Accelerating change: A Q&A with Telus' Kevin Salvadori

Kevin Salvadori, executive vice-president of business transformation and chief information officer at Telus, gave one of three keynote addresses today at TM Forum's Management World Americas in Dallas. As his title suggests, Salvadori is managing his company's immense wireline transformation project. On Friday, he spoke with Telephony Senior Editor Tim McElligott about life on the driving side of transformation and his guest appearance at the forum.

On creating a new Telus:

Telus circa 2000 would have been a regional, Western-based wireless and wireline operator with $5.7 billion in revenue. But we set a new strategy then to be a carrier focused on wireless, data and IP. And we have transformed the organization into almost a $9 billion per-year company and have had very strong success developing that strategy.

We come from the merger of a lot of different organizations. And when I came here in 2004 (after coming to Telus Mobility with its acquisition of Clearnet in 2000) the wireline side of our business really had a very fragmented application environment and that was not conducive to the kind of changes our business was really demanding.

We set out a vision based on a few key business objectives. We wanted flexibility in entering new business markets. We wanted to reduce cost by automating processes and to provide timely, accurate and relevant information for decision makers. We really didn't have the platform we needed to provide broad differentiation. And it was difficult for us at the time to know exactly what our customers were using. So we set out this vision for our transformation program called Imagine. Our environment has substantially changed.

On his approach:

Our focus from an architecture perspective is really an open [service-oriented architecture] approach, which will allow us to make easy changes on our front end and have architecturally compliant application partners and not have to drive a ton of customization.

We wanted to have network abstraction and service abstraction layers so you could provide new services and not have to change your OSS and BSS systems completely when you changed your underlying network. We have had strong executive support for this major transformation effort. And to my knowledge, we are the only carrier in North America to drive something of this magnitude. We have enabled an environment that substantially simplifies the highly fragmented world that existed before. We have enabled a fully converged platform, and we have moved more than 1 million customers onto our new platform, and it's been business as usual on the customer care end.

On how the TM Forum can help:

I would like to see a faster pace of change across the industry. We have led in this space not by a desire to be first, but because others have not blazed the trail before us. I think the industry can do a better job of driving these changes. We really see the transformation of OSS as a core part of the strategic change in our business, and I don't feel that as within TMF we have elevated the importance of this to the level it needs to be.

We definitely need eTOM and the NGOSS framework. We use them as reference standards to look at where we are in our thinking and to make sure we are not re-inventing the wheel in places where we don't need to. But for us, it is a broader issue than just TMF. We certainly support and help drive TMF standards where we can, but based in our size as a Tier II carrier, standard are critical for us to move forward in this space. If I compare telecom to cable, we could certainly improve the way we adopt standard across the industry.

On the drivers of transformation:

IT is not driving our transformation. We partner with "the business" [folks] to drive transformational projects. We both see the business as an equal partner, and we both have critical roles to play. The business needs to play a lead role in driving change into operations and ensure we reap the benefits on either the revenue or cost side of projects.

We really expect significant revenue enhancements and faster product development times through this transformation. We also expect a broader adoption of our products. But we also expect a cost savings through improved customer churn, call center efficiencies and IT costs -- although I am not in a position to talk specifics. Both cost and revenue are equal from an initial business case perspective, but the strategic driver for us was much more on revenue and product development speed-to-market. We also felt we needed to prove out the convergent model.

On the sudden and growing interest in device management:

We are a long way from the early adopters who love to rip open their Linksys modems and configure them to death. The majority just wants to plug it in, have things work and have someone else take care of the complexity. And that is driving the need for a lot of device management at the edge. We view this as core to our future because to get further adoption of technology on the wireline side you need more IP devices in the home. And we have to manage the complexity of services because at the end of the day, we are the organization that gets called when there is a support issue.