Ashish Gupta
Managing Director of Service Design, British Telecom (BT)
Ashish Gupta is Managing Director/President of Portfolio & Service Design (P&SD), BT Global Services. BT Global Services provides networked IT services to its multi-national customers across the United Kingdom, other European countries, the Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and the Americas. Mr. Gupta has dual accountability reporting to the CEOs of both BT Global Services and BT Innovate & Design (BTI&D), which designs and implements BT’s network, systems, and business processes for BT units globally. In his capacity as Managing Director/President, P&SD, Gupta has the responsibility for implementing global services network and IT strategy.
Before joining BT in 2004, Mr. Gupta spent about nine years with Tech Mahindra, an IT outsourcing company, in various roles, including as an IT delivery director responsible for the company’s CRM practice. Gupta holds an MBA in General Management from the London Business School.
Ed Yourdon: I like to ask a starting question, which is basically how you got to where you are now, because people were obviously not born into the position of CIO. So, how did you get here?
Ashish Gupta: Okay, so, how did I get here? If I just clarify the role that I do, because I am the CIO for BT Global Services. But I also have many other functions as part of my role.
Yourdon: Okay.
Gupta: Actually, the way we’re organized in BT is we have a federated CIO structure, so Clive Selley is the CIO for BT Group. We have four legal entities that are listed, and not separately but as part of BT Group, and each business unit has in effect a CIO that represents the interests of that group but also perform a wider function, so we call them not CIOs, but MDs or presidents of service design.
Yourdon: Ahh, okay.
Gupta: And we call them the presidents or MDs of service design because in effect, the responsibility of the role that we carry is more than the management of the IT infrastructure for the company. It’s also all about taking the ideas and product innovations functions and getting them converted into a set of designs and a delivered combination of people, process, systems and tooling capabilities for the business to use.
Yourdon: Okay.
Gupta: In effect, that’s what I do for GS. I have other roles: BT Global Services is into IT outsourcing, so network IT services is what we do. And I also have the responsibility for the function which is responsible for transforming the estate that we manage for our customers. So I have the team around the world—of 3,200—that works with the accountants to transform customer accounts, when we win bids, to move them onto the BT infrastructure.
Yourdon: Okay.
Gupta: So it’s a little bit wider than a typical CIO function. I do the systems for Global Services, and I make sure that we create the right tooling and capability for the operations teams. But I also run the portfolio for Global Services, so the product portfolio team works for me, and I also run this service delivery organization, on transition and transformation.
Yourdon: Okay. Well, it’s similar to what I’ve heard from virtually everybody else in terms of their responsibility for just keeping the lights on, just running the operation—but you’re much more involved in the product area than some of the other people that I’ve spoken to. But back to my original question.
Yourdon: Were you a CIO somewhere else before you took this position?
Gupta: No. It’s basically been an upward career progression. I started off as an IT engineer out of the university. I got through several different functional roles, whether they were development, design through project and program management. I used to work for an Indian IT outsourcing company.
Yourdon: Which one?
Gupta: Called Tech Mahindra, which I joined out of university in India. Tech Mahindra was a joint venture between The Mahindra Group and BT. Which is how it was instituted. And I worked there for a good nine years, at which point I basically moved to BT to join Clive Selley’s team when he was the CIO of BT Wholesale, which is one of our divisions.
Yourdon: Okay.
Gupta: And then from that it’s just been essentially career progression roles. I took on a role running the entire estate in BT, which was about 4,000 systems across the world. And then when Clive moved on to be the group CIO, I took on his erstwhile role—which was the CIO of Global Services, all the product president of portfolio and service delivery.
Yourdon: Okay. Well, that was the kind of story I expected to hear from everybody, and I’ve been staggered by the variety. And that’s given me the opportunity to ask you a question as to the importance or non-importance that you might feel about your foundation, your starting core as an IT engineer. How important is that to what you do today?
Gupta: For me, it is pretty important. You know, I feel the need to understand what it is the teams are doing, so it’s not management by management but by understanding how the nuts and bolts work. I do think though that it is a balance, because the CIO role is a lot wider as it’s defined today. It’s a very integral part of the business than it maybe has been in the past, when it was just about doing IT, so I think it’s not very surprising that we have economists or erstwhile chemists or whatever that are doing CIO functions because I think the way it’s evolved, a lot of the technology aspects.
A lot of CIOs are now actually increasingly people who are very good at outsourcing stuff because lots of corporations are deciding that maybe there are certain aspects of what the CIO did that aren’t core competencies. It isn’t something that they want an IT department for in-house and it actually might be better done through an outsourced partner.
Yourdon: Mm-hmm.
Gupta: And then what you need is somebody who’s very good at managing the partner as opposed to somebody who’s good at doing the IT itself. So I think there’s a good sort of mix and balance depending on what the core strengths and what the aspiration of the organization is, in terms of the individual that runs the booth as opposed to whether or not you graduated from engineering school and then made your way up through the ranks. So while it might be surprising, I think it’s actually quite healthy. It keeps it current.
Yourdon: One reinforcement that I heard from somebody is that having a strong engineering or IT background gives you, as he put it rather bluntly, have a good crap detector. If somebody is trying to sell you a story, you have a more fundamental sense of whether it’s exaggerated or complete rubbish or…
Gupta: I’d agree with that. I think that’s pretty fair.
Yourdon: One last question in this kind of starting area. As you’ve kind of moved up through the ranks, did you take any special training or go back to school to get any special degree?
Gupta: I did. I attended a set of business courses, just through the career, and then I actually invested two years doing an executive MBA. So I was doing that at the same time I was doing my previous role. I was doing it at London Business School. I did it while still on the job. That was pretty tough, because those programs are very extensive. But I found that to be extremely useful. A good grounding in the wider context.
Yourdon: Sure.
Gupta: I brought a whole bunch of “home truths” back to bear in terms of how engineers think about the world and how the broader context thinks about work, and I found that to be a very useful experience.
Yourdon: Well, I had expected to hear that from almost everyone, and it’s not been true very often. And the reason I ask these questions is that I run into a lot of junior IT people who say, “Someday, when I grow up, I want to be a CIO, just like the man sitting up there in that office.” So they’re very curious about how people get started and what kind of additional training might be appropriate or useful along the way, which is the reason for all those questions. But in terms of the main assignment or the main job that you do, you’d already mentioned that there were three main parts of it. How extensive a job is it just to provide the IT services to the internal organization? Is that a minor job or a major one?
Gupta: Well, no, it’s not. It’s not minor. Global Services is a very broadly distributed organization. We have employees in 170-odd locations around the world, and so making sure that they’re all connected to the corporate network and they have the right tools to do their job, whether it’s pricing tools, whether it’s all the management functions, whether it’s just functions that allow them to feel part of BT as an organization is quite a difficult thing, because we have rules and regulations about data protection acts. Each country has…
Yourdon: Each country has a different issue.
Gupta: Yeah. There’s all sorts of technology issues in terms of how people connect. There’s differences in the quality of different networks in each of the countries. But luckily for us, like I said, we have a federated structure, and a lot of the nuts and bolts, laptop services and what goes on the desktop, etc.—I don’t worry about that. It’s done by a group function that’s done centrally for every employee in BT.
Yourdon: Okay.
Gupta: I think my focus area is more about making sure that the people in Global Services have the right systems and tools that allow them to do the Global Services job, which is mostly to do with the billing or the management sales functions and the services operations function for managing the network and capabilities of that nature. So I think that is a pretty substantial element of my role. Especially given that we’ve built up through acquisition, and like every other big telco, we have challenges in terms of consolidating our systems instead.
Yourdon: Right.
Gupta: Keeping it current and making sure that we are on top of it as the technology evolves. You know, if you look at iPads and stuff, how do we make sure that we’re bringing them to bear at an affordable pace?
Yourdon: You know, you’ve mentioned the global nature of your work, and it’s very understandable from what you’ve said. But I must say, I’ve been surprised by the comment I heard from CIOs whom I had thought were just running a U.S. operation or a somewhat more local operation, who still said that basically they live in a global world now and if something happens, if there’s a revolution in Egypt or a tsunami in Japan, they expect to get a phone call at three in the morning because even if they don’t have their own employees in that affected part of the world, their company is expected to jump in. And, of course, you’ve got your own employees and operations that are affected by whatever may happen in the world.
Gupta: Absolutely. Japan’s a valid example because we had a team of people there and we were communicating with them every day to figure out how they were working and it’s very interesting to understand the dynamics of the fact that the tsunami affected the standard phone lines a lot more than they affected the voice-over-IP connections that were in their offices.
Yourdon: Oh, really?
Gupta: So actually, in some cases they were able to connect in their offices as opposed to from some of their homes. So, you know, it’s interesting how all the technology actually eventually finds a way to help in hard and terrible situations like Japan.
Yourdon: You know, there was a concept that got a lot of popularity a couple of years ago, called “hastily formed networks” about the need for local groups on the scene to somehow put together a network to support relief services and so on. Of course, in many cases the cell phone communications infrastructure is the most affected by an earthquake or something of that sort. Was that true in Japan?
Gupta: I don’t have data points, to be honest. I do know that there was disruption to the communications infrastructure. You could see it on the broadcasts on BBC, there were a lot of people communicating over Skype and all sorts of other things when they were doing interviews with broadcasters. But the extent to which they—well, clearly, in the towns and cities that had pretty much disappeared, the masts went with them, without a doubt.
Yourdon: Ahh, okay.
Gupta: I don’t know if there was a big amount of disruption to the mobile communications network in Tokyo and other parts because of the earthquake. I would have suggested that Japan, being a country that knows so much about earthquakes, they would have made sure that there was enough backup. I was amazed at the, the level of movement that some of these skyscrapers we were seeing without them coming down. I mean, those buildings must be engineered amazingly well. So I don’t really know the level of disruption that happened on the mobile network, but there was definitely disruption to the communications capabilities in that country.
