Expertise that scales.

Expertise was creating value, but it was concentrated in too few people.

A small central team could build solutions, introduce new ways of working and solve difficult digitalisation problems.

But if every business area had to come back to the same specialists every time, that expertise would eventually become a bottleneck.

I knew that simply creating a voluntary community would not be enough. If participation depended on whoever happened to be interested and had spare time, the capability would remain uneven and fragile.

For this to become part of how the company worked, every business area needed someone who was explicitly responsible for bringing the capability into their organisation.

I designed a company-wide specialist model and took it to senior leadership.

My proposal was simple:

do not ask for volunteers. Ask every area to dedicate a person to the role.

Leadership backed the model, and each Magyar Telekom area nominated a colleague.

We trained them to use the shared digital foundation, recognise suitable use cases and create collaboration spaces, workflows and business applications within the agreed model.

They then took that capability back into their own organisations.

This was not a side-of-desk community for enthusiasts.

The organisation deliberately created local ownership for digitalisation capability.

The difference was commitment.

A voluntary community can spread ideas.

A nominated person with an explicit responsibility can carry capability into everyday work.

The specialists had something my central team could never scale:

local context.

They knew their people, their processes and the problems worth solving.

My team provided the methods, platform knowledge, reusable patterns and support.

The local specialists connected that expertise to real work.

I did not build a community and hope it would spread. I designed a model in which every business area had someone responsible for making it spread.

Business areas no longer had to depend entirely on a small central team for every digital need.

Some specialists began creating increasingly sophisticated solutions themselves.

Years later, when the SharePoint environment was prepared for migration to the cloud, more than 300 business applications built on this foundation were still part of the environment.

For me, that is stronger evidence than the number of people trained.

The knowledge had turned into things the organisation was still producing and using years later.

The specialist network was one example.

Over the following years, I repeatedly used communities, talks, demonstrations, coaching and hands-on learning to make expertise travel beyond my own team.

I was invited across Deutsche Telekom to speak about digitalisation and the products and approaches we were developing.

In 2024–2025, I co-hosted the AI community for talents across Deutsche Telekom Group’s Technology organisation, creating a space where people could explore AI, share experiments and learn from each other.

Across these activities, the objective was not simply to communicate what my team was doing.

It was to make other people capable of doing more themselves.

A presentation can transfer information.

That does not mean the organisation can do anything differently afterwards.

I became increasingly interested in a harder question:

Can someone else use what I know to create value without me?

That meant combining different forms of knowledge transfer:

• dedicated specialist roles;
• professional communities;
• practical training;
• talks and demonstrations;
• workshops;
• consulting and coaching;
• reusable methods and examples;
• peer-to-peer learning.

The format changed.

The principle did not:

expertise creates much more value when it changes what other people are able to do.

Earlier, I thought scale mainly meant building something that many people could use.

The Kanban Board is an example of that.

This was another kind of scale.

The thing that scaled was not the product. It was the ability to create solutions.

That later became part of how I thought about leadership as well.

If the knowledge, judgement and decision-making remain with the expert or the leader, the organisation has not really learned.

Not every specialist became good at it.

Some used the capability only occasionally. Some never developed it very far.

But others went much further.

For some, it became a significant part of their work. Some continued building solutions inside Magyar Telekom for years. At least one later moved to another company into a SharePoint-focused role.

I would also not claim that every one of the 300+ applications was still actively used, or that each can be directly attributed to the specialist model.

What I can claim is more realistic:

it created a path through which people across the organisation could develop real digitalisation capability — and in some cases that capability became strong enough to shape their careers.