Premier 100: BT's CIO pushes an IT management makeover

07.03.2006
When Al-Noor Ramji returned to his native Britain two years ago to become the new CIO for telecommunications company BT Group PLC, he took over a 15,000-member IT team that was ripe for a makeover. But Ramji wasn't looking to layoffs and offshoring as the solution.

'This was not about firing people and starting over again,' he said yesterday. Instead, Ramji is radically reinventing how BT manages its IT operations, in an effort to make his team more agile and responsive to the telecom's customers.

How radical? Ramji has cut the number of in-house IT projects from 4,300 to 29 and instituted 90-day deadlines on most projects. He is asking small, internal teams to vie against one another in customer 'bake-offs' and providing bonuses to the winner. And rather than deconstructing the prior IT team, mostly long-term BT employees in their 50s, Ramji is retaining the group to realize his pro-innovation initiatives and go up against the likes of Google Inc. and IBM.

Ramji, who spoke in front of an audience of IT managers as part of the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference and was later interviewed by Computerworld, calls this either a 'hothouse' approach to IT projects or 'extreme programming.'

Ramji tried it before at two previous jobs, with mixed results. At London investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Benson in the mid-1990s, he oversaw a small, top-notch IT team that was naturally agile and responded quickly to such incentives. Success was not so straightforward when he took over an 8,000-employee IT team at Denver-based Qwest Communications International Inc. in 2001.

Even one of his gurus, the man who literally wrote the book on extreme programming, was dubious. 'Kent Beck told us that there is no way you can do this in a large company,' Ramji said.