Although Moutie Wali has an engineering background, the director of digital transformation & integrated planning at Canadian telecoms giant Telus is firmly embedded in the business side of the organisation. He also prefers to be in control of new IT initiatives, not waiting on the IT department to drive change. That mindset makes the trilingual […]
Although Moutie Wali has an engineering background, the director of digital transformation & integrated planning at Canadian telecoms giant Telus is firmly embedded in the business side of the organisation. He also prefers to be in control of new IT initiatives, not waiting on the IT department to drive change.
That mindset makes the trilingual tech leader an ideal advocate for Appian World 2025 in Denver, the annual conference hosted by the low-code automation platform.
At the event, Wali shared how his team developed Aspire, a digital planning system built on Appian that is projected to save Telus over 7,000 employee hours a year and uncover $42 million in potential capital reinvestment.
Riding high
Before delving into enterprise transformation, TechInformed quizzes the Vancouver-based exec about an unexpected passion: horseback riding. What began as a creative outlet during his MBA studies became a side hustle in equestrian clothing—and eventually led to an innovation in custom-fit wearables.
Frustrated by the lack of well-fitting riding gear for men, Wali began designing and selling apparel online through his store Shopfarris applying the same design-thinking and e-commerce acumen he used in tech.
The equestrian turned to tech to solve a personal challenge Credit: Cara Grimshaw
After a riding accident required him to wear mismatched leg gear, he turned to technology to solve a personal challenge.
“I thought about Face ID on the phone—it’s almost like a LiDAR system that captures every contour of your face in 3D,” he explains. “So, I applied that to scanning other body parts to create 3D models, which could then be used for custom-fitted clothing and accessories.”
He developed and patented the technology over two and a half years – a move indicative of the exec’s persistent, structured approach to solving real-world problems, both inside and outside the corporate world.
Sizing up the problem
Back at Telus, Wali recalls how he started measuring up what he needed to support his significant dual roles as the company’s leader of integrated planning and digital transformation.
He’s charged with forecasting capital needs over 18 months, three years, even five years—while leading the transformation of fragmented systems across Telus’s infrastructure and network teams.
Aspire, the digital planning and workflow platform he helped build, sits at the heart of both remits. Evolving from a 2018 partnership with Appian and launched into production last year, Aspire is powered by low-code automation, data fabric architecture, and real-time analytics.
“When I took a step back and examined the core challenges of my role, I realised we needed a system that could manage complex planning across multiple teams with many interdependencies,” he explains.
He likens the process to building a car: “You need input from marketing and sales to gauge demand, which drives the network activities, and those must translate into physical infrastructure—towers, fibre, switches, servers.”
Previously, the planning process was messy and manual—spread across spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks, and email threads. Changes often meant starting over. “It could take up to four months to move from Plan A to Plan B,” Wali recalls. “In my 15 years at Telus, I’ve never seen a plan stay intact from start to finish. Change is constant.”
Breaking the spreadsheet habit
One of Wali’s first moves was getting teams to move their planning data into Aspire, away from traditional spreadsheets. “We built a structured data model that captured each team’s investments—whether it was a server or a tower—and mapped the dependencies using a ‘parent-child’ relationship model in the data fabric,” he explains.
This structure made the impact of changes clear and manageable. “If one team made a change, we could isolate affected downstream activities without rebuilding the entire plan.”
Reporting also became significantly easier. “Before, basic questions like ‘How much did we save?’ required manually stitching together spreadsheets. Now, Aspire gives us instant access to real-time data and self-serve analytics.”
Convincing teams to adopt Aspire wasn’t easy. “People were attached to their spreadsheets. We had to show them why the new system was better and support them through the mindset shift.”
Wali embedded key users from each planning team into the development process, turning them into advocates. “It was about defining scope and user stories to get buy-in and co-create the solution,” he says.
Wali speaking at Appian World 2025
Another issue Aspire tackled was misaligned capital. “If we planned for 100 sites in a region but only built 50, resources might still be allocated to all 100 if updates weren’t communicated properly,” he explains.
“With Aspire, we’ve improved visibility and coordination, saving $42 million in idle or misaligned capital.”
An AI-driven future
Looking ahead, Wali sees AI playing a critical role. Telus is currently trialling self-serve analytics powered by natural language processing.
“Executives often need customised reports. Rather than pre-building everything, we’re enabling them to interact directly with the data,” he says.
Appian’s data fabric supports this vision, and Wali is layering in AI capabilities so that users can generate insights without IT intervention. “As a business leader—not a developer—I can define the outcomes and work directly with Appian and its partners to deliver results. Aspire puts control back in the hands of the business.”
Of course, he adds, data compliance remains key. “Being a Canadian company, all data must stay within Canada. We’ve worked closely with Appian to ensure our AI infrastructure is hosted in Canadian cloud environments with strict firewalls,” Wali notes.
“We’ve taken longer to implement some features, but for the right reasons.”
Moutie believes that AI will soon reshape enterprise planning entirely. “I can imagine a future where marketing inputs or competitor actions are fed into a system that auto-generates a draft network plan. But what I like about Appian’s approach is that AI isn’t a black box—it integrates into the workflow, where humans can still intervene where needed.”
For now, Wali is focused on perfecting the first use case. His advice to other leaders? Don’t rush. “Spend the time upfront to define your problem clearly. We invested heavily in understanding user stories, pain points, and the full scope. That early phase might feel slow, but it’s the most critical. Once development starts, everything flows much faster.”
