First jobs: From billing specialist to CIO, Jean-Philippe Avelange is comfortable learning from scratch

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In the early 2000s, a young engineering intern Jean-Philippe Avelange accepted the position of billing specialist at systems integrator Capgemini—an exciting shift that would take him from Paris to Mexico City. 

He just needed to figure out what a billing specialist actually did. “I literally remember Googling ‘what is billing?’ because I had no clue,” he recalled.

Avelange’s IT career began with aiding Capgemini’s telecom clients to fit billing systems to their specific needs. He helped customize Portal Software’s Portal Infranet for use by Avantel, a Mexican telecom provider at the time, assessing its billing requirements and how those could be translated into coded designs and an implementation plan. (Portal Infranet was later acquired by Oracle, which processed telecom usage in real time to support phone features of the era, like prepaid balances and ringtone download limits.)

Almost three decades later, as CIO at network-as-a-service (NaaS) company Expereo, he sees a lot of important lessons in that early experience.

“It was never pure technical work. It was not just doing development. It was literally understanding their needs, but being able to basically act on it yourself. And I think I’ve kept this [pattern] throughout my entire career,” Avelange said.

Wake-up call. Early morning hours aren’t necessarily quiet when you’re working on telecom systems. That’s when everyone’s off their phones, and the real analysis can begin.

As a billing specialist, Avelange conducted non-regression testing, a process to ensure that a newly added feature didn’t break a system. The wrong driver, for example, may disconnect a database from the billing system and lead to unexpected problems with a new release.

“I remember this excitement at four in the morning when there was no one, just the team, doing the release, and it’s sort of this thrill of doing an open-heart surgery on a system that needs to come back,” he told us.

How did someone Googling “billing specialist” become a true specialist? Avelange said he’d been fascinated by computers from an early age, and enjoyed the rewards of troubleshooting an unknown challenge. During his four-year career at Capgemini, he went on to lead the team and take responsibility for released integrations.

“You just keep trying to find a solution. It’s almost like a game, in a way,” Avelange said. “You get obsessed with finding the solution and cracking the puzzle, cracking the problem.”

After his first assignment in Mexico City, Avelange stayed at Capgemini until 2004. He then helped start a consultancy, Inoven, where he worked until 2010. In 2017, a headhunter approached him about a role at Expereo, where he became CIO—a role he didn’t quite understand on day one either.

“I can’t pretend that I knew exactly what a CIO was supposed to do,” he said.

That feeling of being a new exec on the block didn’t stop Avelange from ultimately leading the development of automations and AI-driven capabilities at the NaaS company, including the firm’s expereoOne visibility platform. In a follow-up email, Avelange shared how he wants his Expereo team to use AI to prototype quickly, which closes the gap between the business and IT: “Early in my career at Capgemini, I was bridging the gap between business and IT. Today the point is to remove that gap completely.”

He sees his lifelong adaptability strategy just as helpful for today’s IT professionals. Technologies like AI are moving so fast, and specialists are so hard to find, that everyone has to keep learning—and maybe even Googling: “There is no specialist anymore. Everyone has to relearn completely from scratch.”