BT Global Services boss falls on sword BT issued a surprise profit warning this morning and saw its share price tumble by almost a fifth as a result. The telco announces results for the third quarter on 13 November. But it told the Stock Exchange this morning that although revenues had grown in line with expectations, profits have missed targets, especially in BT …
No real surprise on the BT Global Services front - that's the bit of the company that has the NHS Connecting for Health albatross latched onto its neck. The way that project's going and the extent to which BT is involved, it's a wonder that BTGS revenue hasn't shrunk and left them facing a loss.
If things are the same as they were two or three years ago, they'd be better off moving staff away from that bloated monstrosity of a contract and redeploying them to other projects that actually have some chance of creating profitable income (as opposed to hassle, delayed payments and penalty charges).
Grabbed my coat a did a runner back in 2006 - I could have stayed on that particular gravy train burning taxpayers' money for years, but doing so would have disturbed my otherwise guilt-free and peaceful slumbers.
I worked for BT GS once. They had out sourced a project to India to save money, but then they didn't like the poor indian chaps that came over to lead the project in the UK.
Cue phone call to me asking me to work for said Indian company and provide a "European Face" for the BT people to work with.
It struck me as potentially racists to say such things, but i dont think it was meant that way..
It meant that BT simply could not deal with people from a different culture.... no surprise when you experience the culture that is BT!!
Far too much outsourcing and offshoring in GS. add that to the pointless layers of management and process and you have a stinky org.
Funnily enough, BT had been trying to model the entire company after the "great performance" of GS... I wonder what they'll do now?
If they're sensible, they'd use some Agile techniques such as Scrum to flatten the hierachy, get more people doing value work, and increasing productivity, customer satisfaction and quality.
They won't though... they've promoted an accountant again who'll purely focus on costs, (like cutting training and travel) which will hamstrung productivity, and they'll keep offshoring to reduce costs.. after all if you're producing junk - you might as well produce junk cheap.
So so sad.
BTGS suffering is unlikely to be due to subscription losses from Phorm. GS don't have much to do with broadband service provision like that - they're the corporate networking, IT outsourcing, big Government and commercial contract arm of BT. (Yes, BT do actually have such a thing.) They do stuff like NHS Connecting for Health ('nuff said), computer systems for various UK councils and Government agencies, stock market trading platforms, etc. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the CfH project (or "the almighty NHS care records cock-up" as you might prefer to call it) was one of the significant contributory factors to BTGS' relatively lacklustre performance.
Ironically, I've heard from one or two folks that most of the people who work for BTGS - particularly the engineering staff - are about as anti-Phorm as you can get and think that it's a bloody stupid idea that is likely to do BT a lot of harm. Unfortunately, the assorted management clever buggers in BT Retail and elsewhere don't have a history of listening to their own technical staff, much less that bunch of overpaid, geeky IT swots in Global Services.
That's one of the saddest things about BT. There is actually a fair number of reasonably decent, competent engineers and techies who want to do a good job (by and large). However, they're overburdened and hamstrung by too many layers of clueless middle and senior management and a load of horrendously over-complex internal procedures (some historical, some due to regulatory requirements, many due to the aforementioned bloody awful management).
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