The McCue Interview: BT CIO Al-Noor Ramji

BT is an organisation in transition. The move to reinvent itself from an old-fashioned provider of telephone lines to a global IT services company is, says BT CIO Al-Noor Ramji, a transformation "on the scale of IBM" when Big Blue saw the diminishing margins on products and bet the house instead on services.

IT undoubtedly will play a key role in BT's transformation and Ramji is a year into overseeing the 'One IT' programme that aims to consolidate the spaghetti technology sprawl that previously existed at the telco.

He says: "The IT role is to build a platform on which our services can then be provided - not going to the extreme of a product company but not going to the extreme of a services company."

It's still early days but Ramji has already made his presence felt at BT. We sit in his office the day after he picked up the CIO of the year award at the CNET Networks UK technology awards in London, which sits on the desk behind him.

"When I arrived I had 4,300 projects in my portfolio which is always a nightmare for any CIO to get a handle on," he says. "You don't know whether you're taking too much risk, too little, how your measures are returned against risk."

That's on a very different scale to his previous role as CIO at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) where he says things moved much faster and there was more instant feedback from internal users.

He says: "In an investment bank they'll either yell at you anyway even if you didn't ask them or you can walk around and see them. Here there are even different cultures on different floors. The emphasis at DrKW was on very fast delivery, very focused. I used to sit on the trading floor so it was very easy to feel the pulse of what was needed."

Yet he has already cut down those 4,300 projects to a more manageable 29 programmes that operate on rigid 90-day cycles that have to deliver something at the end of it.

The cycles operate on what Ramji calls a "hothouse" format where teams of business and IT people focus on projects for 90 days. The cycle starts by defining what the "customer experience" for a particular process should be and then that process is filmed from start to finish. At the end of the 90-days the process is filmed again to see if it has been improved.

"It's very obvious to people what has improved and what's not improved," says Ramji.

The aim is for staff to work on anything between two and eight 90-day cycles at a time, with a break in-between for training and holidays. Ramji has also linked pay to performance in the "hothouses" with the introduction of post-implementation reviews for staff.

"If you do the classic IT thing you work like the blazes, you finish and then your boss dumps another lot of work on you and off you go again," he says.

But despite an emphasis on "celebrating success" Ramji says it is as important for mistakes to be made - as long as it is before a system goes live.

He says: "We're very tough. We take a red, red, red green approach to life rather than a green, green, green and you fall off a cliff. I'm a software guy so I like bugs. I want things red before you deliver them because it's no good getting them red after you deliver them."

Ramji has also aggressively pushed on with BT's offshoring strategy since his arrival, a strategy he says is driven more by a shortage of skills in the UK than cost. He has also implemented a 90:10 rule that for all offshore contracts no more than 10 per cent of the work should be done onshore - Ramji says the ratio was slipping nearer to 70:30 when he arrived.

"The real issue for us is more about talent than cost. Software has always been a talent business. It's dependant on the few and the brightest and best," he says.

Ramji follows the traditional line about only outsourcing non-core activities but says the definition of that is not as black and white as many organisations think - and cites testing new systems and code as a task that can actually be core to the business.

"It's tricky because you use words like non-core and critical but quite often things can be non-core and critical. In a company where you can literally separate IT from the business it is easier. Here you cannot because it is an IT business," he says.

Offshoring the more routine work, however, is a way of freeing up BT's 14,000 IT staff for more core tasks and the more interesting new projects, according to Ramji.

"Up to now, like any other company I suspect, something new turns up so you give it to the offshore or outsource guy, which is actually madness if you stop and think about this because the newer stuff is being given to the wrong people," he says.

As well as the people side there is the IT platform side to Ramji's role and he has the unenviable task of consolidating some 4,000 systems down to just 40 - or moving from "spaghetti to lasagne" as one BT exec has described it.

Ramji says: "How do we play the same game that the car industry does - Volvo, Mazda, Ford, one platform. Everybody thinks they get a different car. It really ought to be as simple as that. That's where we're heading."

The future architecture plan for BT is a utility computing model that will involve a combination of Linux on the mainframe and Linux on Intel boxes, with BEA in the middleware stack.

"In every area you look at we have every vendor known to mankind. I'm trying to choose far fewer," says Ramji.

Given the size of the task it's perhaps not surprising to find that Ramji doesn't have time for many leisurely pursuits other than taking his children out on their bikes in the park on a Sunday, and the main vices he confesses to are chocolate and Starbucks coffee.

But he says this is less about a poor work-life balance and more about his passion for IT. "I love IT, I love this thing. I just enjoy it. When you enjoy it why would you want a break?"

So where does a CIO go from transforming BT? Ramji says he may go into teaching or work for a VC.

"This is a transformation on the scale of IBM. I'm not going to fight another one like this. Once I make it work I think this is my last CIO job. I don't think there's any combination of CIO jobs that I haven't done then," he says.

"But," he adds with a laugh, "then I have to figure a way of paying the mortgage."