Yourdon: Fascinating. Now, a second area that you mentioned a moment ago in terms of what your job involves has to do with the whole product area, and I wanted to explore just one aspect of that for a moment. When I spoke to the CIO of Microsoft, he said that while his department is not responsible for the products—they don’t create Microsoft Office—they are evolved enormously in the activity that he referred to as “dogfooding,” that is, being the first users of what will eventually become a product. Is there a lot of that here at BT?
Gupta: Yeah, it’s very interesting because, actually, our biggest customers for Global Services are CIOs. If you think about what we do in Global Services, because we provide outsourced network IT services, which is WAN, LAN, voice capability and infrastructure for CIOs around the world. So, yes, in a lot of ways, clearly, we dogfood our own stuff, because we provide our own network. We have our own voice communications capabilities, and we productize that stuff, and we sell that as a managed service to other CIOs. So in a lot of ways, yes, we eat what we produce because in a lot of ways that’s what we actually go to market with.
Yourdon: All right, one last question in that general area. To what extent are you expected to help invent possible products that just don’t exist at all right now, as opposed to taking a product idea that might have originated from a business unit and productizing that? That’s more understandable, but the idea of helping to invent the future…
Gupta: Yes, so, like I said, we run the portfolio team. I have a product management team that is keeping tabs with what’s going on in the market from an innovation perspective and bringing those ideas to bear in terms of innovating the next sets of products and how we take them to market.
Yourdon: Okay.
Gupta: So we do define the propositions. We do look at how we take those propositions and make sure that they fit the customer needs to the market segments we’re going into. We obviously do it very closely with the market units, because they have the customer relationships. But we’re also working very closely with the technology companies, be it the Microsofts, the Avias, the Ciscos of the world that produce the telecommunications capability, and then we look at how we can bring some of that technology to bear with a wider portfolio, including the network, to make life easier for the CIOs and to improve the productivity of their employees. That’s the value-add that we look to bring to the market.
Yourdon: Now does your group get involved in putting the services on, say, a mobile phone, or are you more just on the network side of things?
Gupta: No—our core proposition—we don’t have a mobile network division, but we do a lot of mobility services. So we will look at mobile-enabling voice, for instance, we will look at creating mobility applications for telecoms to do equipment management services for CIOs so that they can manage the mobile estate within their organization, they can manage spend levels and look at how they can control that.
Yourdon: Okay.
Gupta: So tools that allow CIOs to manage their own organization better. And, yes, we do have products and services that we can put onto mobile devices like iPads and iPhones and other things of that nature, but what we’re not doing is selling mobile networks, because we don’t have a mobile phone network, for instance, right? We have a different target marketplace.
Yourdon: Okay. The reason I asked that question is that the CIO of Verizon reminded me that among the many business partners they have to interact with, of course, there are all of the smartphone vendors. You know, the Apples and Samsungs and Nokias and so forth. And, of course, they’re busy, hopefully, innovating.
Indeed, one of the amazing things I heard in Japan—I can’t remember which mobile phone company I visited—was that they have to come out with at least two new models each year, because Japanese workers get two bonuses every year—which they often spend on telephones, so there’s a spring season and a fall season, whereas in the U.S., Apple comes up with a new iPhone once a year, not twice a year.
Gupta: Well, I just think that the productive cycles and the life cycles are getting much shorter and shorter all the time. And I think that’s a bit of a challenge for us as CIOs because we need to keep pace with it so we don’t start losing the advantage that some of those tools and technologies create for our employees. And, of course, in big enterprises like us, there’s a lot of other things to worry about, like how secure is the data on those devices? Are we making sure that we’re not opening ourselves to a threat of important company confidential information getting leaked out just through accident or through theft of these devices? And how do we secure all of those things, which to a large extent, makes our ability to now consume an iPad every year a lot harder? Because some of those things are not fixed in a day.
Yourdon: Yes.
Gupta: And I think a lot of policy thinking and shift needs to go on before we can fully exploit the ability to use these devices more widely through the organization because a lot of companies still have very locked-down estates, very stringent firewall rules, and they’re there for good reason. All we need to do is figure out the flexibility for an employee to use a mobile phone personally and for business use, yet not open the organization up to a threat—and I’m not sure we’ve all cracked how we do that just as yet.
Yourdon: [laughter] I would agree. Well, that moves me into the next area that I wanted to talk to you about, which is just the general question of new innovations and new developments that you see coming along. The one that has been universally mentioned by everybody, of course.
Gupta: Cloud? Well, yeah, I think the buzzword is “cloud computing.” How do we get rich on what is now well agreed as being the way we do computing going forward? And how do we make sure that we can leverage that asset and go back if you will to the—it’s very interesting to me because we all started off with big mainframes, that were all multi-tenanted and multi-processed and multi-tasked to our client-server model, to our mini-microcomputer model, back towards a mainframe model, which is really what cloud computing gives us.
