Working to Simplify the Communications World
As General Manager for the 21st Century Network (21CN) Programme Ian Stirrat runs the programme office which brings the elements of 21CN together from across the parts of BT. Here Ian shares with Consult21 News his vision for what he says is the most important long term change BT has ever undertaken.
What is your career background?
The last ten years have been on national, large scale change or programme management jobs. 21CN is in a league of its own compared to any other change or programme BT has delivered in the last two decades. The first half of my career with BT covered many of the planning, customer service and operations roles in Scotland.
What does 21CN mean to you?
21CN is BT’s opportunity to change the way its customers experience BT – to become much more like a low cost and agile provider of services and network. It has got to be the most important long term change BT has ever undertaken.
What experience do you bring to the 21CN programme?
Experience of several large change programmes, together with the learning of what worked and what did not. I also bring a commitment to listening to our customers and communicating well internally.
What is the biggest challenge of your role?
Dealing with the size of the external influences on 21CN. Few of us can remember changes to our market and regulatory environment on a scale that we are seeing today. We are also having to make progress in the face of many things not yet being fully known.
What is the scope of the network design work being under as part of the 21CN programme?
We are designing an IP network capable of carrying many services which today need dedicated networks to support them. By having a converged IP core network, we simplify our world greatly and make the future communications world simpler for our customers and our operations people.
What is the most exciting part of this design work for you and for BT?
It has got to be getting into shape to migrate services to the 21CN network. We’re reaching the stage of bringing eight vendors’ equipment together to realise an architecture – a world first for BT during 2006. This architecture will take us from our current PSTN centric world to one that supports voice, video, music and high speed data services. It is laying the foundations for a new generation of advanced fixed, mobile and video services that will change the way individuals, families and businesses live their lives.
What are your key milestones for 2006?
We will soon communicate with our customers on which products and services will be supported in the first phase of 21CN to begin in Cardiff before the end of 2006. By the end of August we will be well advanced with our joint BT/Industry testing programme, proving how today’s services will be carried on 21CN. By November, we plan to be ready to migrate the first voice services from today's network to 21CN.
And what about after 2006?
This is a five year programme – it will take five years after the end of 2006 until we have completed the migration of around 25 million customer lines to 21CN.