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1. What attracted you to BT Design?
The things that originally attracted me to BT design was actually the senior leadership that was already at BT. At the time that was Ben Verwaayen and Al-Noor Ramji who were obviously global stars in the executive area and since I'd worked with Al-Noor I knew that he was the type of person I could actually make the full changes with no matter the organisation whether it was a smaller bank or a large multinational Telco. That was huge for me because the worst thing you could go to is an organisation that has inept leadership and all you do is chase around in circles. When I knew I was coming to BT design with Al-Noor and Ben Verwaayen already here, it was already a godsend being with leaders who are actually aiming to make a change.

2. Why did you choose to join your business area?
I chose the business area that I am in today because my background is actually technologies. I'm just a natural techy geek so the things that I like to do in my own free time I also do as a full time position. Within BT Design our service design area is one of the areas where you get to flex all of your muscles in designing, in architecting, in actual implementation so it covers all the bases of not only playing with technologies but also getting real business value out of them and it fully lets me roam where I want to roam.

3. Can you briefly describe what your area of the business does?
The area of business that I am involved in is mostly revolved around designing services for our internal facing customers. That just means that for Global Services or BT Wholesale we the ones that actually create the infrastructure, we create the services that sit on top of the infrastructure when there is a building system that needs to made, when there is a customer portal that needs to be pulled together BT Design is the one that pulls that together.

4. What have you been doing since you joined?
The things that I have been doing since I joined BT Design are wide ranging. I spent the first two years the online e-commerce team, ripping out the inept web analytics solutions that were in there previously and putting in one that was much more robust, much more modern and much more of an industry leader.

In the past year and a half I've been really knee deep in the operations of BT Design. I was working out of the CIO office directly with Al-Noor Ramji which was a fantastic experience. Not only was it taking me away from my techy everyday role but also letting me inject some of that techy stuff into the actual operation areas.

In the past six months I have been working with J.P Rangaswami which has been a terrific experience as well, delivering new all sorts of new wiki's, blogs and technologies for not only BT Design but also BT Group, Ben Verwaayen, Andy Green a lot of people who are respected globally as the next generation leaders in Telco & technology.

5. How do you see your future at BT Design?
My future in BT Design is looking very bright at the moment. Previously when I first joined BT Design I think all the expectations were there. I was working on the online team, I was doing the ecommerce areas and bt.com but as I have evolved within BT I has also been given greater responsibilities. In the past year and a half I've taken on much higher level roles and I think in the next couple of years I want to continue that trend. I want to keep on learning, keep on growing, and keep on taking on higher leadership areas within BT.

6. What's the best thing about your job?
The best thing about my job with BT has been the freedom to not only play with the technologies that I would actually use personally, but also create business value out of them. The biggest example is probably the BT Web21CN SDK which is software services built on top of our core infrastructure products that we have globally. BT is the global leader in telecom infrastructure and us actually creating a web services layer has been a huge godsend in being able to expose that to all the millions of developments out there. Along with creating the regular voice and data now we get to plug them into web applications such as Facebook, the social networking portal, in other enterprise networking strength software. Here we have a great melding of both our core infrastructure where people are saying 'oh there are the old traditional ways' but also this new layer of what's actually happening in the services and the coolest things that are out there. It's been fabulous to actually play with that and actually build the next generation of services.

7. Can you outline a couple of projects you have been involved with that have been particularly leading edge or else just exciting / satisfying for you?
One of my favourite projects at BT has been the web analytics project. We went in with nine different solutions in place and ripped them all out and said that there is going to be one market leading solution that we want to put in and when we delivered on that we actually saved numerous costs, speeded up on development and actually had a much better view of all our customers and what they are looking for in our online world.

8. Does the culture at BT Design encourage innovation?
The culture at BT Design really encourages innovation through the mindset that if you're going to fail, fail fast. Lets go and try out everything we can, lets go try out new solutions, lets go and try out new technologies and if it doesn't work we know it wont work quickly, rather than traditionally when we had to debate over it, communicate, plan and then discuss and then finally try and make a decision on what we are going to do. So innovation is really about taking something new and really jumping on it early on. I think this is the best way of doing so and Al-Noor Ramji our CEO of BT Design has been the main driver behind this.

9. Is there anyone you work with who particularly inspires you - who and why?
The most influential person at BT Design has been J.P Rangaswami .Since joining a year ago JP has trail blazed across BT, encouraging more openness to our customers, more openness to our peers, collaborating and innovating around the business. JP's way of thinking and his blog has been tremendous in injecting new ways of looking at taking a look at old problems, the new solutions that have come through and the everyday fun of being actually being around JP has just been incredible.

10. What qualities does BT have today to keep it at the forefront of technology?
The key element that has been keeping BT at the forefront of technology has been global network. Our infrastructure is second to none in the world and our abilities to create the new services on top of it, whether that be web related or otherwise has been tremendous contributor in keeping up with all of the global players and actually lead in this space.

11. Has working at BT turned out the way you expected? How has it differed?
I had high expectations when I started at BT and over the past few years those have been exceeded by the number of opportunities I have had across the business to stretch different parts of my abilities. Technology I very strong on already but organisationally, operational wise I have been given challenging tasks, challenging roles and challenging deliverables which sometimes I have been able to meet, often at times exceed and its been fabulous to be able to learn these new skills and really stretch myself throughout.