"I can now see who's approved something and where it's up to," he said.

Internally, Telstra is working with Mercury to deploy 85 "robots" to measure BigPond's performance.

"The robots are running across cable and wireless [links] and we can point the robots to any Web site and measure its performance," Roe said.

Mercury's Asia Pacific president, Graham Sowden said because business will always find IT to be complex and complicated, IT needs to change its approach.

"[I don't mean] stop doing what we're doing, but add something else because business's view of IT is it's expensive and inefficient," Sowden said. "IT needs to demonstrate it can mitigate business risk; we have to stop considering IT as the 'kitchen' and look at the wider [view]. Diving deeper into the technology is an easy trap to fall into. We do have to add another dimension if we're going to break the cycle of being asked to do more with less."