Fascinating interview from the thoughtful JP, now Managing Director, Design (was CIO) at British Telecom.  Note, BT has 150,000 employees worldwide.  This wide ranging interview speaks about converting BT to a platform based. networked company.  This is no different than a Bank, when you consider the multiple branch nodes, thousands or tens of thousands of employees, and billions of transactions annually. 

Watch for start ups to figure this out too.  The CTO role gets in the way of effective customer experience design.

» CIO BT Design: JP Rangaswami – Transcript | CIO Sessions Vision Series on ZDNet.com

Dan Farber: Now you’ve been a CIO for many years, you were at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, you were the CIO at BT before you took on his role, let me just quote something you said about the role of the CIO, you warn that “the CIO role could disappear within a decade because all senior managers and board members will have to be knowledgeable about IT, and that’s almost a given in the you-tube generation”. So do you think that the role of the CIO, that you’re a dinosaur if you’re a CIO today?

JP Rangaswami: Perhaps not today, although believe it or not, at BT we’ve done away with the CIO title at our levels. … … Part of the reason to get rid of the CIO title was effectively to say that we represent disciplines far beyond just what was in IT in the past or in IS, that we represent networks, we represent products, we represent processes. What we represent is design so it made sense for us to come together and converge on that title.

The consequence of eliminating the CIO (read CTO) position is not a
semantic in job titles.  This is turning the organisation on its side. 
Instead of the traditional vertical view, of customer segment, product,
technology, marketing, this view looks for synergies across the
organisation.

JP goes on to speak lucidly about:

Customer experience:

JP Rangaswami: First and foremost we go beyond just thinking about
just the technology and the systems to really include the networks, the
people and the processes. It really gives us a different perspective
because we can concentrate on the customer experience much more easily,
you can really look at the end to end from how the customer touches
anything we do to how we return that service to him when we can
concentrate on the cycle time we take on the number of times we get it
right so we can look at right first time levels. All these are
disciplines which we feel we are better empowered to deal with because
the role transcends the traditional IT role.

Customer positioning:

JP Rangaswami: Well yes, what I actually said was, in the past we used
to say “instead of giving a man a fish we teach him how to fish”. Today
we’re building hurricanes and windmills, capturing energy that the
customer creates and our role really is to expose our assets in such a
way that that customer can create new value for himself and for his
customers by the provision of our assets as usable tools and services,
and that is as much a design construct as anything else. It is way
beyond what we traditionally called IT.

Justification for Social Network access to Employees:

JP Rangaswami: Well I would ask the question the other way around
and ask how the other companies justify what they’re doing [by banning FaceBook]. But
fundamentally, what does facebook look like to me within an
institution? It allows me to form groups of interest which is no
different from arranging a meeting or creating a center of competence.
It allows me to send messages to other people in an efficient way
rather than blasting people with email based spam. It gives me the
opportunity for people to subscribe to things their interested in, it
gives me a newsfeed for what people are doing in a sharable consumable
fashion, it allows me the opportunity even to publish the interests of
different people in such a way I can look at what my colleagues are
doing, what my subordinates are doing. In fact if you look at what I’m
doing with facebook, what I’m really achieving, what any of us who
wants to use it in an enterprise environment achieves, is to say that
you’ve taken what happened t at the water cooler or at the coffee shop
and made it persistent, made it shareable, made it teachable, made it
learnable. That’s a huge win because we’ve spent years talking about
the value of the water cooler conversations, of the coffee shops, of
the more amorphous softer discussions. Now we have the ability to
actually understand what these relationships are, how information and
decision making migrates horizontally, laterally through an
organization, rather than through the published hierarchies, how people
really work, and what people do as part of that work. It’s time we
broke the assembly line mindset, I think social networking tools give
us an opportunity to look at the relationship graphs, to look at the
people who form the malcolm, gladwell, mavens and connectors and
salesmen. To look at the flows that matter rather than the flows of the
politics, and these are immense tools.

Software as a service:

JP Rangaswami: Absolutely. Part of why we built BT design the way we
have is to realize that the past of having networks and products is
really not where we’re going. We’re a platform based software driven
networked IT services company. That’s what the transformation requires
us to be, that’s what we’re shooting for, and that’s the way we believe
we’re going to provide the customer the experience he wants. That means
delivering services to the customer where he wants it, how he wants it,
when he wants it, with whatever device whatever form of connect,
whatever time of day. These constructs are not easy to apply unless you
think of software as a service in being able to expose the assets as
services not as products, and then to be able to expose them in such a
way that the customer can actually create other services out of them,
whitelabeling, mashing, the creation of managed mashable networks. All
of this is only possible if you take the software as a service mindset

I have followed JP for years, and if you are interested his blog is here.

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