The effectiveness of many tech organizations can often boil down to how well they work with the business. This reality has many levels, from understanding the goals of the business to building the business team’s confidence in how well technology can function as a strategic partner. Achieving this true partnership between IT and the business is what drove Hesham Fahmy, CIO of global communications technology company TELUS, to make culture the core focus of his transformation efforts. This focus has proven critical in creating an IT function that acts like a value-creation partner and helps drive growth.
That spirit is reflected in a number of concrete ways. TELUS has undergone a significant technology transformation, becoming a software-driven, AI-first technology business. The company has achieved nearly 100 percent adoption of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines across most of the technology stack, automated 80 percent of its test suite, and established Canada’s first fully sovereign AI factory. These moves have helped reduce the IT spend-to-revenue ratio from 5.8 percent in 2020 to 4.0 percent in 2024 (the industry average is 4.9 percent), while delivering more than $350 million in measurable AI benefits since 2023.
In this interview, Fahmy talks with McKinsey Partner Brant Carson and alumna Chhavi Arora about the challenges TELUS has faced along the way, and how it has overcome them to find success.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Transform culture first
McKinsey: Over the past four years, you’ve driven strong progress in your organization. What does it mean for the IT function to become a value-creation partner to the business?
Hesham Fahmy: I was hired to fundamentally transform IT from a cost center to an engine of value creation, and I knew from day one that technology alone wouldn’t get us there. The transformation had to start with the team culture. We needed to be problem solvers, not order takers.
Historically, the IT function has operated very transactionally. Success has meant delivering what was requested, on time and on budget. But you cannot be a value creator if you’re only doing what you’re told. Real value creation requires understanding the business deeply enough to challenge assumptions, propose better solutions, and sometimes say, “There’s a better way to solve this problem.”
I’ve been in this business 30 years, and here’s what I’ve learned: If you want to create sustainable, repeatable results, the only way to do it is through team culture. Many leaders will tell you that you need rigorous processes to drive consistency. I believe the opposite: Culture trumps process any day and is our true competitive advantage. Processes become obsolete, markets shift, technologies evolve, but the right culture continuously creates the right processes for whatever challenges emerge. And the right culture is built on three pillars: delivering value relentlessly, owning problems completely, and producing results that matter to the business.
I’ve been in this business 30 years, and here’s what I’ve learned: If you want to create sustainable, repeatable results, the only way to do it is through team culture.
McKinsey: Can you break culture down a bit? How do you build it? How do you lead it?
Hesham Fahmy: When I joined TELUS, instead of talking to my team about goals and objectives, I anchored everything on our North Stars: ownership, excellence, always delivering value, and transparency all the time. These aren’t just values on a wall; they’re decision-making frameworks. For every system we build and every problem we solve, we start by asking ourselves three fundamental questions: What is the customer journey? What is the customer impact? What is the customer experience?
When you get people thinking through that lens day in and day out, something powerful happens. They stop waiting to be told what to build and start proactively identifying what should be built. No matter what the actual objectives are, your team is thinking strategically about the how and the why, not just the what.
McKinsey: How do you get your teams to think about business goals, not just technical ones?
Hesham Fahmy: I push my team to truly partner with the business and understand the business deeply enough to challenge requests and propose better solutions. The only way to achieve that is to truly embed yourself in how the business works—the market dynamics, the revenue drivers, how we delight customers, where we create value.
When you understand the business at that level, you understand not just what’s being asked for but why it’s being asked and whether it’s the right solution. So, when our business peers say, “I need you to build X,” the best response is, “Help me understand the problem you’re trying to solve. If X is the right answer, let’s build it brilliantly. But if there’s a better way to solve this problem, let’s explore that together.” That’s when you become a true strategic partner, not just a technology provider.
For every system we build and every problem we solve, we start by asking ourselves three fundamental questions: What is the customer journey? What is the customer impact? What is the customer experience?
Think like a business owner and self-fund everything
McKinsey: You have driven a cost-efficiency program at the same time as working to change TELUS’s IT culture and build new product offerings. TELUS, in fact, has lowered the IT cost as a percentage of revenue by more than one percentage point. How did you achieve that?
Hesham Fahmy: I’ve always believed in creating a self-sustaining investment model where efficiency funds innovation. Rather than viewing the IT budget as an entitlement, we operate like a business within the business, and that mindset changes everything. I don’t want to think in terms of “You need to give me money to invest in something.” I believe you have to earn permission to invest by demonstrating value and creating room through efficiencies. Otherwise, investment decisions become battles with finance rather than strategic business choices.
If I’m thinking like a business owner, it is in my best interest to keep shrinking the cost envelope as much as possible, not just to drive efficiencies but to create margin to invest in transformation. I’m constantly thinking, “I need to create room to invest in initiative A by generating savings in initiative B.” That creates a powerful incentive structure. When there’s exciting, transformative work on the table, like building Canada’s first sovereign AI factory or launching our Fuel iX generative AI platform, teams push even harder on efficiencies because they know those savings directly fund the innovations they want to work on.
It’s a virtuous cycle, where efficiency enables innovation, and innovation drives business value that justifies further investment.
McKinsey: How do you communicate that to your teams to prevent them from thinking, “Shouldn’t we go and ask for more budget?”
