Bala Subramanian joined AT&T as the Chief Digital Officer in the Digital, Retail and Care Organization. In this role, Bala leads efforts to transform the digital experience of our customers and employees across all touchpoints – stores, call centers, online and in-home. In addition, he leads a team that is responsible for the retail and support experience for our customers and the employee tools used in the stores and call centers.
Bala brings a unique blend of deep telecommunications along with leading the digital transformation of a large retailer. His 24-year career started in deploying GSM/GPRS networks and lead to various positions in leading teams in strategy, engineering, architecture, operations, and product management.
Prior to joining AT&T, Bala Subramanian was the Chief Digital Officer at BestBuy and part of the senior leadership team involved in the turnaround of Best Buy. He was responsible for developing and leading the technology vision and strategy, Enterprise Architecture and leading the Digital Organization that was spearheading the transformation of customer and employee experience across the channels. Prior to this role, he was the Chief Technology Officer of Best Buy leading the re-platforming of the web, mobile and app experiences for customers and introducing product management culture and lean/agile ways of working in the organization.
Previously, Bala was with T-Mobile for over 12 years where he held multiple positions, including Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and Technology Strategy. In this capacity, Bala was responsible for product, IT and network architecture. In addition, he led the redesign of T-Mobile.com website and created a roadmap for TMobile to become an Open Service Model wireless provider. Prior to this role, Bala was responsible for wireless data network engineering at T-Mobile. During his tenure, he led the successful development and implementation of high-speed wireless data networks (HSPA+, LTE, EDGE) as well as the underlying data center networks and infrastructure. He was also responsible for mobile product rollouts such as Games, Ringtones, Apps, etc. as well as T-Mobile HotSpot network. Bala holds an MBA from Fuqua School of Business, Duke University and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma.