BT are rapidly shooting for the most despised company on the planet, I would be very dubious of any BT company and business data at this point in the game.

"If your profits turned out not as expected, turn to page 78"

They need a well aimed hack in the fork after their misguided Phorm nonsense.

Too right AC, BT are loathed by most of the people I know in IT.

No real surprise on the BT Global Services front - that's the bit of the company that has the NHS Connecting for Health albatross latched onto its neck. The way that project's going and the extent to which BT is involved, it's a wonder that BTGS revenue hasn't shrunk and left them facing a loss.

If things are the same as they were two or three years ago, they'd be better off moving staff away from that bloated monstrosity of a contract and redeploying them to other projects that actually have some chance of creating profitable income (as opposed to hassle, delayed payments and penalty charges).

Grabbed my coat a did a runner back in 2006 - I could have stayed on that particular gravy train burning taxpayers' money for years, but doing so would have disturbed my otherwise guilt-free and peaceful slumbers.

This is why they were willing to break the law to allow a spyware company inside their network.

Actually, this isn't that surprising, when BTGS have 'offshored' their quotes people and now they follow the dilbert principle in processing orders. Every day a new and interesting challenge to overcome. Its almost like they don't want our money.

In other words, the out-sourcing of all those jobs to monkeys in India or Eastern Europe didn't work.

Quel surprise!

Who else smiled at that comment - for anyone who has to do business with BT Groups you will quickly spot the mistake in this PR release which I think should have read "All but one of our divisions is not working"

"Ray Leclercq who is currently CFO at Openreach becomes new chief finance officer. "

I do so hope he turned upto the board meeting this morning and said "It is I, Leclercq".

So.... BT has run out of Viable Valuable Networking Source..... Novel IP. Now that's an Opportunity for someone with Global Vision.

I worked for BT GS once. They had out sourced a project to India to save money, but then they didn't like the poor indian chaps that came over to lead the project in the UK.

Cue phone call to me asking me to work for said Indian company and provide a "European Face" for the BT people to work with.

It struck me as potentially racists to say such things, but i dont think it was meant that way..

It meant that BT simply could not deal with people from a different culture.... no surprise when you experience the culture that is BT!!

Far too much outsourcing and offshoring in GS. add that to the pointless layers of management and process and you have a stinky org.

Funnily enough, BT had been trying to model the entire company after the "great performance" of GS... I wonder what they'll do now?

If they're sensible, they'd use some Agile techniques such as Scrum to flatten the hierachy, get more people doing value work, and increasing productivity, customer satisfaction and quality.

They won't though... they've promoted an accountant again who'll purely focus on costs, (like cutting training and travel) which will hamstrung productivity, and they'll keep offshoring to reduce costs.. after all if you're producing junk - you might as well produce junk cheap.

So so sad.

"Cue phone call to me asking me to work for said Indian company and provide a "European Face" for the BT people to work with."

European Face Native Heart would have worked ITs Beta BT Better.

I wonder if this has anything to do with subscription losses due to phorm.

BTGS suffering is unlikely to be due to subscription losses from Phorm. GS don't have much to do with broadband service provision like that - they're the corporate networking, IT outsourcing, big Government and commercial contract arm of BT. (Yes, BT do actually have such a thing.) They do stuff like NHS Connecting for Health ('nuff said), computer systems for various UK councils and Government agencies, stock market trading platforms, etc. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the CfH project (or "the almighty NHS care records cock-up" as you might prefer to call it) was one of the significant contributory factors to BTGS' relatively lacklustre performance.

Ironically, I've heard from one or two folks that most of the people who work for BTGS - particularly the engineering staff - are about as anti-Phorm as you can get and think that it's a bloody stupid idea that is likely to do BT a lot of harm. Unfortunately, the assorted management clever buggers in BT Retail and elsewhere don't have a history of listening to their own technical staff, much less that bunch of overpaid, geeky IT swots in Global Services.

That's one of the saddest things about BT. There is actually a fair number of reasonably decent, competent engineers and techies who want to do a good job (by and large). However, they're overburdened and hamstrung by too many layers of clueless middle and senior management and a load of horrendously over-complex internal procedures (some historical, some due to regulatory requirements, many due to the aforementioned bloody awful management).