CDO interview – Harry Singh has to deliver BT Group platform vision – diginomica

BT Group’s latest boss has set out to make the venerable telco a platform business. CEO Allison Kirkby took the helm at the London headquartered BT Group last February, bringing experience from leading European telcos to a major change program at BT that aims to cut costs, simplify the structure, prepare the business for the future, and transition to a platform. What does this mean for Kirkby’s digital leaders? 
Harry Singh, Chief Digital Officer (CDO), with primary responsibility for the organization’s mobile network EE, met with diginomica and Gartner analysts at the research firm’s European event and shared an insight into his role. 
BT Group is working its way through a £15 billion infrastructure deployment, which aims to put full-fibre broadband into 25 million homes by December 2026. It claims to have already reached 14 million premises. Alongside upgrading its aging infrastructure, a major internal transformation has been underway for a number of years, begun by Kirkby’s predecessor, Philip Jansen. This plan aims to streamline operations across the diverse portfolio of business lines within BT Group, which include enterprise and household services, as well as mobile. Jansen’s plan includes reducing the workforce by 40% by 2030. 
The business has £20 billion of debt and is being disrupted by the communications move to technologies such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. As Katy Ring wrote for diginomica: 
BT, like telcos everywhere, is reappraising its role in the digital era.
CDO Singh says the business is ingrained into the infrastructure of the UK, has 30 million customers, over one million business customers, and achieved revenue of $30 billion in the previous year:
Our customers are not just buying connectivity, they are buying an outcome, which may be connectivity to game, for example. And for us, the strategy is to create platforms that will deliver that…How we build the services and outcomes on top of that is underpinned by the platforms.
Singh says the new leadership, along with the platform approach has begun a major culture change in the business and the relationships with its customers. He believes those customers are buying into the brand of BT as they see it as a platform for services such as connectivity, entertainment or identification. 
Greater collaboration and simplification of the business structure and product range are helping that, Singh says. As a CDO with responsibility for the EE mobile brand, he says: 
Even though my focus on a day-to-day basis is EE, my parallel responsibility is across the BT Group.
Although there are stated savings, Singh says there is also significant investment available for him and his digital leadership peers: 
If you look at the telco industry, it can be cost-driven as the margins are low, but we see an opportunity to grow sensibly and increase margin across the business.
Digital investment is not just about technology; Singh and the organization is looking to increase cross-functional working: 
It is about really unlocking how you bring teams together to really think about outcomes, and we are doing that in ways that have not been seen in the industry before.
As Hena Jalil told this title last year, moving to platforms has allowed BT Group to reduce the “spider’s web of legacy systems” that complicated routes to market. The One Business strategy has seen BT reduce the number of products it offers, while Salesforce has been used to create the BT Global Fabric, a new sales platform. This led to the rationalization of Salesforce instances at BT from seven to a single version, whilst the BT Service Platform has utilized ServiceNow to reduce the time to resolve issues. 
In our interview, Singh said these are not purely rationalizations but signs that BT is investing in its vendor relationships. On stage at the Gartner event, he added: 
We had 56 different applications and 79 ways of implementing ServiceNow. We are now down to one, and we are now getting to the scale of that as a group capability. We had multiple versions of Salesforce, and we are now down to just one, and we are leveraging these partnerships.
Singh went on to explain that BT has worked in close partnership with its suppliers: 
We had a platform, we had a partner, and we were trying to figure it out ourselves, and we made a few left and right turns. We had the same issues with ServiceNow and Salesforce, and it shows that if you partner properly with your hyperscalers and leverage their learnings, it enables good outcomes.
He explained how Google worked closely with BT in a major data project, which has led to 97% of BT data being on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), the first three months of that project were difficult, he says: 
Google came in and helped us through that and put us on the right path. Having the data organized means it is explainable.
BT has leveraged its size and scale to get the risk of major projects shared with the vendors, he says: 
Sharing the outcome is a model that we have tried to implement, so we are not just buying a service or technology; we are thinking about what is the outcome that we want to achieve, and you take some of that risk.
If BT reaches its self-set milestone of 25 million full-fibre connections the business won’t require as many engineers to physically connect premises to the network, so its transformation could have negative connotations for many staff. Its knowledge workers also face a similar fate as automation transforms customer services. Singh says BT is well aware of this and is working on the language and message of the transformation as it takes place: 
We are reframing our vernacular quite a lot. We get asked what is the end state, but we are reframing that to be what is our future state. It is subtle but quite important as the pace of technology change means there is not an end state; what we have is an event horizon.
That means as a leader, he and his peers have to be able to explain how they are investing in the company and what career paths may look like in the near future, he says: 
There are times when people have made bold statements, we have to be transparent and we have invested in our leadership community, so they understand the implications and engage with our community.
Singh believes AI, though part of the challenge to some roles at BT, is also part of a beneficial change to life as a BT employee. Within HR, generative AI is already being used to respond to basic HR requests, which he says often just require HR staff to find a resource, copy the relevant material, and send it back to the employee or line manager making the request, he says: 
Nobody is happy in that process. Now we are using generative AI to provide those answers back to our colleagues and that means our HR community can really focus on things that are really important like disciplinaries or promotions.
The CDO is honest about the current levels of AI hype and confusion: 
Where people are conflating it is generative AI and adoption. When machine learning models came about seven to eight years ago, it was going to be the death of the data scientist role and that all we would need is business analysts as we would all be citizen data scientists. To this day, we are all still struggling to hire data scientists.
You cannot argue with the sense of reducing applications and processes to simplify the business and enable it to respond to market conditions. In this, BT has done what so many other organizations in every vertical have done. Having covered BT for 17 years, it is an organization that so often says the right things, but its ability to deliver is consistently underwhelming. As a result, it remains a business that is unpopular with digital leaders and consumers alike; perhaps this time, things will be different. 
Disclosure – ServiceNow and Salesforce are diginomica partners at time of writing.
diginomica and the diginomica logo are trademarks of diginomica Limited.
© Diginomica Limited and its licensors 2013- 2025
Developed by BRAINSUM .

source
This is a newsfeed from leading technology publications. No additional editorial review has been performed before posting.