Fonicom CEO Renaldo Arciola featured in Forbes on 14 essential lessons tech leaders can learn

Technology is constantly advancing, and companies need to do their utmost to keep up with its fast development to ensure they are not caught out by a system failure of their own doing.

Renaldo Arciola, Founder and CEO of Fonicom, advises firms to find a balance between deploying new, current technology and delivering reliable systems.

“Perform regular maintenance, testing and contingency planning to secure systems, and you will maintain customer trust,” he said.

“Companies should carefully evaluate new tech investments for business alignment and value. A balanced approach is necessary for success.”

Therefore, he continued, “avoiding being perceived as a ‘laggard’ and investing in tech for its own sake are both key.”

Mr Arciola made the comments to Forbes as a member of the Forbes Technology Council, which is billed as “an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives”.

The piece features “important lessons tech leaders and companies can learn” from members of the Forbes Technology Council following America’s Southwest Airlines cancellation of more than 15,000 flights during the week of Christmas 2022.

This was the result of a system failure caused by several issues that were exacerbated by a nationwide winter storm.

The core of the issue was an “extreme” backlog of updates to the software it used to assign crew to flights, which was adopted over two decades ago when the airline was but a fraction of its current size.

In sharing the contribution, Mr Arciola encouraged businesses to "learn from these incidents and work towards preventing high-impact problems in our organisations".