Plusnet is a British internet service provider (ISP). The company was founded in 1997 in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, and floated on the Alternative Investment Market in July 2004, making them a public limited company (Plusnet plc). On 30 January 2007 Plusnet was acquired by BT Group, but it continues to operate as a separate business. When did you start your current role?2012 Have you completed an MBA?Yes Order the following sources of advice/information by value to you: Peer Group In-house Vendors Consultant Analyst Technology strategy and spending What is the major transformational IT project that has been recently completed, or is underway at your organisation?Part 2 of a 3 phase transformation currently under way.  Part 1 delivered in Dec 2012.Part 1 transformed legacy product catalogue and L2C (lead 2 cash) sign up journey, also introduced mobile sales channel.Part 2 is currently transforming the L2F (lead to fulfilment) capability i.e. the provisioning functions across our supply chain (BT Wholesale, CPE – customer premise equipment etc)Part 3 will swap out a home brew billing engine replacing with an off the shelf Geneva product which will plug nicely in by virtue of a transformed ground up L2C and L2F stack delivered in Parts 1 and 2. In addition, engineering capability was transformed.  An agile, enterprise scale engineering target operating model to actually deliver the above capability was introduced. Transforming our network architecture to ensure efficiencies, lower cost and better customer experience (CX) whilst our business and customer base grows and customer behaviours change to also include TV over the top services such as YouView, Sky GO, Netflix etc … bandwidth consumption is exponential but higher customer experience is critical and at a lower cost.  Worked with Juniper and Procera to achieve this aim.What impact will it/does it have on the organisation?Part 1 delivered devastating commercial impact moving plusnet to become the 3rd fastest growing UK telco behind Sky and BT, ahead of Talk Talk, Virgin, O2, EE etc  This has remained consistent for over 5 quarters.  Online sales swing of 30% from 40% online vs 60% inbound to 70% online and 30% inbound.  The new online mobile channel accounts for 10% of online sales.  Streamlined online sales journey tripled online sales conversion %s. In terms of customer growth (and with some context): Marketing SOV (Share of Voice) spend by Plusnet for 13/14 is estimated to be only 1.4% (compared to 2% in 12/13) largely due to significant increased spend by competitors such as Sky estimated to be in the region of £301m representing 53.8% of total market spend in 13/14 (vs 40.2% for Sky in 12/13). However despite a 1.4% SOV quarters Q4 12/13 and Q1 13/14 showed Plusnet obtaining a 10.2% and 14.5% share of market movement respectively in each of those quarters resulting in Plusnet being the 3rd fastest growing telecoms company in the last six months behind Sky and BT. It is worthy to note that there was a clear step change in market growth for Plusnet per quarter from Q1 12/13 and Q2 12/13 where although still net adding customers at a rate of 7K and 8.1K verses 16.4K, 32.8K and 27K the following three quarters. All of this was beyond expectations and broke some of our internal operational systems that then forced another transformation agenda such as replacing the call centre telephony system, accelerating our 2nd site plans in to Leeds (Plusnet had only moved in to a large set of offices in Sheffield 9 months earlier representing the largest Sheffield office buildout and move for over 5 years). The delivery of Part 2 will provide a closer to 100% set of straight through processes resulting in greater efficiencies across our call centre FTE where those who work in provisioning are involved in heavy manual intensive processes. Part 3 will be essential to de-risk the business for receipt of cash and improve our regulatory compliance ability. The engineering operating model has allowed for the engineering department to scale up to 8 x larger than when I first inherited it and to deliver in an enterprise fashion, allowing for critical deliveries of above transformation such as part 1 under extremely tight timescales and in order to keep pace with market conditions.  Moved away from legacy technology (PHP) to enterprise technology (Java) with clearly defined presentation, data and business logic layers for future sustainability and robustness.  Introduced continuous integration testing (CIT) for higher quality.What new strategic technology deals has your organisation struck and with whom?Procera to supply our DPI (deep packet inspection) platform replacing EOL Arbour E100. Critical to our network cost management and customer experience. Juniper/Imtech to supply our core network components, as our network bandwidth demands and consumption increases, essential to keep lowering our cost per GB ratio.  Move on to Juniper's new MX platform. Name your strategic technology suppliers?BT WholesaleCISCOProceraJuniperImtechTech Mahindra What is the IT budget?Capex: £12mOpex:  £9.5m (£3m channelled to cost of sale) What is the strategic aim of the CIO and IT operations for the next financial year?Complete parts 2 and 3 of transformation whilst at the same time delivering market competing products such as TV to become a "triple play" telco service provider competing with Sky, BT, Talk Talk.  Triple play is a critical move for Plusnet in order to protect our existing customer base whilst at the same time maintaining and growing our market acquisition. As TV is rolled out it is essential to maintain internal operational systems for high quality customer experience, i.e. our core network, hence the criticality of our strategic deals and work with Juniper, Procera, and Imtech. It is also essential to maintain our telephony system and increase our second site presence in order to ensure that we can protect our status in independent market surveys as being number 1 for customer service.  