Telstra turns to former CIO for Agile insights

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 11 November 2009 02:30

IT Industry - Market

Telstra CIO John McInerney is going up to Queensland to kick the tyres of Suncorp’s IT systems at the end of the month, and grill Jeff Smith, who was Telstra’s CIO from 2002 to 2005, about how he has implemented Agile development techniques at the financial services company.

Earlier this month Telstra CEO, David Thodey, and CFO John Stanhope announced that Telstra’s massive IT transformation project had come to an end. Although Telstra claimed that the project had delivered $307 million in savings, it remains well shy of the original savings estimates, and has left the telecommunications giant with 800 legacy computing systems to manage still.

Smith, now the group executive of business technology at Suncorp, said in an interview with iTWire that; “John Stanhope and David Thodey have agreed that it was too darned big and it’s not done. They need to break it into smaller chunks.”

He believes big bang approaches to systems development simply don’t work. “If you say that the project is $1 billion upfront then you don’t know the problem you are solving.”

Telstra’s overhaul cost the company $3.9 billion.

Smith has taken a different approach at Suncorp and is using Agile development techniques which take an iterative approach to developing software and which force the business and IT to work intimately on systems development and testing.

Having just completed an infrastructure overhaul Suncorp now has a single desktop platform; has reduced its data centre count from seven to two; virtualised its 3,200 servers down to 200; cut its Unix boxes from 85 to five; and mainframes from five to two.

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