Telstra's IT transformation, 15 percent done: now for the hard part

Stuart Corner
Monday, 09 October 2006 08:11

Opinion and Analysis

According to Winn: "The first thing we had to do was we had to map everything that we have today. That is no small task with a business as complex and the systems as complex as they are at Telstra...Then we created the mapping of the new world of what we wanted it to be and how did we want our systems to perform...What were all of the asks or all of the new capabilities from our market based management? Go to market capability, everything from campaign management, understanding customers, single identity or presence across the systems, and we laid all of those out and then again mapped what we are going to be able to deliver out of box and not out of box. So all of the work that has gone on for the last 10 months has been very detailed, agonising, pick and shovel work."

He then revealed that the high-risk implementation phase is due to start in a matter of weeks when resources will be redirected from legacy to new systems. "Starting 1 November...we are going to do very little systems work in our legacy environment other than just price change, some stuff we have to do from a competitive standpoint and what we call break fix...All of our effort, all of our resources are pointed towards the new capabilities, and with that becomes getting all of the data ready to do the migration across to the new systems."

This is when the rubber hits the road and, if things go wrong, the proverbial hits the fan. Winn revealed that "Our first drop is the consumer drop which is in the late third quarter of this coming calendar year, and then we are going to be moving millions of accounts at a time."

So that answered the first part of Martin's question (Can you elaborate on what the different tasks are in the IT transformation?). As for the second part (more detail please on risk and consequences of slippage and cost overruns), Trujillo and Winn avoided that one. But it does not need a lot of imagination to realise that if you're moving a few million accounts at a time there is always a risk of a major disaster. Fingers crossed!



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