Vendor CIOs and dog food consumption

BT's unveiling of a division focused on convergence today was interesting on several levels. The head of the new unit, Tom Craig, noted talk of the subject as long as 14 years ago at the annual TMA telecoms show. The hype has continued ever since, only now it really looks like user organisations are taking the plunge.

Key to all this is the belief by the vendor - and BT's not the only one being evangelical in this space - that what it's promising to deliver can be delivered. To use a very dot-com boom era phrase, these companies must eat their own dog food.

BT's really been chowing down of late. At a briefing today there was talk of webinars, company-wide simultaneous webcasts with the top brass, IP telephony and hot desking - on a national basis enabled by server-stored desktop configurations.

That's a pretty good way of convincing potential customers you're not just good at the marketing spiel. Whether BT and others in this mode are successful, and successful quickly, is open to debate. There's no doubt they've made a move in the right direction.

Equally interesting is the concept of IT and communications giants wheeling out their IT heads to support their arguments. BT today put its IT director - Chris Price, BT Exact COO - in front of the media and analysts, and the recent past is littered with similar examples, most notably by Dell and Intel.

A story run on silicon.com this week about back-up tips and nightmares also elicited a response from one reader who had great internal IT support. He then went on to add words to the effect of: "But I should think so too - I was working for Intel at the time."

The companies that are always selling to CIOs must be model IT houses themselves.

And the role of the internal head of IT is increasingly blurring, frequently mixing CIO and CTO functions, at least at tech companies, but more often mixing CIO and marketing roles.

So next time you have a problem with a vendor, ask how their head of IT or comms sorts it out. Even ask to speak to them. And if these businesses don't use that technology themselves or keep them under lock and key, start to ask even more questions.