Yourdon: Right.
Gupta: Except, of course, it’s way more powerful and way more flexible, and a lot more distributed, and so for us, it’s very important that we exploit that, not just for ourselves, but also for the propositions we take to market for our customers. And the architecture’s evolving rather well, isn’t it? So you’ve got more and more of the computing becoming virtualized and available on demand, on a sort of utility basis. You’re getting a lot of the application platforms getting more standardized. So you can exploit the broader developer community to create apps, and through the explosion of the app stores, be it on the iPad or on Android, or maybe even increasingly on the BlackBerry and the Windows platform, which are the four big ones as I see them at the moment.
Yourdon: Mm-hmm.
Gupta: See, you’ve got the IOS, you’ve got Android, you’ve got Windows Mobile, and then you’ve got the platform that BlackBerry uses. And, clearly, others will make plays in that space, but at the moment, from an enterprise market segment perspective, most people have one of those platforms. And then the combination of the ability to put applications on those devices is running on a more distributed, cloud-based computing infrastructure, with more platformized capabilities that allow application development and innovation to happen at greater speed is all good for us as enterprises.
We have the same challenges in terms of data protection, if you’re multi-tenanted, are we secure? And all of those policies have to be resolved and clarified. But, without doubt, people are moving toward virtualizing their estates, to getting to more applications that can be written on standardized platforms. The challenge we have, obviously, is a lot of enterprise businesses are heavily today dependent on big software manufacturers like Oracle, like Microsoft.
Yourdon: Right.
Gupta: Like all the others, and we have thousands and thousands of users deployed using these applications with licensing that’s based on old models. And how does that evolve to exploit the new compute-utility-based, per-use-based model? That’s the key challenge, and I think it’s very exciting for us, in terms of where the industry goes next.
Yourdon: One other aspect, of course, of the cloud computing concept is the scalability, the instant scalability that it provides. I heard a lot about that yesterday when I was visiting Ladbrokes because they like to say that their whole business is “peaky.” I think is the word he used. In the moments before a big race, a big football game, the demand spikes. Do you see that becoming more and more common among all of the major computer users, this idea of extremely rapid and fluctuating demands for scalability?
Gupta: Well, to be fair, what happens today is everyone has a set of peaky processes in their business. You know, whether they’re bill runs that happen at the end of the month, or whether there are events that happen at a certain time on a certain week on a certain day that needs a certain volume to be able to deal with it.
Yourdon: Right.
Gupta: And I think at the moment, most enterprises end up creating more capacity than they need, on an average running basis, purely because they have to deal with those peaks because they’re so important to their businesses. And so the benefits of being able to take different peaky businesses that peak at different times and run around a common shared infrastructure, economically just makes total sense.
Yourdon: Yeah.
Gupta: The challenge is getting the right mix of businesses on that platform and being able to deal with all the challenges around data protection and security and all of that stuff. But it’s inevitable. It makes so much economic sense to be able to do it on that basis where you’re not building hundreds of extra servers in your data centers. only because you’re going to get that peaky event on a Saturday night if you’re a broadcaster or end of the month because you run billing cycles or whatever the model might be. It makes total sense.
Yourdon: Well, that’s a good point. So you’re saying that it really affects everybody, because everybody has got their own peaks.
Gupta: And whether you are willing to live with the peak because it is so critical that if it failed, you’d be out of business.
Yourdon: Good point. Now, there’s another phenomenon that you’ve touched on with a couple of your comments already that I’d like to explore. Maybe one way to explain it is to say that the traditional world that most of us grew up with involved new products, tools, apps, etc., coming into the enterprise and being controlled and locked down and managed very carefully, if appropriate, pushed down to the employees, to say, “Here’s something that you can do at your desk.” And now you see a world—it’s certainly illustrated by Google and some of the individual phone apps—things come in at the consumer level. You know, “We’re going to sell something to the consumer out on the street.”
Gupta: Yeah.
Yourdon: And then it may come up into the enterprise, with some problems and opportunities, but the obvious example is that all around the world now, employees are bringing into the office some handheld thing and also the memory of what they were doing last night at home on a computing device that’s much more powerful than what’s sitting on their desk. How does that impact your day-to-day world? This kind of upward movement, from the consumer up into the enterprise?
Gupta: So, if I was honest, that in itself isn’t our biggest issue. From my perspective, right? I think we might be missing a trick in terms of exploiting it better, but we have other challenges to sort out at the moment. I think the bottom line is there is increasingly becoming a need for convergence of devices between individuals and their personal use and what they do in the enterprise, because everything is getting so seamlessly integrated. People work all sorts of hours.
Yourdon: True.
Gupta: You know, they’ll be working at eight o’clock in the evening over dinner sometimes and sometimes they’re at work and they might want to do something that’s personal, and that level of flexibility though creates a stickiness of the employees with the organization ’cause it gives them the flexibility to maybe work, achieve their objective in life and at work. And not feel like the two have to be separated out, which is, “Nine-to-five I use a PC. It’s locked down. I can never do anything else. And when I go home, I can look after my bills and whatever else on a different and more powerful device and with a set of apps.”
