Interview: Sanjay Kumar Singh, Openreach Technology, UK IT Awards winner

“Events like the UK IT Industry Awards inculcate a culture of celebration of excellence”

Sanjay Kumar Singh is Principal - Software Engineering at Openreach Technology. Openreach Technology won Technology Refresh Project of the Year and Sustainable Innovation of the Year at the UK IT Industry Awards 2024.

Mr Sanjay Singh is a Principal Software Engineer leading Domain Architecture, Governance, and Strategy for the Field, Network and Inventory technology area. He is an inspirational leader who is adept at driving process optimization and digital transformation to deliver large business outcomes. He has executed large-scale transformation in the Field Engineering space for Openreach Field-force engineering community as well as leading the network planning and survey on digital roadmap. Mr Sanjay is currently leading and executing massive transformation in the field of workforce management and scheduling.

Sanjay shared with Computing what this year has brought for him and his organisation and where he thinks the opportunities for 2025 can be found.

Please provide some background on your company for our readers.

Openreach runs the UK's digital network. We're the people who connect homes, schools, hospitals, libraries, businesses - large and small, broadcasters and governments to the world. It's our mission to build the best possible network with the highest quality of service, and make sure that everyone in the UK can be connected. We differentiate ourselves in terms of quality of service & experience we provide to our customer and the scale, and speed at which we build our network keeping sustainability and safety of people at the heart of everything we do, in a socially responsible way.

What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?

We are proud of the fact that we are consistently connecting 1m premises each quarter with full fibre, thereby providing ultrafast, ultra-reliable broadband to homes, businesses, and public services to meet the ever-growing tech needs of today and tomorrow thereby empowering UK as a digital economy.

Why are events like the UK IT Awards important to the IT industry?

Events like the UK IT Industry Awards inculcate a culture of celebration of excellence in the field of Information Technology. Seeing different nominations and winners reinforces the fact that while the advancement in technology is important, its applicability and impact are much more important. Such a forum helps professionals and companies to learn and get inspired by each other. It’s great to see professionals and organisations showcasing the best of their contributions across IT landscape while honouring and recognizing the best-in-class contributions!

What have been the biggest challenges of 2024 so far, and how have you overcome them?

Laying down full fibre connecting to 1m premises every quarter, with quality and efficiency has been challenging and is rewarding at the same time. Automation has once again proven itself to be the key to inducing efficiency along with a wonderful ecosystem of collaboration amongst business teams, direct employees and partners who all have been working to achieve the common goal to reach the target. Full fibre network planning and survey required automation in the entire chain of Mobile Planning, Network Redesign, Automated Costing, Market Campaigning integration, along with ability to work Offline and achieving the work in a device agnostic manner.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the IT industry in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?

From an IT industry perspective AI brings massive opportunities, though AI adoption should be achieved in a responsible way and purely be use-case driven rather than getting carried away by the AI buzz. AI in full fibre network connectivity journey can bring massive opportunities to augment the safety and efficiency of our workforce, along with use-cases which drive value in business operations. Opportunities around finding faults in the fibre network quickly and accurately could bring efficiency and transform the customer experience.