Orange Business Services CIO: The future's Orange

Orange Business Services (OBS) CIO Vincent Kelly arrives at the swish London offices of his PR handlers wearing a signature orange tie but with his wrist in a protective sleeve. "I fell off my bike at the weekend," he explains, adding that his habit of tackling local terrain on two wheels causes a major spill once every couple of years. The odds sound scary, I venture. "You choose to live or die," he laughs.

In fact, Kelly is a bit of a sports nut. Born in Kilkenny, this ebullient Irishman is a big fan of Gaelic games, cricket and also supports not one but two English Premiership teams in Arsenal and Fulham. That's when he is in London: he spends Tuesday to Thursday of every week at OBS HQ in Paris, as well as having significant other travel commitments such as four visits a year to India and two to Egypt.

It's a life in the fast lane but Kelly plays down what sounds like a fun but rather frantic existence. "Taking the train to Paris is not so different from commuting. I'm a big fan of Eurostar. I'm always in the same carriage and you see a lot of the same people. The staff are great. I can get some work done on there and catch up with things."

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Orange Business Services (OBS) CIO Vincent Kelly arrives at the swish London offices of his PR handlers wearing a signature orange tie but with his wrist in a protective sleeve. "I fell off my bike at the weekend," he explains, adding that his habit of tackling local terrain on two wheels causes a major spill once every couple of years. The odds sound scary, I venture. "You choose to live or die," he laughs.

In fact, Kelly is a bit of a sports nut. Born in Kilkenny, this ebullient Irishman is a big fan of Gaelic games, cricket and also supports not one but two English Premiership teams in Arsenal and Fulham. That's when he is in London: he spends Tuesday to Thursday of every week at OBS HQ in Paris, as well as having significant other travel commitments such as four visits a year to India and two to Egypt.

It's a life in the fast lane but Kelly plays down what sounds like a fun but rather frantic existence. "Taking the train to Paris is not so different from commuting. I'm a big fan of Eurostar. I'm always in the same carriage and you see a lot of the same people. The staff are great. I can get some work done on there and catch up with things."

OBS was created by France Telecom's 2005 acquisition of Equant and renamed the next year. It is a global business-to-business provider of communications and IT infrastructure services including networks, IP telephony, telepresence videoconferencing, server management and remote working. The company has over 20,000 staff in 166 countries and a network that covers 220 countries. That's a huge reach but Kelly says he has close empathy with customers.

"I'm providing IT to a division of 20,000 people and, as our CEO Barbara Dalibard says, we eat the cake we bake," he says.

"Our people are using [Orange products for] remote working and we're a customer of our own company. That's very important to her and she gave me a strong steer early on. In certain cases we get offerings early on and we may be a beta customer for our own end-user offerings."

Kelly is refreshingly unfussy about the CIO role and its status and he disagrees with the frequently-held view that the obvious next role for the CIO is chief operating officer.

"I've reported directly to the CEO and the COO, and at the moment it's our COO Carlos Sartorious," he says.

"Barbara's focus is customer innovation, growth and so on. It's important for me to be listening to the business and what are the priorities and pain points of other executives; the important thing is that you're around the table.

"I'm running the IS and my number-one priority is that if you have made a commitment to a customer you deliver a network on time that's working.

"My number-two priority is that the business needs to change, that it has transformation plans... it introduces new products and enhances products and services. Now, the COO role's focused on the operations of the business and to me that's -totally different."

Logica progression

Part of Kelly's strength as CIO comes from his having had a long stint at Logica, the training ground for many leading IT practitioners in the country today.

"There were a lot of bright people there at the time and it gave me a very strong background and customer focus, and a very strong project management rigour," he says.

"At the heart of it we were a people company and there were colossal changes going on in the 1980s and early 1990s that were very interesting: early implementations of Ethernet LANs, applications for banking, or satellite networks. As a service company we had a broad range of experience in dealing with problems and how to resolve them.

"When I was on the other side of the table, one of the things I wanted to do was be a CIO. I suppose I'm a poacher turned gamekeeper but it's given me a view as to how to deal with partners. Technology is important but it's a people business and I regard myself as a people manager."

At Equant, later to merge with Global One before becoming OBS, Kelly had to put those skills to use as the network infrastructure business changed rapidly through peaks and troughs in demand and through mergers and acquisitions.

"There was a massive merger consolidation with different sales, delivery, ordering, networks, network management and customer service management," he recalls but adds that he relished the challenge. That period of change also informed his strategic outsourcing plans, Kelly acknowledges with characteristic frankness.

"We needed to take significant cost out of the business and give the business common tools," he says. "We could get a 50 per cent lower cost by having service centres in India and Egypt. I went there driven by cost, but having gone there, you realise it opens up skill sets, new ideas, new ways of working, so you leverage that."

Kelly has 300 staff in India, 300 in France and 100 in Egypt, hence his busy travel schedule. "Our customers want a good price and we have to be efficient," he says. "We piloted near shore and made a staged transition [to offshoring]. You always have transition issues but we didn't have any linguistic issues and I have been amazed by the quality of English and French [spoken in India and Egypt].

"The issues were about deep knowledge transfer. Not people not understanding what to do but, to make it really successful, what's upstream and what's downstream and the full implications of that. After a transfer, quality drops then you have a peak of defects and over time you get that back to normal or better levels.

What's worked best for us has been having a specialist working in front of a team and leading by example."

Now Kelly is amid another major change programme, dubbed IS 2010, that attempts to match IT responses to business priorities. Despite banking meltdown and the credit crunch, there are plenty of challenges ahead and he believes that the IP revolution has only just chipped the surface of collaboration possibilities. In fact, the future's bright.