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Mark Quartermaine has left Capita after just six months as MD of their newly created IT Services operation. See – Quartermaine joins Capita. Ops Director Russ Hewitt also left a month back. Mark Wylie (Executive Director) will assume Quartermaine’s responsibilities at least for the time being. Quartermaine is off to head Juniper Network’s operations in UK&I
I spoke to both Wylie and Quartermaine about this. They both quoted the same party line that Quartermaine wanted to be a ‘bigger fish in a smaller sea’ and that the responsibilities of job had not been what he had expected. We were very sceptical about the appointment and the new structure when it was first announced. See – Capita – a new force in IT Services? In particular why did Capita want to compete as a ‘vanilla-flavoured’ IT services company when that part of the market was facing increased difficulties anyway? We all know what Capita is super good at. So why not ‘stick with the knitting’ rather than try to be something you aren’t?
Quartermaine had been at BT Global Services up to his move to Azzurri in Sept 10. BT is another example of a company which failed in its move to IT services but has since returned, rightly, to its network management roots. The list of ‘product’ companies trying – but failing – to move into IT services also gets longer by the day – see our recent posts on HP and Dell. In my experience IT services requires a very different management style than anything you find in a products or telecomms company. It took IBM about 10 years to learn that. HP still hasn’t. Recruiting managers from telecomms companies to run IT services companies (eg in the case of Logica) has also appeared somewhat weird to me.
Moving from BPS to IT Services is just as difficult and fraught with danger as moving from products or telecomms to IT Services. Anyway, why would you want to do it? If you are going to be anywhere right now, BPS is a pretty good place to be.
