New UK BT Group CEO Allison Kirkby to Start Job on 1st Feb 2024
Broadband, mobile and technology giant BT Group (inc. Openreach, Plusnet and EE) has this afternoon revealed the start date for their future CEO, Allison Kirkby, who will now officially replace Philip Jansen in the role on 1st February 2024. Allison was named as the group’s new CEO last year (here), albeit without a solid handover date.
The original announcement in July 2023 noted that Philip Jansen would continue to serve as CEO until the end of January 2024 “at the latest“, before handing the reins over to Allison. Jansen will be available to support the handover until the end of March 2024, at which point he intends to retire from executive life.
The official announcement doesn’t say any more than that, and our previous article already covers the background to all of this. Needless to say, BT will no doubt be hoping for better times ahead with the appointment of Allison Kirkby into the role, but turning the operator’s fortunes around will be a tough job.
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Allison is currently the president & CEO of Telia Company (since May 2020), although she has also been a Non-Executive Director of BT Group since 2019 and is a Non-Executive Director and member of the Audit Committee of Brookfield Asset Management Limited.
The new CEO will initially continue to follow BT’s current strategy, although over time new leaders tend to bring with them changes in strategic direction. Allison will also need to be mindful of the challenges to come, such as the need to complete their FTTP rollout (job losses will follow) in order to stay competitive in a much more challenging broadband market and the rising risk of a takeover by key investor Altice UK (Patrick Drahi).
Not to mention the retirement of their old copper line network, as well as the closure of thousands of old telephone exchanges, a potential change of government and Ofcom’s next set of market reviews. Keeping good relations with the regulator, government and unions will be very important – something Jansen occasionally struggled with.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Hopefully she’ll realised that retention is cheaper than recruitment and start looking after her staff better than Foodbank Phil ever did.
We have no chance she will carry on the race to the bottom culling as much as they can get away with while claiming a nice pension then sailing off into the sun
Who?
Liz Truss
Needless to say, BT will no doubt be hoping for better times ahead
I thought they were doing ok, since they got such a huge market and their network covers the majority of the country and people for some strange reason trusts them and won’t move.
Maybe the alt networks are doing something, music to my ears.
I think you need to do some reading. Altnets are very little to do with BT’s present predicament: the root causes go back more than 20 years.
BT should be congratulated – they’re one of just 10 FTSE 100 companies to have a woman CEO.
Hopefully she will be more of a Denise Coates than a Dido Harding, Paula Vennells, Sharon White, Michelle Mone, Christine Lagarde, Elizabeth Holmes type.
Denise is truly inspiring.
You prefer Denise Coates, making millions from the despair, broken marriages, reposessed homes and even suicides of gambling addicts, to Christine Lagarde?
In her defence, sort of, at least she’s taking that income in the form of a salary, thus paying a higher rate of tax on it.