This month, Executive Vice President Joseph Rotolo will take over as chief executive of Afiniti, the technology consulting company where he has worked for more than 20 years. Mr. Rotolo, who will stay on as president, aims to simplify Afiniti’s structure in order to transform it into a stronger, faster-growing company.
Mr. Rotolo says that in recent years, Afiniti has changed its position in the market and expanded its client roster from telecom and energy companies, including AT&T, to global consulting firms, including McKinsey & Company and Accenture.
He has also overseen the expansion of Afiniti’s engineering and technology labs in metro New York, Chicago and across the country. The labs have helped create new products and services for Afiniti’s clients, including Urban Design Collaborative, which designed the PeopleLine app for New York City; and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which helped develop Afiniti’s architectural firm Scaleway.
“We just wanted to make it easier to do business with us, so we can say to clients, ‘Hey, we have this whole story to tell you,’ ” says Mr. Rotolo.
Mr. Rotolo sees progress being made to “close out the information gap” between Afiniti’s engineers and the business side. The engineering side needs to evolve in order to transform more quickly, he says. To do that, he has introduced new roles and managers to better lead teams.
Mr. Rotolo says his leadership style is to “always get my hands dirty, and see where the bottleneck is in the company.” He continues to take an active role in the design and development of Afiniti’s systems, including as president of the software center and in the process of evaluating new tools and metrics.