New Managing Director for Openreach’s Operations South Division

Karen Witts is the new Managing Director of Openreach’s Operations South Division.

The opportunity to head up one of the largest units in Openreach and in BT Group, came at a perfect time for Karen who commented, “a couple of years ago, I said I would be interested in an operational role. I thought it would be good to do something right at the sharp end with lots of customer impact. I want to get right into the nuts and bolts of the company, roll up my sleeves and get stuck in.”

Karen moved to the post from her role as Chief Finance Officer in BT Wholesale, and is well aware that people might wonder what a financial expert knows about engineering. “I’d be more surprised if they weren’t asking that question” she says.

“I’m not an operations expert but I’ll have thousands of engineering experts working with me. I view myself as a business person with a business background and now I’m running an Openreach business.”

Karen brings a plethora of skills and experience to Openreach. In her seven year career with BT so far, she’s worked in BT Worldwide, BT UK, BT Business Services and BT Wholesale.

“Lots of my previous experience is pertinent to my new job. The products and services I was familiar with in Wholesale are among the products our Openreach customers use and some of those customers I worked with are now Openreach customers.”

And it’s maintaining and supporting Openreach’s commitment to its customers that Karen sees as one of her biggest priorities, delivering the right service at the right cost at the right time and keeping the promises we make to our customers.

“There are issues around these goals” she says. “We don’t have the network health we need and we’re not always delivering the sort of service we want to, but we are working very hard to turn things around and we have some great success stories to celebrate. I don’t have a magic wand but my priority is to ensure that I understand the issues on the ground.”

Magic may not feature in Karen’s resources but dynamism and energy certainly do. “I’ve always been passionate about my work. For me, feeling the passion is half the battle, the other half is delivering what we say we will. I’m not the sort of person to do my job quietly. There will be a lot of noise around me and I’ll drive for results, I don’t give up easily”.

“I feel really proud to work in Openreach. We have a great opportunity to make a difference to the way we do business and serve our customers. We have a great asset in our access network and a great job to deliver.”