This is critical as our marketing strategy depends on this statistic.  Basic things such as ability to have enough people using our systems to answer the telephone and service our customers is critical. Transformation achievements Would you describe the CIO role as a transformation leader in your organisation?Absolutely Describe the transformations you have led / been involved in, how did they transform operations, customer experience or the organisation?The 3 phase transformation touches all aspects of the business from customer, to internal sales and service operations, as well as IT operations. Here is one example: Part 1 transformation introduced a new sales sign up journey.  This is now a single sign up journey that is used by both customer online or by our internal sales agents.  It was condensed from 12 convoluted pages down to 4 effective and streamlined pages.  Not only has this resulted in greater online conversion % (and thus influencing the 30% swing) it has also improved sales agent staff with the following: – lower call handling times- increased conversion % (30% up to 40%)- ability to provide context sensitive prompts and guidance for call centre staff to improve customer experience and increase sales conversion % (the context sensitive prompts are gleened from higher performing sales agents to allow for continuous improvement) Within IT operations, benefits of the transformed sign up journey resulted in: – less in life production incidents- less demand on systems such as core database connections Within Software Engineering:- a single consolidated product catalogue and supporting functional frameworks allow for a greater C2M (which pleases marketing) with reduced engineering and QA touch points … therefore cheaper tooBeyond technology, can you describe a business transformation programme that you own or contribute to?As a technology driven company all aspects of the described transformation touch business transformation.  Here is one contextual example: Part 2 transforms L2F provisioning.  Currently the service operation team structure and R&Rs are such that they are designed to accommodate the legacy systems that are manually intensive.  The transformation creates a lot of straight through opportunities allowing 1. the resources to be reallocated elsewhere (more sales agents to meet demand, multiskilling across sales and service to allow for reduced call wait in transfers, better customer experience etc) and 2. where manual touch points are necessary the current approach is flipped on its head to allow the shape of the team to be best designed to meet the needs of the customer. What key technologies are being considered to enable transformation?Engineering:JavaSymfonyGitFlowJIRAJenkinsFisheyeSonarSplunkPuppet Network:Procera DPIJuniper MX What percentage of your applications / infrastructure is run from the Cloud?20% How is the use by employees of their own technology, use of mobiles and social networking impacting operations, customer experiences or the organisation at present?Some of our technical authorities played around with a tool called Jenkins at home.  They brought it to work as a suggested business case to improve our testing model with CIT (continuous integration testing).  It is now a key part of our engineering operating model. Do you have a plan in place for how to deal with shadow IT and BYOD. How do you influence and engage executives, place the right controls around employee choice and engage with the organisation on this issue?Limited at this stage.  I recently moved our internal mail platform.  I outsourced it to BT predominantly to replace our legacy and shaky implementation with a more robust solution, but also in order to leverage their "app" capability to function across smartphone and tablet devices (iOS and Android). Where do you seek transformational inspiration from?My children!  Always be on the look out for future developments.Like minded peers amongst the CIO forum.  What is happening in other industries / companies.Common sense within the work place, always looking for opportunities to improve, shape, challenge, whilst understanding the strategic context of the business. The CIO role in the business Who do they report to?CEO Does the CIO have a seat on the board?Yes How often do you meet with the CEO?Weekly Does your organisation have a digital leader and what is the difference in their responsibilities to yours?No, I am it.  I work very closely with the Marketing Director and his team however, to progress digital marketing. The IT department How many staff make up the IT team?(What is the split between in-house/outsourced staff)196 total staff, 165 internal, 31 outsourced.Previously to delivery part 1 transformation I contracted a software house to supplement our engineering workforce with delivery (at the time the engineering team was much smaller).  At its peak the engineering outsource FTE was 50:50 vs Plusnet engineering FTE. Describe the CIO’s management team, do you have direct reports that develop the relationship and services between the business and IT?Head of ArchitectureHead of Software EngineeringHead of IT OperationsHead of Production StabilityHead of SecurityIn line HRIn line Finance Each one of my direct reports face off across all other directors.  Each of my directors have members of their own DRs that face off to various lines of business such as marketing, consumer, B2B, finance. And how many log-in accounts do you issue across you organisation?If you refer to staff, circa 1000. What is the primary technology platform?CRM was home grown, as was billing.  Billing will be the first outsourced off the shelf product purchased (Geneva). Once the 3 phase transformation is complete it will leave behind a stripped down (legacy) CRM that can then be maintained or replaced as necessary.