disappointed that the pan-Baltic company was divided up among the three Baltic telcos in which TeliaSonera owns controlling or substantial interests (though not for very much longer in Lattelecom).
Ozoliņš, however, is seen as a strong team builder and will probably save what can be saved at Lattelecom Technology and get the company back on track.
In fact, even as the ex-TietoEnator honcho was cleaning out his desk, Lattelecom Technology signed a contract to set up and run an information system for the national statistics agency in the Ukraine, based on the system it designed and operates for the Latvian Central Statistics Bureau.
3 comments:
Don't remember if this was mentioned, but CEO of MicroLink Estonia, Peter Priisalm, also left a few weeks ago, with Enn Saar, the head of systems management unit becoming the new CEO. The reasons I guess have been the same for managers in both Estonia and Latvia, a year ago nobody could have predicted things will go this way, and a company built over many years losing so much of its value so quickly.
So how did the whole thing get screwed up? What were the shareholders thinking? Or was everybody expecting the organization to get glued back together when and if TeliaSonera finally got control of all three Baltic telcos (which they won't)?
honcho is the most widespread word in Kazhas lexicon
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