KEY POINTS:
There has been an overwhelmingly positive response to British Telecom executive Paul Reynold's appointment as Telecom's new chief executive and for good reason. He has exactly the type of skills set Telecom needs in a leader.
I envy the huge pay packet he will receive - $1.75 million plus the same in a performance-dependant cash and share allocation, but not the massive issues he faces.
These are just some of the things he'll need to tackle when he comes onboard in late September.
- Undertake a management shake-up.
It's time for some fresh thinking at the top - there are at least a couple of senior executives who are just too much a part of the old regime. Thanks, but goodbye.
- At the same time, stop the exodus of good people from Telecom. The employees have been in restructure mode for years and this has taken a toll on morale.
Telecom is being hollowed out at mid-management level and the country's largest IT and telecoms supplier just can't find people to fill its numerous vacancies.
It could start by offering more competitive salaries.
- Make a hard call about Telecom's future in Australia.
Don't allow a repeat of what happened with Theresa Gattung, where she was handed a sizeable investment in Australia and then felt the need to keep sending money across the Tasman to make it work (which it didn't).
- Get Alcatel Lucent cracking on this $300 million GSM network and while you're at it sort out a content sharing and handset purchasing deal with Hutchison 3G, so that Telecom can finally extract some value from its stake in the Australian mobile operator.
- Rebuild Telecom's relationship with the Government by scrapping, for now, any notions of structural separation and focus instead on making work the operational separation plan that has been proposed.
- Give your very capable wholesaling boss, Matt Crocket, the leeway BT gave you to engage with competitors to make them bigger and more satisfied wholesale customers.
- Decide what to do with online retailer Ferrit - either bite the bullet and close it down or rethink the whole thing, it's just not working.
- Develop an online strategy that involves more than just offering a big, unwieldy portal in the form of YahooXtra. Engage more with local web and software developers to come up with something exciting online.
- Fix the network. I left this one to last for a reason, it'll be Reynolds' biggest headache. Sort out what is going on with Telecom's mystical next generation network.
When is it going to deliver something that makes a difference to us, the users? The same goes for the ADLS2+ access technology roll out and the limited backhaul capacity in Telecom's network that its wholesale partners keep grumbling about.
That should keep Dr Reynolds busy, at least for the first few quarters.
The local tech blogosphere:
Aardvark's take on the Reynolds appointment