Yourdon: Right.
Gupta: So I think increasingly we have to leverage the convergence of an individual as an individual at work and at home and find a way to exploit the upward-based apps, but we have to find a way to make sure that we do that in the context of securing the enterprise data, make sure that we are within the bounds of the regulation we operate within, and those are the problems that we have to tackle and be able to deal with.
Now, I haven’t got all the answers, and we do have lots and lots of people that have abilities today to connect their working with their iPads or their iPhones. We have sort of agreements as to how that’s managed and what the expectations are, like it has to be password-protected, it has to go through our VPN, it will get scanned, etc., so that we’re keeping all of those checks and balances in place. But has that got us to the point where it’s a single-device model and your home PC and your work, or your home laptop and your work laptop looks exactly the same? I wouldn’t say that it is.
Yourdon: Okay. But, if I understood you correctly, at the moment your primary marketing thrust and your product development thrust is still aimed at the enterprise first and foremost. With the expectation that it’s eventually going to involve all of these employees who are doing things at home and bringing into work, and somehow those worlds have got to be married up.
Gupta: Well, if you look at what’s happening—we do a lot of work in the unified communications space, which is all about unifying the messaging capability with the voice capability with your contacts and your e-mail and all of that good stuff. Increasingly, all the tools that we would take in the enterprise would provide capability, would federate your contacts between your personal contacts and your work contacts, so that you can bring them all together and make it easier for employees to use a more unified capability for how they work.
And so we have tools and we have products that are targeted and aimed specifically in that area for employees within enterprise organizations. So, by definition, with the nature of the architectures that are being built up, there is a convergence happening in terms of innovation and application development anyway, I think.
Yourdon: Okay. There’s another aspect of all of this that I’d be curious to hear your opinions about. Partly because of all these developments we’ve talked about, the price of technology and devices is dropping to the point where almost anybody can afford it, including large parts of the world that previously could not afford anything at all. And so we’re now seeing enormous new markets in Africa and parts of Asia, with hundreds of millions of people having handheld devices that allow them to do productive, useful things. And I’m curious to what extent a company like BT is trying to capitalize on that or seeing that as a tidal wave?
Gupta: Well, I think, in a lot of ways, we enable a lot of other enterprises that are growing in those areas. If you look at FMCG1 businesses, you look at what companies like several of the ones that we work with today are doing; they’re all expanding, they’re all seeing growth in Africa, and in a lot of ways we are building the network infrastructures that allow them to get there.
Yourdon: Okay, okay.
Gupta: To be able to then connect their employees in those countries back with the rest of the world. So, the mobile traffic explosion that’s going on and the connectivity and the ability to be able to get stuff into those countries and enable the factories, enable the employees is happening. We can see it going on.
And we’re absolutely at the heart of empowering companies going into these growth markets but also making sure that we’re not just helping them with their employees there, but also bringing back and connecting those employees to make them part of the bigger, broader enterprise that they work in. So in a lot of ways, us and a lot of other telcos, our core business is to make sure we keep people connected, wherever they might be. And I think we’re playing a very important role in terms of keeping the world more and more connected. It keeps getting smaller, every month, every year.
__________
1 Fast Moving Consumer Goods.
Gupta: There are technologies that bring people closer together, and we’re certainly at the heart of making sure that the networks we build, the resilience we put into them, the capital we’re investing allows companies to do that easier and easier all the time.
Yourdon: Well, that’s an interesting point, because it does all require a network. Vast networks. That sometimes gets overlooked, but you guys are kind of in the background, so to speak, making all that possible. It really is an amazing kind of shift that you see. Google Apps, for example, is free. It may be supported by ads, but it’s free, so the social transformation is just phenomenal. But I think that your point is well taken. If you didn’t have a network there in the background, it would be irrelevant.
Gupta: We were having this conversation as part of one of the subforums of the IMF2, which has to do with cloud and enablement of communities, through the ability to leverage the cloud and what the cloud brings to them. And I think one of the big discussions we were having there is, “The cloud’s all well and good if you can get at it.” And, really, that’s why there needs to be continued focus on the infrastructure that allows communities to access the cloud. Because if you can’t get at it, it’s not really there to help you with.
Yourdon: Hmm.
Gupta: So, yes, you can get Google Apps for free, but if you didn’t have a mobile network operator building a mobile network or a telecommunications operator connecting that country up with the World Wide Web, providing the bandwidth that’s required to be able to truck all that traffic through, yes, you can deploy smart phones, make them cheap as chips, but they couldn’t get anywhere near what customers actually need to be able to use.
