Akbar Mahomed

Part of the IT Leaders 100 - a list of the most influential IT leaders in the UK in 2026.

With over 15 years of experience in IT and digital operations, Akbar is a seasoned IT Service Management professional with several years at a tier one telecoms provider. He is the leader of several teams and capabilities across IT as well as driving service transformation to achieve best ever incident volumes and MTTR with direct impact on business profitability.

Akbar thrives in fast-paced and challenging environments to bring value and mature the processes and capabilities a large organisation depends on.

Akbar is highly rated locally, with a strong reputation across European markets at Vodafone.

What's the most exciting part of your current role?

Delivering the merger of Vodafone UK and Three UK's IT systems and processes into a brand new combined Service Operations & Cloud department at the same time as delivering best ever incident volumes, MTTR and reliability.

That has been combined with a major transformation of our organisation and leveraging partners to deliver at pace as one team and achieve the best customer experience possible.

What do you do in week one of a new project to avoid pain in month six?

Set expectations on ways of working, desired outcomes and people behaviours with a clear leadership charter and empowerment of the project leads, with each lead owning their deliverables and stepping in to gaps that will arise in month six to deliver at pace rather than staying in their silo.

It’s also important to establish clear accountabilities and one team culture at the start. This will remove resistance to change and allow people to build up their tolerance for ambiguity and persevere when things go wrong.

Finally, the go-live date would be set as a decision to achieve with business and not a moveable lever, with all bought in and knowing each other to build psychological safety from every department or team involved.

What’s the part of your estate you most want to simplify in 2026?

The transformation of the IT estate to allow 20 million customers to transact with ease, using modern systems with high reliability built in by design. So, getting hundreds of IT projects through service design into service transition in a seamless agile way with quality throughout would be the main aspect to simplify how two different delivery functions operate and hand over to a single combined IT Service Operations department.

Excluding smartphones, what piece of technology could you not live without and why?

GPS navigation. In the past, going anywhere you needed maps and time to plan routes and avoid traffic and tolls, causing a lot of travel anxiety, stress and kids asking how long till we arrive. So, sat nav systems in cars are a life saver and ensure you can always find a car park or petrol station and get to where you need to be without hassle.

What excites you most about the future of IT?

The speed of execution for any idea being thought to then being implemented in an enterprise setting is super exciting. Bringing down time to market from months to days and responding at pace brings competitive advantage, which is unheard of in traditional telecoms with loads of technical debt. So, it’s the advancement of new technology and AI to cut down the delivery lifecycle bring new opportunities and growth to businesses.

What talent are you quietly proud of that would never show up on LinkedIn?

Surprised myself as a pretty good pizza chef at a recent team event, spinning dough in the air and cooking up a storm as a first timer. Considered getting a portable pizza oven and making a side hustle if I can convince my wife to help with clean up.

What’s your most-used keyboard shortcut or command that you wish everyone knew?

Control-F as it takes me far too much time to find things in documents or apps. Before AI this was a superpower in today's day and age where thousands of emails arrive each day and sorting the mess takes valuable time away from people. If you don't have the benefit of Copilot, then Control-F is a major help.