British telecom had a problem. Three years ago, as the U.K. telecom giant (now BT Group plc) sought to remake itself from a provider of traditional telephone services into a leader in network-centric IT solutions, it found its own IT shop was a mess. The $34 billion company, which operates in 170 countries, had no central IT department or global oversight. Instead, each business line had its own CIO and IT staff—and thousands of technology initiatives, each operating in its own silo.
BT needed a new IT approach. In May 2004, it lured Al-Noor Ramji away from his role as CIO, executive vice president and chief e-commerce officer at Denver-based Qwest Communications International Inc., and put him in charge of BT Exact, the London-based company’s research, technology and IT operations arm. As CEO of BT Exact, as well as Group CIO for all of BT, Ramji was given a monumental task: reshape BT’s IT efforts and unify the company’s global technology strategy.
Ramji’s first step was to identify and consolidate all currently operating technology initiatives. “When I arrived at BT,” he says, “there were 4,300 technology initiatives across the company, all with random delivery dates. Only about 20 percent of them had an actual business case, but none of them were being tracked in any way.”
Read the full story on CIOInsight.com: British Telecom’s Tech Transformation.