Yourdon: Yes. Very good point. Now, you mentioned bandwidth, and I can’t help but ask a question here. Being an iPad user or an iPhone observer, I’m sure you can anticipate this, which is that the bandwidth requirements of a lot of those devices are an order of magnitude greater than they were when we were just doing simple voice communications. I almost never use my iPhone for ordinary phone calls. It’s all web browsing and that kind of thing. How much of a problem is that going to be in the future, and as the people who have smart devices are doing far richer things with astronomically greater bandwidth requirements than would have been the case ten years ago?
__________
2 International Monetary Fund
Gupta: It’s a very significant problem already. You only have to roam around in India to figure out how difficult it is—you can have a full signal but still not be able to do anything with it ’cause the networks are getting heavily congested by the devices. You know, the operators are investing huge amounts of capital to increase the size of the pipes, to bring new technology to bear. We’re helping a number of the operators here in the UK, for instance, with being able to trunk more and more data off the cells. Providers are providing fourth-generation LTE networks.
Yourdon: Right.
Gupta: All of it is being accelerated because of the speed at which the smart devices are gaining traction, the success of the platforms and the applications on them mean more and more people are using it, much, much faster. How many iPads were sold in the first six months? Was it over a million devices were sold in two months or so? Some ridiculous number like that.
Yourdon: Well, they had sold 15 million when Steve Jobs got up to announce the iPad 2.
Gupta: There we go. So I think it sold a million in the first four weeks or so. And the more that happens, the more pressure it will put on bandwidth and network infrastructure. I think people also expect them to be more reliable, ’cause they get so used to using some of these applications. They become so integral to their day-to-day life. There is now more than ever the expectation that these networks are not only quick and fast but also very reliable. So I think the core network infrastructure is still a very integral part of the speed at which all of this is happening.
Yourdon: Now in terms of growing all that, is that primarily a capital problem or a technology problem?
Gupta: Well, it’s a bit of both, because the technology needs to evolve at a pace which allows us to build those networks at price points that are commensurate with the price points at which customers are expecting to be able to pay for some of this stuff.
Yourdon: Right, right.
Gupta: So the cost per unit of bandwidth or the price per unit of bandwidth drops significantly year on year, every year. The costs of building those networks needs to trend the same way and a lot of that is enabled by just more innovation, better technology, and greater scale clearly helps. But a lot of that plays in the mix. It’s a very interesting dynamic on cost and price and how do we as providers of networks enable this ever-growing desire and requirement for bandwidth but, equally, make sure that we’re making good positive returns in helping the businesses, other businesses and customers flourish?
Yourdon: Interesting. Let me turn the conversation around about 180 degrees now and talk about the dark side of the force, the problems, the things that keep you awake at night. You’ve already mentioned security. That’s kind of an obvious one, and the related issues of privacy and so forth. Are there other problems associated with the technology that you work with that keep you awake at night?
Gupta: Yeah, I guess the big challenge for us is speed. How do we make sure that we can innovate and deliver products and services, both to our internal users but, importantly, to our customers at the speed at which they’re expecting us to?
Yourdon: And also maintaining enough control and integrity.
Gupta: Absolutely. So how do we get through the innovation part and how do we build the tools, how do we build the capabilities, how do we take them to market at a price and at a speed that is commensurate with the rate at which customer demands are changing? So one of our big challenges is how do we do that? And then underpinning that on a whole bunch of other challenges in terms of skills: how do we capture the right skills that we need to be able to move the business forward from a technology perspective? How do we retain them? How do we keep them excited? How do we stay relevant?
Yourdon: Ahh, okay.
Gupta: There’s a big, there’s a big war out there in terms of skills. There’s a lot of people working in very different ways. I saw one of your questions about, you know, what differences are we seeing in terms of the graduates that are coming through?
Yourdon: Yes, I’m going to get to that in just a moment, because it is a big area, yeah.
Gupta: But I think the big challenge for us is really as an IT function, we need to continue to reduce the cost of IT for the organization, but do it at the same time as improving the quality and speed at which we get capabilities delivered. And then from an innovation and product perspective, we have to do much the same in terms of delivering new products and services, innovating but doing it quicker, doing it cheaper, and getting it out there faster. And I think those would be some of the biggest challenges that I face on a day-to-day basis.
Yourdon: There’s a slight variation on this that I’ve asked all the other CIOs about. When you’re dealing with these issues and problems, you’re also working with other business units and product managers and marketing people, and so forth.
Now, in the old days, when I got started in the field, we were the experts and they didn’t know anything about computing, so they would come to us and say, “Please tell us what we need to do.” And even then, these peers of ours were very smart and very successful and had very strong opinions and certainly felt that they knew how to run their business better than we did.
Now they sometimes feel that they know how to run the IT business better than we do, so that you can’t order them about what to do and what not to do, even though you may seem some opportunities that they’ve missed or some dangers that they’re unaware of. How do you influence them to deal with these problems and developments that, that you’ve talked about?
Gupta: Yeah, it’s a very, very good point because there are lots of people out there that do understand the technology better because it’s become so integral to how people work, not just at work but at homes. I think it comes back to engagement and governance and being clear about what it is the objectives are the organization is trying to achieve and then aligning around them. I don’t think there’s any IT organization that does everything everyone wants at any given point in time.