Hesham Fahmy: If people are thinking that they should ask for budget, they’re actually thinking it’s someone in finance who’s just being unfair and not giving them the funding. That’s why it’s so important to get into the mindset of thinking like a business owner. If you own a business and someone is going to fund you, they’re going to want to look at your financials and understand your balance sheet.
I do this with my teams. I walk them through our corporate balance sheet and explain the dynamics to show them these allocation decisions are not unfair. It’s no different than your personal budget at home. You have a mortgage to pay and you have your income. That is the envelope you have to operate within.
If I’m thinking like a business owner, it is in my best interest to keep shrinking the cost envelope as much as possible, not just to drive efficiencies but to create margin to invest in transformation.
Build a culture of engineering excellence
McKinsey: How did you incorporate this focus on culture and technology’s value-creation mission along your transformation journey?
Hesham Fahmy: A big piece of becoming value creators is developing engineering excellence, and that meant going back to the basics. One of the first things I did was ask every team to create a map of their value stream—a detailed view of the processes they worked on and how those directly create value. Here’s the insight: You cannot improve what you don’t understand, and you don’t truly understand a process until you’ve documented every step. The map didn’t have to be 100 percent accurate, just accurate enough to identify where we could make our processes 5 or 10 percent better. It’s these small, continuous improvements that compound into transformative change.
Then I asked every team to present their value-stream maps in an open forum in front of peers and leaders. I think people initially feared they would get criticized publicly, but we deliberately focused on problem-solving and collaboration in the sessions, not judgment. Pretty soon, teams started identifying improvements in their own processes during their presentations. Observers began offering to help and coach, and suddenly, instead of dreading these sessions, people were volunteering to present because they saw the value in collective problem-solving.
The goal was to create a culture of radical transparency where continuous improvement is everyone’s responsibility, not just management’s. The forum started with me asking all the questions, but it quickly evolved into other leaders doing the same and team members challenging each other with more questions, like, “Have you considered this approach?” This created a self-sustaining culture where people constantly ask, “How do we do this better?” That mindset is what drives both efficiency and innovation.
The goal was to create a culture of radical transparency where continuous improvement is everyone’s responsibility, not just management’s.
McKinsey: What is your system of tracking performance? And how do you measure how your organization is really acting as a partner to the larger business?
Hesham Fahmy: We use a combination of metrics, many of which are leading indicators and some of which are qualitative, rather than just quantitative. I’ve learned that the most-revealing metrics are often not our traditional IT measures. For example, we track how often my team gets surprised by last-minute requirements and has to scramble for resources. If we’re seeing a lot of that, it tells me that we’re not being brought to the table as strategic partners—we’re being treated as order takers, not problem solvers.
I also look at how our teams respond to delivery pressures. Do they struggle because they’ve been given arbitrary dates or because they don’t fully understand the business value driving the timeline? More tellingly, when faced with a challenging deadline, how often do teams push to extend it versus finding creative ways to deliver on time? That can be a good indicator of how deeply teams really understand and appreciate the value of what they are working on.
McKinsey: Are there other examples of the transformation in action that you want to share?
Hesham Fahmy: Yes, and this example perfectly illustrates how culture drives innovation. We were experiencing unexpected system failures during our most critical business moments—Black Friday and other major selling days. We were doing extensive performance testing, but we were testing in preproduction environments that could never truly replicate production conditions. We were essentially practicing for the game in an empty stadium.
I challenged my team to focus our energy on figuring out how to test safely in production, since that’s the environment that really matters. The team’s initial reaction was that it was impossible and that testing in production would corrupt data. But this is where culture makes all the difference. Instead of accepting “impossible,” they asked, “How can we make this possible?”
They engineered a solution, starting with “game nights”—testing during off-hours, when potential failures wouldn’t impact customers. We did this for months, learning and refining our approach. The insights were game changing. We uncovered system behaviors we’d never seen in preproduction testing. More importantly, we learned that systems don’t fail instantly; they degrade gradually, showing warning signals we can now detect and predict. This transformed us from being reactive to proactive, from hoping systems would hold to knowing they would.
My team then pushed me one level further—and this is where you really see cultural transformation in action. The team came to me saying that while they’d proven we can test safely at night, nighttime system behavior was fundamentally different from daytime load patterns, and the confidence we were building was limited to scenarios that didn’t actually matter for business. To get real confidence in the system during Black Friday, we needed to test during the day, when real customer traffic is flowing.
Instead of accepting “impossible,” [the team] asked, “How can we make this possible?”
They were absolutely right, and they had the courage to challenge me because we had built a culture where pushing for better solutions is rewarded, not punished. They figured out a way to stop failures quickly, making daytime production testing viable. When they took this proposal to our business partners, the initial reaction was skepticism, and understandably so. But my team earned their trust and confidence by going beyond just the technical solution and actually presenting the business case for why this was important and how we could protect the system.
The evolution in that relationship tells you everything: Our business partners are now actively requesting more “game nights,” because they want the extra confidence our testing provides and trust our technical capabilities, judgment, and commitment to protecting the business during critical moments.
At the end of the day, engineering excellence and the right culture don’t just reduce costs or improve processes. They create competitive differentiation and drive measurable business value that shows up in revenue and in customer satisfaction.
