I think the technology industry as a whole and telecoms to some extent is still blinkered in terms of where the customer priority should be. People in IT need to answer the question: Do they want a key role in determining the overall direction and strategy of the company?

At the end of the day it's the customers that keep us in the business not whether we have the greatest back-end services and capabilities or we provide the best devices. It's all about how the customers can make use of these things in their life--without that it matters little to customers.

SM: So this has been going on for some time. In reality IT started this on the systems side of things and my job is to try and bring that back to the customer experience, bring this back around the core business objectives and the processes around the customer.

We need to evaluate what this transformation means to all parts of the business? What impact will it bring to our marketers, our sales people and call centers? What do these guys need to do differently to embrace this change to be more customer-centric? How do service agents serve different customer segments? How do they deliver different service levels? And from a technology perspective, how we do we build platforms to support these different things be it CRM solutions or others.