Yourdon: [laughter]
Gupta: The issue is agreeing and being able to communicate effectively what challenges we’re trying to resolve, make sure that we have the broad governance and buy-in from that organization, be it through capital investment forums or decision-making bodies that can agree and then communicate not just what we’re doing, but why it makes sense.
And then good quality execution of those elements, because I think people get frustrated at two levels. One is, “I can’t have what I want,” but, more importantly, “I can’t have what was promised I could have.” And I think you need to sort of solve problem number two before you can start tackling problem number one.
Because if you’re not resolving what you promised to deliver or what you offered you would do for the organization in time and cost, then there’s a level of issues in terms of confidence and the willingness to go on the journey.
Yourdon: Yeah, a lot of the other CIOs have said the first thing you need to do is establish trust. Because if they don’t trust you, particularly because you’ve not delivered what you promised, then it doesn’t really matter what you say.
Gupta: Yeah.
Yourdon: So that’s got to be the first point. I had an interesting comment from one of the electric utility companies in the U.S., who said, “Just because you can use Excel doesn’t mean that you’re a programmer.” Everybody thinks they understand a lot about IT, but she said, “We have to sometimes bring our outspoken business leaders into some of our more complex areas and show them that, in fact, it’s a hell of a lot more complex than they ever imagined.” And I have to assume that’s true for some of what you do as well.
Gupta: Yeah, I think there is absolutely a broad expectation out there that fundamentally there must be a way that they could do it faster than us if they just had control of all the functions, so we centralize all this stuff. Without doubt, we have to have those conversations and say, “Look. Here’s the reasons why that aspect of the problem that we’re trying to solve cannot be fixed through a quick fix, which takes two weeks and is done.”
Yourdon: Right.
Gupta: Because, actually, in doing that, we create a whole suite of other problems that will come back and bite us later, and this is the reason why it has to be done this way, this is why it costs what it does, and we’d all like to do it faster, but this is the reason why the plan looks like the plan and that’s why we will execute this plan. So those conversations, just like every other department, or IT department, in the world—in fact, many other functional service departments in organizations, not just CIOs, have to go on that journey.
Yourdon: Yeah.
Gupta: Because you have the same conversation with an HR manager or the head of HR: “Why can’t I just get XYZ skill and hire them at will?” Well, there are reasons why you want to balance your resources a certain way, you want to do things, you want to train your light body of a strategy for what you’re enforcing in an organization to look like, the same way you need to have a strategy and an execution plan for what the technology looks like. And you have to go through those hard conversations and have those discussions.
Yourdon: You’ve used one other word in that answer that also resonated with me. When I asked that question of the CIO at Educational Testing Services, the people that do all the college placement exams in the U.S., he said, “We constantly have users coming to us saying they want to outsource. They don’t want to have to everything through central IT. And our response is, ‘Fine, if you want to, but let us show you the detailed cost breakdowns, the detailed measurements, and then make sure that the vendors you’re talking to give you equally detailed measurements, and if you can get it cheaper, God bless you. Do it.’”
Gupta: Absolutely.
Yourdon: But if you don’t have the measurements, you don’t have the data, he said it’s very hard to carry on a rational conversation. And, of course, one of the dilemmas we’ve always had in the IT profession is that we’ve, we’ve not been all that good at measuring things.
Gupta: My personal opinion—this is a personal thing—is it’s very dangerous to outsource something that you either ill understand or couldn’t resolve yourself.
Yourdon: [laughter] Yes.
Gupta: Because how do you know that the outsource is actually being effective? And how do you know that in the outsourcing, we aren’t mortgaging away a capability that is actually required to drive the business further forward? So, you know, at a minimum, you should be able to fix it yourself.
Yourdon: Right.
Gupta: You might be able to do it faster ’cause the skills might exist somewhere else or the organization that’s taking on the outsourcing has economies of scale and can leverage a certain type of people that can do it better, but if you don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve, and you’re outsourcing it because outsourcing is what the mantra is, then in a lot of such cases I would suggest that the outsource doesn’t work.
Yourdon: Yeah, I would agree with that.
Gupta: You end up with contract breakages, unhappy customers, big fights with your suppliers about what you thought you were getting and what you’re then going to get, and all of that to me is about not having been crisp and clear about exactly what we’re trying to achieve through the outsource.
Yourdon: I agree. The last major area I wanted to talk about before I ask you my final question had to do with this generational issue you saw in my list of questions. You know, every company these days is now facing a new generation of employees, not just in the IT department but throughout the organization, that grew up as digital natives, and I’m curious what your opinion is of them. Is it good, is it bad?
Gupta: Well, I don’t think it’s good or bad. I think it’s different. I think the population coming to work at the moment does expect to be more mobile. They expect to be more flexible, and I think they are more easily frustrated by the constraints that you might put around lots of procedural processes that they feel, because of the way they’ve grown up—you know, when I grew up in Mumbai, I used to have two TV channels that were only ever available from six o’clock in the evening till ten o’clock at night. These days, you know, the TV is on 24/7.
