'We have a strong continuous improvement and learning culture': An interview with BT Enterprise Managed Services' Reece Malt

Reece Malt, Senior Manager Technical Services at BT Enterprise Managed Services on the last 12 months' successes

BT has been shortlisted in five UK IT Industry Awards categories Best User Engagement Project of the Year, Digital Transformation Project of the Year, Emerging Technology Project of the Year, Development Team of the Year and Automation Project of the Year. We asked Reece Malt, Senior Manager Technical Services, Enterprise Managed Services for his thoughts.

Computing: BT needs no introduction, but perhaps you could give us some background to your area?

Reece Malt: BT is one of the world's largest communications services companies, serving customers in the UK and in a further 180 countries worldwide. Our main activities include fixed-line phone, broadband, mobile and TV products and services, as well as networked IT services.

BT Enterprise serves UK business customers and Enterprise Managed Services (EMS) is a core capability for our enterprise business, underpinning solutions for corporate UK and government institutions, delivering the complex integrated solutions our customers require in an evolving and demanding world.

What makes you different from other technology companies?

BT is here to ‘connect for good' - for the good of our customers, the good of our colleagues, and the good of our country. At the core of our strategy is the convergence of BT's leading network capabilities to provide unrivalled customer experiences, in both fixed and mobile services.

What BT does matters. BT is woven into the fabric of the UK and plays a vital role in delivering secure services to organisations around the world and underpins much of the UK's critical national infrastructure, servicing government, commercial and residential customers.

What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?

The last 12 months has been pivotal for EMS as an organisation. We've delivered a fantastic digital capability for our customers which is now the benchmark for others to aspire to.

Our people have led the way in the industry with ITIL4 accreditations, and we were recently announced as the first company in the UK to publish our achievement of CMMI certification Level 3, a benchmark we share with NASA!

We have pulled all of these elements together into a finely balanced and high performing ecosystem which has optimised to the max the value of our people, processes and tooling in the last 12 months. It's the evolution of our ecosystem and the service it allows us to offer our customers that is our proudest achievement.

What are you working on this year?

We're delivering advanced digital diagnostics and artificial intelligence to offer a more pre-emptive service for our customers and allowing our people to focus on optimum value activities. We're evolving our ecosystem for our secure customers and taking learning from services we offer our secure customers to offer new cyber security options for our commercial customers. And we're offering our ITIL capabilities to an extended customer base as well as increasing our customer self- serve options via the Enterprise Managed Portal, which our customers helped us develop.

We already have a strong continuous improvement and learning culture and in the year ahead we plan to evolve this further by expanding our DevOps capability.

We are a highly professional and technical organisation and plan to use that capability to enhance the experience of our people and our customers by empowering our engineers to automate processes and take part in our continuing professionalisation and technical accreditation agenda.

Why are events like the UK IT Industry Awards important to the IT industry?

So many reasons! They're important for our colleagues as they help us acknowledge our collective achievement; they help us appreciate everyone's individual contribution, and they serve to motivate us to do better and greater things. Events such as this helps us attract new talent and retain existing talent, who doesn't want to work for a company that wins things?

These events also allow us to benchmark where companies are or aspire to be and give great peer learning opportunities. They provide credibility to any organisation, if you can win awards what better marketing material can there be!