Network management Toolkit

Engineering BT to 21CN

Graeme Wearden of ZDNet UK and Dan Ilett of silicon.com Special to ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 22 Sep 2005 15:00 BST

...to procure technology on a global basis. When we selected, it was by domain. Marconi has been a significant partner of BT and will continue to support other networks. The decision was based on operation, innovation, commercial needs.

21CN is clearly a big step but how has BT's approach to innovation changed generally in the three years you've spent here?
We have shifted from being a leader in creating innovative technology, to being a leader in levering that technology to the benefit of our customers and shareholders. That's a big change, from the pure enjoyment of creating new technology to the greater enjoyment of developing services that make money and help the business.

Today, we're innovating the way we innovate, for example with closer ties to universities and businesses and a focus on work that is commercially viable.

You started at BT in 2002, the same year that Ben Verwaayen became BT chief executive. Is three years really long enough to make significant changes within a company the size of BT?
Three years ago, the entire telecoms sector was in a bad way. BT took some big decisions at that time to rapidly address its debt mountain [which reached £30bn] and that created malleability within BT — an understanding that change was needed and that the old BT wasn't right anymore.

Today, our revenue from New Wave services is growing very strongly and we're taking a lead in the transformation of our network through the 21CN project.

BT is radically different from the way it was three years ago. The debt problem has been addressed, we've changed from just being a telco to also being a major supplier of ICT services, and we've also revitalised our approach to innovation.

But why doesn't BT just concentrate on building and operating the best networks possible, and let other people develop services to take advantage of them? It can't be easy to create a dot-com start-up mentality in a company the size of BT.
BT wants to operate the best networks in the world. But we also seek a more meaningful relationship with our customers in their daily lives. That's why we are doing more in the innovation space.

You can see that is working today in the IT services space, where we've landed £17bn of business in the last three years. We're also building the ability to offer better-networked IT services into our network.

It looks like BT is moving against the general market trend, with HP recently slashing R&D jobs, for example.
The key is that BT has moved to a hybrid R&D model, where we work closely with universities and other businesses. This means we can get greater leverage and thus better results from the funds we deploy, so we bring more purpose-built innovations to market.

If you could change one thing about BT, what would it be?
If I could change one thing, it would be to create a common consensus within BT about the opportunities that are open to us so that all our people were united in pursuing them and had been communicated the risks of not doing so.

It's something we work on continually but I think it's still the one thing that I would love to do more on.