Yourdon: With 500 channels.
Gupta: They’re watching 500 channels. They’re watching something on TV and communicating with their friends and SMSing away on their mobile all at once. And they’re just used to being able to be better connected to be able to do things in a certain way. And then when they come into an organizational construct, they kind of don’t expect to be able to radically change their mind and work in a context that’s very different, not just from an IT perspective, but just generally in terms of the processes and the procedural rules that exist within an organization and how they work.
So I think that as the mix changes and as the population gets more Generation Y or X, I think we will need to and will see a shift in the dynamics of how organizations work. Just by the pure nature that a lot of these people that will come through the ranks know a certain different way of living, not just working, and they will hope to mold the way they get work done in that way.
And I think it will bring innovation, so it’s a challenge, because they have to be integrated, they need to feel like they can take the business forward, and they need to feel like they can be successful. But at the same time, they’ll want to start seeing a collection of them trying to change the way certain things get done. Through better collaboration, through tooling, through whatever. And I think we all have to just at least be conscious of that and deal with it as best as we can.
Yourdon: Do you see any, any disadvantages or risks or problems with the younger generation? Do they create problems for you?
Gupta: I personally see that the generation at the moment is a little disadvantaged. The state that the younger generation is in, because the state of the economies at the moment and the fact that pension ages are being increased, basically means that people will have to stay at work for longer. Which means, by definition, that the average age of an organization will move to the right, just because everyone needs to work longer to create the nest egg that they can use in retirement.
Yourdon: That’s true.
Gupta: Which then means, by definition, we’re not creating as many opportunities for the younger population. So I think they’re going to struggle a bit, which is not fair for them, but it’s the reality of where we are, and I think that’s going to create a level of tension in terms of figuring out how they get frustrated about not being able to get into the workforce, into the right sort of jobs and roles as quickly as they might want to.
So I think that while there was the opportunity generation, I think at the moment the guys coming out of the university face some reasonably challenging times in terms of the number of jobs that are available and how they get hired, which is why companies like Google and others are doing so well, because they’ve started up fresh, they don’t have a legacy of lots of people and a very strict employment contracts that have worked in large organizations for many, many years, and they are being able to hire all of these newer generation people with new ideas, and that, I think, is an advantage for them.
Yourdon: I’ll give you an amazing statistic. When I spoke to the CIO of Google, I had just seen an article in the paper, and I confirmed it with him. They get 75,000 job applications a week.
Gupta: That is amazing.
Yourdon: It is. He said, “We have millions of résumés on file here.” Just staggering. Well, let me ask one final question—and it’s kind of an obvious ending question. Where do you see yourself going from here? Are you going to be a CIO for the rest of your life, or do you have aspirations for anything other?
Gupta: To be honest, I’m 36. I’ve done a lot of stuff in a reasonably short period of time, so when I get asked that question, I guess for me it’s about constantly being able to achieve outcomes for the business and for customers. I haven’t sat down and mapped out the route to being a president or to being a king or anything like that.
Yourdon: [laughter]
Gupta: It’s worth it for me at the moment to be able to be reasonably opportunistic in finding things that are of interest to me, and then moving on. I move on when I feel like the job and the role I’m doing is done. I can move on and let somebody with new ideas come in and I can go do something else. Do I want to be a CIO all my life? You know, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I quite enjoy working with technology. I have a good background in it, and actually, it’s quite a fulfilling job. It will kill me, though, because the CIO function is not a 9-to-5 job.
Yourdon: No, it’s a 24-hour job.
Gupta: It’s very, very intensive, obviously. And obviously, that needs to play in to how long and how far you wish to go in the work-life balance sort of sense, but equally, I’d be more than happy—’cause I already do some of this in terms of portfolio and business alignment—to look at opportunities to move laterally, to doing more P&L escrows or deciding to do something different. But, we’ll see what comes.
Yourdon: The reason I ask that question is that the traditional picture of the CIO is that it’s the end of the line, and a lot of the people I’ve interviewed are in their fifties or sixties. In fact, I interviewed one CIO who had just resigned—in fact, I take it back, there were three. One man was in his eighties—it’s understandable that he said, “I don’t want to be a CIO anymore.” But, particularly in the technology companies, you, the CIO of Google—I guess he’s in his thirties, but a lot are young people who have risen relatively quickly and they’re in an industry that’s moving quickly, and so they’ve got still 20 or 30 years ahead of them. And as several CIOs have told me, they never planned for this job, and they’re not going to plan for the next job. Opportunities present themselves, and when the right opportunity comes along, they’ll—
Gupta: Jump and decide what to do then. Yeah, it’s a way of doing it. There are certain people who have a career mapped out and know where they want to get to. There are others like me who are happy that I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve so far. I’m happy with what I’m doing, and I’m not out looking for the next step or the next thing just yet.
Gupta: It’ll come.