CIO 1-on-1 In the age of convergence, the IT guy at telco companies is no longer confined to roomsful of computers, says BT Wholesale CIO Clive Selley.

As more telcos begin to roll out next-generation networks that provide data, voice, video and TV services, Selley says, IT workers are finally moving out of their traditional support roles to where the action is.

"They are moving to the very heart of the telco, because they are building the revenue-generating platform that represents the future of telcos," he adds.

Appointed as CIO of BT Wholesale in February 2005, Clive also works with the other four division CIOs in the BT group to ensure overall business goals are met, such as making the company more agile.

Indeed, earlier this year, BT group CIO Al-Noor Ramji challenged his CIOs to break away from the traditional telco ways of introducing new products and services, urging them to take a leaf out of Google's development model.

Al-Noor's words were taken seriously. Shortly after, the company decisively implemented the One IT initiative, a 90-day delivery cycle for new products and services. In a recent interview, Selley talks about the bugbears facing BT's revolutionary 21st Century Network (21CN) which his division is building, the challenges facing India as an outsourcing location, and what it takes for a successful CRM strategy.

Q: What is the rationale for having various CIOs within BT? How does the organization ensure each CIO does things which are consistent with the overall IT strategy?
A: We have a group CIO who is responsible for the IT strategy for the whole of BT. We do have one CIO for each division of the business--global services, retail, wholesale and Openreach. The CIOs in each line of business work with the group CIO to ensure we pursue a common IT strategy, such as building a common set of platforms and using a common set of technologies. We leverage economies of scale by working together with the same partners and vendors.

We kind of work with our foot in two camps--one in our line of business which we're intimately a part of, but we collaborate through the office of the group CIO to make sure we're doing IT work in a consistent way that benefits the group as a whole.

So how much flexibility is the individual CIO given to meet the business needs of his division?
We have a very high degree of flexibility in a sense that we individually have ownership of the IT budget for each line of business. In BT Wholesale, I have the largest IT budget in the company, and I work very closely with Paul Reynolds, the CEO of BT Wholesale, and his management team to make sure all the investments we make in IT are precisely honed against business objectives.

Within our lines of business, we have great influence and level of control over our IT investments. What we do though, is we collaborate to establish a common IT platform where it makes sense, such as billing, where we agree on a set of billing technologies for our lines of business.

Name Clive Selley Job title Chief Information Officer at BT Wholesale Geographical responsibility Global Work experience Selley assumed the role of CIO in BT Wholesale in February 2005. His CIO team works with the division's management to drive the business and identify opportunities to win strategic or operational advantages through IT. Previously, he was also BT Retail's program director for customer relationship management (CRM). In this role, he implemented large-scale CRM platforms based on Siebel's technology. Selley was also instrumental in delivering systems to support BT's entry into the U.K. consumer mobile market.

Can you tell us more about the "One IT" program and how it is instrumental in BT's overall IT transformation?
One IT is the name of the organization that's headed by the group CIO. On the management board are each of the CIOs and the person responsible for the data centers and operation management of the entire IT estate. Through One IT, we have oversight of the entire investment that we make in IT every year, which is about ₤1.5 billion (US$2.9 billion). All of the IT resources are actually located in the One IT resource pool. The CIOs individually have a number of personnel--whom we term "business engagement" folk--working with us to build very tight linkages between the lines of business.

We then organize the bulk of our people into two structures--the first is around what we term customer experience programs, because we believe that absolutely key to the success of BT going forward, is a ruthless focus on improving the customer experience in dealing with each segment of BT. Then we describe within customer experience programs three key experiences that we focus on: concept-to-market (how we bring new products to market), lead-to-cash (a customer's journey from enquiring about a product to purchasing it) and trouble-to-resolve (a customer's experience of having an issue to getting it resolved). We're very focused on having structures around customer experience because in a fast commoditizing marketplace, customer experience will become essential for companies like ourselves.

The other structure is around platform programs. Historically, among large corporations, IT has been designed, built, and deployed for hundreds of business units in a company. That has given rise to problems such as proliferation of technologies, inconsistency of service, and the old chestnut of stove-pipe systems based on segments or products. This has made it difficult to sell converged and bundled products. Our strategy is to define an IT architecture for the BT group that has 14 major IT platforms, such as billing and service management. We encapsulate those platforms with usable capabilities, which are exposed via Web services.

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