IT Week:Fujitsu Services is probably still best known as the former ICL. As the firm's chief executive, how do you think the company has changed?

David Courtley: We started by fixing basic problems like poor contracts and waste. Since then we've worked on service quality and productivity - both the engineering and customer satisfaction aspects. The next step is to build up business. We have been successful in our heartland of government, but we can also be more assertive in the commercial sector.

You have won some joint bids with, for example, Capgemini. Are such partnerships just a matter of gaining scale?

I think that we recognise how appropriate partnering is, and how well it goes down with big customers and with government. We're a big fan of the Intellect IT Supplier Code of Best Practice that the OGC [Office of Government Commerce] has championed. Part of it is about being responsible about resourcing and so on. Partnering is one way of dealing with that. It stops single points of failure.

You mentioned improved service quality. How do you measure that?

We have many measures. First of all there's the contractual service level agreement [SLA]. We monitor those closely, and we know we have an improving performance.

Service guarantees matter when a system is up and running. But problems can often arise before that stage...

As far as big projects are concerned, we do very systematic reviews and, in addition, our customer satisfaction programme is pretty comprehensive. We use a third party [research firm] and our satisfaction scores are monotonically increasing. Partly we've recognised that meeting SLAs isn't enough. These days customers expect suppliers to be proactive: to work with them on strategy, to help with innovation. And if things go wrong, they expect a sensible response. The first resort shouldn't be the contract, it should be fixing the problem.

So what makes projects go wrong?

Project management is a constant challenge, and I don't think the IT industry is as mature as other sectors. Much has been made of [the potential benefits of] software reuse. But in fact the big integrators don't really do reuse. Expertise is reused, and not everything is built from scratch, but large, distributed IT systems have typically been wrought a piece at a time. The result has been some very complex systems. When it comes to reliability and maintainability, there's a problem.

What's your answer?

We've been looking at how Fujitsu works with customers in Japan. Typically, the Japanese are very good at taking concepts and, frankly, implementing them properly. The attention to detail that pervades a company like Toyota led to the sea change in quality [of cars]. Fujitsu is trying to do the same for IT. We call it Triole. It's about destruction-testing of systems in a laboratory setting before deployment. That enables a step-change improvement in reliability and cost of ownership. These are not new words, but a new attitude.

The downside could be slower delivery.

Absolutely, and that's why you've got to be disciplined about reuse. This is really taking off in Japan, where Fujitsu is dominant with 40 percent of IT services. So we're in a great position to deploy this. What we're finding is a lot of interest. CIOs have their tactical battles, but they also need to talk about long-term strategy.

ABOUT DAVID COURTLEY

David Courtley was appointed chief executive officer of Fujitsu Services in April 2004.

He joined Fujitsu Services in July 2001 as chief operating officer.

Courtley has also served as managing director of services giant EDS in the UK, and as chief executive officer of E-people-serve - a BT/Accenture joint venture.