Having an aim is one thing ­ – realising that aim is an entirely different proposition, especially when you have to create operational efficiencies, transform the workplace culture and manage a broad range of responsibilities.

Al-Noor Ramji is chief information officer (CIO) at BT, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. It recently posted revenues of £5.1bn and profits of £447m for the third quarter of 2007.

When he took over as CIO in May 2004, Ramji had one very clear but vital remit: to reduce BT’s running costs by consolidating older IT systems onto a single infrastructure, dubbed the 21st Century Network (21CN).

The plan is to eventually convert 16 different network environments, each with their own billing and operating systems, into a single converged network based on the internet protocol (IP), which carries voice over IP (VoIP) sessions rather than analogue voice calls across BT’s telecommunications infrastructure.

As CIO, Ramji is responsible for sketching the broader strategic direction of the company, but he also holds a number of additional posts. He is chief executive (CEO) of the firm’s research and technology business, BT Exact, and last year took on leadership of a new division, BT Design, agreeing to assume overall responsibility for improving the customer experience.

“My duties as a CIO have changed to cover a broader set of networks, products and processes, which are also split into the planning, design, construction and development of new products and services,” he says.

The transformation will enable BT to deliver not only better operational efficiencies, but also provide a platform for the delivery of new IP-based services and applications to business and consumer customers.

The measures implemented so far have yielded considerable cost savings; about $450m (£226m) says Ramji. But perhaps more important is the ability to significantly accelerate the time it takes to get new products and services to market.

Since the project began in January 2005, the speed to market has increased by more than 110 per cent and output has risen threefold.

Ramji’s expertise in reducing operational costs was partly honed from his time employed at Qwest Communications, where he was credited with reducing costs by $500m (£252m) in 18 months.

Though Ramji’s remit exists mainly at the group level, he takes an active interest in recruiting and developing new management talent at BT, though he regrets the loss of others who have left the organisation for what they felt were greener pastures.

“Everybody that reports to me also reports to another chief executive, so finding people who are ‘three circles’ people – ­ individuals who understand the customer, the company and the business ­ – is tough,” he says.

Not everybody at BT has been happy with the transformation. BT could well be perceived as a company of engineers and telecommunications specialists; people who are more concerned with delivering products rather than services, and happier facing racks of telecoms equipment than customers.

“While we succeeded in transforming the company into one IT world, we are losing a few people to companies that are perceived as being faster to address some segments of the market, and which have better stock prices,” says Ramji.

Andy Green, for example, BT’s former CEO of group strategy and operations, left the firm to become the chief executive of Logica at the beginning of the year.

Green led BT’s international business sales as CEO of BT Global Services for six years, from 2001 until BT’s restructuring was announced in April 2007.

And as part of the overhaul, BT is set to lose a total of 5,000 managers by the end of the current financial year – ­ but intends to recruit an additional 2,500 engineers in their place as it strives to improve its customer service record.

Most of these engineers are being drafted into Openreach, the division BT set up in 2005 in response to pressure from telecommunications regulator Ofcom, to allow rival broadband providers fairer and more equal access to copper telephone lines.

Clearly, the 21CN transformation and the associated consolidation have proved to be hard work ­ – and Ramji acknowledges that being responsible for company re-invention is not easy.

“Going through a transformation is a lot of fun, but it is not for everyone,” he says. “Because BT is so virtually based and globally so big, the challenge is to balance between people focus and customer service, while also accommodating customers at the leading edge who want to adopt things such as Web 2.0, and running regulatory areas such as Openreach.”

Ramji says his previous executive positions had a fairly narrow focus on IT, and it took time to fully encompass the role of CIO.

“I brought a combination of customer experience and what some people, notably the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, call being a strategic executive officer, which just means that you have broadened out to take the wider business perspective but have not let go of IT,” he says.

Ramji is also dedicated to providing BT customers with greater flexibility across the services they lease. Such flexibility includes individual products developed specifically for BT’s own customers, as well as the wholesale packages the firm provides to rival broadband suppliers and telecommunications companies.

“We used to call it the seven sisters: it involves traditional things such as looking after the customer’s master files, so that when we want to offer group-specialised processing, or bundle services in a different way, we can,” says Ramji.

“With wholesale providers, for example, we want to let them bundle things for their customers in a different way themselves, and let customers do the same trick in short form.”

After almost four years in the job, Ramji is well on his way to achieving the targets BT set in 2004. But the next few years will prove the ultimate litmus test of his success as the 21CN transformation nears completion.

CV: Al-Noor Ramji

• Al-Noor Ramji was appointed chief executive (CEO) of BT Exact and group chief information officer (CIO) of BT in May 2004. From 1 July 2007, he also became CEO of BT Design, the division responsible for the design and delivery of process, networks, products and systems, as well the 21CN global platform. In the same year, Ramji was also given the additional responsibility for customer experience for BT.
• Prior to joining BT, Ramji held the position of executive vice president, chief information officer and chief e-commerce officer at US telecommunications specialist Qwest Communications, where he led the IT and internal network functions and customer web hosting, and was responsible for business and billing operations.
• Before joining Qwest in 2001, Ramji founded and was group CEO of Indian software company Webtek Software. Prior to that he had been global CIO at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, where his main focus had been to deliver financial services through the web.
• Ramji is a chartered financial analyst and holds a BSc in electronics from the University of London. He is a non-executive director of global software products and solutions company Misys, as well as Indian firm Tech Mahindra, which specialises in providing IT services to the telecoms industry.

Key project: 21CN

Although BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN) project was conceived before his arrival at the company in 2004, Ramji has been instrumental in its implementation.

21CN represents a complete overhaul of BT’s telecommunications network and is designed to support new customer services and deliver improved operational efficiencies to the business.

“The 21CN programme is the project I am extremely proud of, it is completely testable and provable when we did the IT transformation,” says Ramji.

He has also forced a sea change in the attitude of BT employees, who are now much more customer-facing and aware of the fact that they need to demonstrate their value to the company.

The challenge, says Ramji, was persuading workers to concentrate less on being experts in their particular field, and more on how the customer perceives both BT and the services it delivers.

“Instead of thinking of capacity in terms of servers, we must think about it in terms of what the customer feels, whether they are able to double their transactions every day, for example. It sounds pretty boring but it is fundamental to what BT does,” he says.

“I managed to get 3,500 people from traditional IT into revenue IT – from being internally focused on back-office work to revenue producing work, and 3,100 of them are still at it.”