This Q&A column focuses on technology leaders to better understand how they are addressing the challenges and opportunities faced by digital businesses today. My first guest is Gary King, who recently served as EVP and CIO of T-Mobile USA, America’s Uncarrier, where he led the company’s innovative IT strategies. Gary has also worked in similar roles at Chico’s, Barnes & Noble, Avon Products and more. He will speak on the opening keynote panel of “Adapt or Die,” a one-day, hands-on, immersive dive into digital strategy and API technology hosted by my employer, Apigee.
Q (Greg Brail): Most people are aware of T-Mobile in the U.S. and what they’re trying to accomplish in being a different kind of mobile carrier, but I think specifically from a digital transformation background, it would be great to hear a little bit about what you were trying to accomplish when you were there.
A (Gary King): At T-Mobile, back in 2012, the company had entered into an agreement to be acquired by AT&T and so the innovation and development had pretty much taken a hiatus while that merger went through the FCC. Ultimately, when that merger was not approved, the company really had to rethink the way that it went to market and fundamentally change how it addressed its customers – otherwise it was just going to be competing directly against two big incumbents and it had been doing that for a number of years without a lot of success. As we went into 2013, the emphasis on the company was on identifying customer pain points and eliminating them. Of course, the first thing that you think about in the mobile space is your contract with your carrier and that contract is integral to many of the applications within the retail systems, within the back office systems, within the financial systems, etc. So the application changes needed from the IT organization started coming very fast and needed to be turned around almost overnight. The transformation for the IT organization was one of going from big quarterly releases of application changes into production, to moving to almost daily implementations of application changes into production. Also, with that increase in velocity, there also came the need for increases in quality and just sheer scale. One of the interesting things about the company was that coming into 2013, the company had about 35 million subscribers, but over time, it doubled that original 35 million to over 65 million subscribers.
Q (GB): The mobile contract is a big deal and T-Mobile’s big innovation was changing the contract. Where did that idea come from and how did that get propagated through the organization?
A (GK): When I say customer pain points, there is a whole ethos associated with listening to customers, prioritizing what they care about and turning that into marketing and technology innovation. People hated contracts! So T-Mobile eliminated them. A large number of initiatives that are built around listening to the customer and what I think, from a transformation standpoint, was very interesting was how much tighter the marketing organization and the IT organization had to work together to bring those new products to life, whether that was free streaming of your music or free streaming of your video or rollover of your data stash. Those types of data applications and how they went to market became very tightly coupled with how the initiative was communicated to the marketplace.
Q (GB): So, you said that the contract was sort of the centerpiece of many of the IT systems. When whoever came up with the idea to change the contract model brought it to IT, was the response, “No way, we can never do that! That would mean we’d have to change all the IT systems.”?
A (GK): Yes. Obviously, the industry has grown up around the idea of keeping track of every minute of your voice data and turning that into a bill. The other fundamental change occurring in the mobile industry is that we’re going from voice to data or we’re moving from voice call to internet call. So, it’s a lot less important to keep track of every bit that transfers from your phone, and much more important to just think of it in broader brush service ways. It is a structural change that is occurring, which clearly has impact in the entire stack of software and so there is a huge element of change management associated with this kind of turn around.
Q (GB): One of the things you also talked about was a growth in subscribers - that also caused changes to IT. What are some processes and tools that you used to drive that change through the organization as well?
A (GK): Most important to a change like this is to understand architecturally where your bottlenecks are or to put it into the T-Mobile vocabulary, to understand where the IT organization’s pain points are. We aligned around that idea and began to address those things for the organization. In a very large application environment, often the testing and deployment process is a huge impediment to rapid innovation. We began to break that apart into smaller pieces and automate some of the testing and deployment. This enabled us to move from quarterly timing, to monthly and then finally, we moved the majority of production changes to a daily cadence.
Q (GB): So, these changes you mentioned finding the bottlenecks in the architecture - do these changes come from the bottom up or do they come from the top down?
A (GK): A little of both, and when I say architectural changes, I mean both organizational and infrastructure. We needed to virtualize the services in the middle where it enabled databases to be shared by application and then virtualize services at the e-commerce, website and retail service layer. The customer service layer was also extremely important to allow for rapid integration and testing because T-Mobile sells through almost 70,000 points.
Q (GB): So, I’m wondering while you went through this process at T-Mobile what surprised you the most. What were things that you didn’t expect, either in a good way or a bad way?
A (GK): I think the speed with which the IT applications are becoming automated, virtualized, services, etc. really was a transformation that I didn’t think would happen as quickly as it did. And you see it clearly when you transition applications to the cloud – you see the power of exposing capabilities from features and functions of your product to others. That innovation moves much quicker than the traditional internal IT applications. Being able to monitor that, track it and provide a service level for that type of integration is tremendously important in this new world.
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I hope you found my conversation with Gary interesting and insightful - stay tuned to my channel for additional Q&As focused on the digital transformation. Also, feel free to check out our new movie at the following link: Adapt or Die.