TMW: Dancing to the beat of a BT drum

DALLAS--Phillip Dance, chief information officer for technology at BT, made it to his first TeleManagement World event this week. He survived a near-death experience to get here and came up for air from his company’s industry-changing 21^st Century Network transformation project to bring BT’s story of success to the OSS community, many of which played a vital role.

One of his messages was that the position BT finds itself in is no different from any other service provider: under competitive pressure. “We are the most contested service provider in the world. We have 60 active service providers trying to take our lunch,” Dance said.

However, unlike almost every other service provider in the world, BT has thrown caution to the wind and embarked on a $20 billion transformation project, mostly complete yet never quite finished at the same time.

“We survived a near-death experience when the bubble burst. We recognized we were in severe trouble, and with clever steerage of our aircraft now have 11 consecutive quarters of revenue growth,” Dance said.

BT steered down the path of economics and efficiency by reusing as much technology as possible, only customizing solutions close to the customer access point and automate processes such as testing. “If we didn’t automate testing, I don’t think we would have been able to pull off the stunt we did,” Dance said.

One stunt was to launch its IPTV service his month and bring what Dance said is perfect pixels to the people. In other words, the kid next door playing video games won’t affect your TV screen, he said.