Al-Noor Ramji of British Telecom puts it this way: I don’t allow the use of “customer facing” unless those guys pay me real money. What was happening in our organization is that people used the word customer to imply colleagues. Now if you give me greenbacks, you’re a customer. If you give me what I call blue dollars . . . it’s just internal transfers of money. That’s not real money. . . . So most of the spending decisions do come through me but . . . the budgets are still held by the business lines. . . . They cannot spend the money on IT without me. On the other hand, I cannot spend the
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