Cook’s Collaborative Edge

One of the biggest current questions in telecom is: Will an old line telco – a local exchange carrier in the US, or a national carrier in Europe, ever transform itself into an open, information-carrying grid?

James Enck notes some interesting straws in the wind in the aftermath of the telco 2.0 meeting in London earlier this month.

British Telecom, the formerly stodgy national carrier of the United Kingdom, is more than two years into major reform. It has already created a “loop co” or access to basic infrastructure division. As James pointed out elsewhere in his telco 2.0 coverage, there are plenty of bright talented frustrated people who seem to know what is to be done but are management constrained from doing it.

I really wonder reading James comment about an emerging camp which says, “We should stop fighting in the services arena, restructure ourselves around infrastructure and reappraise how we can derive value at the edge,” if BT is not about to treat us to a telco 2.0 transformation. To do this BT will have to install and empower management from the top down to the middle ranks. There is evidence that this is happening. Two weeks ago I chronicled the view of the CTO and CIO at the top level.

Now in the next level they have installed JP Rangaswami who in the past 6 years as Global CIO at Dresdner as pushed the envelop on these issues farther than just a handful of other executives around the world.

JP’s blog – Confused of Calcutta calls itself a “blog about information.” It can be said that connecting one person to another in a single voice conversation old telcon style is a plodding and pedestrian a use of technology as you can get these days. JP using blogs and wickis, turned things upside down and inside out at Dresdner.

I have only met him in person once for about 10 minutes in June of last year at supernova in San Francisco, but during that brief moment he stated that his next major objective was to give his customers full access to and control over their personal information. I am here to learn he said. He was a study in contrast compared to the CTO from ATT who had several underlings there preparing his talk and schedule in advance then whirled in - gave a boring sermon talking market speak all the way and then whiled out to his next occasion to pontificate. He knew all the answers.

JP does not, and I have never run into someone who has made his thoughts publicly available in his blog beginning in February of this year who has focused so totally and carefully on all the goings on at the edge. JP has a knowledge and a network that makes him one of the strongest candidate imaginable to revolutionize BT’s relationship to its customers.

JP has not recently come to some grand revelation but has had sensitive antennae out for a good many years. My case in point: Chris Locke, Doc Searles, Rick Levine and David Weinberger published the Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999. JP read it and in 2000 Chris’ speakers bureau had him on a plane to Mumbai and Bangalore on short notice. Chris was on the ground for about 36 hours and spoke to JP’s 40 person tiger team of programmers.

At the time Locke wrote: “IT director J.P. Rangaswami runs offsite swat teams that take a real problem, break it down, come up with a solution, code it, and integrate the results into the corporate computing infrastructure — all within a week.” More here.

(For the youngsters reading this the Clue Train manifesto was the first comprehensive statement of the forces of changes brought by the internet that have now morphed into web 2.0, telco 2.0, enterprise 2.0 etc. The link is to my July 1999 interview with Chris - I believe the first one published)

The possibilities at the Edge are opening up with such stunning speed that very few people are even well aware of what they all are. JP is one of a handful of the best versed people in the world in this area and he is also one of very few CIOs who is well versed in the economics of open source and the dynamics necessary for a huge company like BT to function effectively in this new world. There is no guarantee that he will succeed but what he is going to be doing will likely be hugely significant.

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