IT Week :What does your role as BT chief information officer involve?

Al-Noor Ramji: When I arrived in May 2004, BT's IT was in many places - all the lines of business had their own CIOs. My job is to bring the whole lot together. What we're trying to do at BT is to pull off the IBM trick of going from being a product to a services company. Only in our case, it is a bit more challenging. We're not going head-to-head with IBM; we are a communications company moving into services, so the overlap between the two is our sweet spot.

How will BT need to evolve to achieve the transition?

We have to change into a customer-facing company. Historically, as for any telco, the main asset has been the telephone number. It affects the mindset - you talk of 21 million lines instead of customers. So how do we structure our IT investment around improving customer experience? What customers want is a connection that just works and they never have to call us. Also, online interaction should be 60 percent plus, not the 10 percent it is today.

How will you reach your goals?

The first thing I did was rationalisation. When I arrived there were over 4,300 projects underway. I'm sure they were all pretty sensible, but when you're doing that many things, you tend not to be very focused on returns, or what the customer sees. Today we've got it down to 29 programmes. Each of these has to deliver something, rigidly, every 90 days, or we do not bother doing it. Every programme is measured in terms of customer impact, and you're not allowed to talk about customers unless you mean external customers.

How does the 90-day cycle work?

You bring in a customer and six competing teams build one prototype each day for three days. Some of the details I would prefer to keep to ourselves, but essentially, instead of doing requirements solicitation in the usual waterfall method used by large companies, which takes months if not years, you build the prototype there and show it to a real customer. Then it has to deliver results in 90 days, measured against benchmarks.

How does this model affect IT staff?

If you've met the targets, you get paid. So we have IT people getting bonuses. Also, if you have good people, it's rare for a manager to let them go to work with someone else. So part of the cycle is, if you're a customer-facing person, you will not be swapped out of that role for eight cycles [two years]. If you're a developer, we can change you every other cycle. We deliberately rotate, and managers get paid on the basis of rotating their people.

Do you spend a lot on training?

We have budgeted for that. In terms of training, we want industry-wide qualifications because customers ask for them. We're starting to get involved with industry standards. We are trying to influence the web services organisations, and also the classic IT qualifications.

About Al-Noor Ramji

Al-Noor Ramji joined BT in May 2004 as chief information officer of BT Group.

Previously, he was CIO, executive vice-president and chief e-commerce officer at Qwest Communications.