Q&A With BT's Maria Pardee: Embracing Open Innovation

In her keynote speech at the upcoming Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo in April, BT’s managing director of global integration, Maria Pardee, will talk about the importance of trust and reputation as service providers move to the uncomfortable but urgently necessary world of open innovation and how being the mechanism to verify reputation can be a competitive differentiator for service providers.

Her role as CIO for BT retail and her new role that focuses on global integration have exposed Pardee to the challenges and benefits of working with and relying on new groups of partners for the applications and transaction technology that will move the industry forward. Here, she speaks with B/OSS editor Tim McElligott about some of that experience.

BT talks a lot about its openness: open platforms, open service delivery, etc. What is the biggest challenge to being open?

BT's Maria Pardee

Trust. When we talk Web 2.0 and the transactions occurring on the Internet, how do you know who you’re dealing with? And it’s not just with the Internet. I’ve had this discussion with people from military intelligence. Their transactions are so deconstructed now. Twenty or 40 years ago, they knew the reputation of the people they were getting their intelligence information from. All of a sudden you’ve got all this underground information from people who aren’t necessarily military — they’re working with religious and cultural factions. How can they trust who they’re transacting with?

The thing is, you can’t buy trust. And as transactions get more global, can you get an eBay or PayPal type transaction system to work around the world? Today, someone who does business on the Web and gets 50 transactions through which they get high marks from customers; will that play in a global media and broadcast environment? And how do you do it in an environment where billions of transactions are occurring every hour?

I don’t have all the answers. I think those questions will keep us busy for the next 10 years. One way is through reputation, but also trust and verify.

What about openness on the other end? On the kind of open source innovation BT talks about in its 21CN initiative?

BT is engaged in open source innovation because we believe that’s how you get viral applications written. Look at the iPhone example: new applications for the BlackBerry would come out maybe once a week. But for the iPhone, you’d get hundreds of new apps a week, many for free. It is truly viral and explosive.

I tricked out my laptop the other day, just for fun, and even the choice of banners available on my Apple was amazing. That’s because of the open source code and innovation that is shared with anyone interested in developing applications. But also, Apple has very tight controls over the testing and content of those applications before they make it through.

BT’s open innovation platform is called Ribbit, [based on the Silicon Valley startup by the same name that BT acquired last summer for $105 million.] It allows developers to develop any kind of custom application for the phone network. We have about 13 thousand to 14 thousand external software developers working for us. We also have relationships with marketing companies. It’s usually a pretty complex supply chain of suppliers and vendors. Let’s recognize that people with open source networks that don’t treat it as proprietary only increase the proliferation of applications for your customer base. It’s hard for companies like AT&T or BT to develop these apps themselves.