NOW, why would a global telecommunications player like BT take one of its brightest young executives and send her off to Belfast? After all, the Northern Ireland market is a Limited one; half a million residential accounts, perhaps 150,000 businesses, relatively few high-tech, high-user companies. BT's operation there is already streamlined, well- managed, the waste cut, revenues at Pounds 267 million sterling, contributing to profits.

But then there's the question of the new title. Lucy Woods is chief executive of HT lreland. The whole country. Last week, the new woman was quite frank about what was going on: HT is serious about the Republic, for both commercial and residential customers.

"There are lots of ways we could construct business to generate revenue in the South. We could have gone into some sort of share scheme with Telecom Eireann, which we are not going to do. We could just wait and grow our own small sales team, which would take forever, and which is unlikely. Or we could find some sort of partnership. And we have been and still are talking to a wide range of people," she told The Irish Times.

That includes the current talks with the ESB, which could give BT access to a ready-made communications network stretching to every part of the State.

The level and the pace of BT's expansion in the Republic will depend on the terms for the liberalisation of the market, Ms Woods says. In the short term, the company plans to offer some of the business- oriented products offered by Concert, the to-be-approved merger with MCI, as well as some of BT's more lucrative business technologies.

This would result in HT targeting multinational companies hased south of the border, offering them high speed data networks on a worldwide basis. There are also tentative plans to enter the residential market, later on; full competition will not be allowed in the Republic's market until 2000.

"I would be in favour of that because I think it's a business we know very well, residential telephony. And once your network is there, residential customers could be profitable."

Expanding its Irish operations holds an attraction for BT for another reason; in Britain, the regulator has indicated that he would like to see the cable companies and others grow their revenues. "So there's a limited amount to which BT can continue to stimulate the market to protect its profitability," Ms Woods states.

At 38, Ms Woods's CV is that of a high-flyer. She studied mechanical engineering at London's Imperial College, and was one of four women in a class of 150 to graduate. She went to British Aerospace, but moved after a year to British Telecom, then a semi-state company, as a contract negotiator.

She was underwhelmed by the corporate culture of the day: "I can remember on my first day, there was this row, this wall, of books. They were called Telecom Instructions. And there was an instruction for everything, how to fill a form in, and it was just paralysing!

"We weren't commercially-focused, we weren't worried about competition, we weren't worried about customers - we didn't even call them customers. We didn't have more than a dozen accountants in the whole business and BT did not have a computerised ledger system. That's the truth."

But times were changing, and, in 1984, the company was one of the first to be privatised by Margaret Thatcher. HT introduced "Total Quality Management", and reduced the workforce by half, to 120,000.

Lucy Woods studied accountancy, and moved to the financial management side of the business. By 1993, she was head of BT's chairman's office, and in 1994 was appointed as executive assistant to the group managing director.

The mother of two children, aged l2 and 10, she was initially worried about moving to Belfast. But, she says, everyone has been charming and friendly. She has steered clear of the politics of the conflict -and insists that all 2,500 staff leave their views behind when they come to work each morning.

BT Ireland, is run as an entire company, rather than broken down into different business functions, she says, "a sort of micro BT".

"My background has been right across the range of the business: finance, engineering operations, purchasing, strategy, headquarters, environment, marketing -I was just perfectly placed to run something, to be in charge of a business."

She sees BT's operation in the North as very solid, well structured, offering a high quality of service to customers. "But what we need to do now is to face up to a new world, and I think that's perhaps where we have some effort to make," Ms Woods says.

Within Northern Ireland, she is planning a major marketing drive, focused on home users, small business and large companies, to try to grow business. Her goal is to increase revenues by l0 per cent this year.

"For the residential base, we'll be talking to them about using the phone, how they can get more out of it; messages, alarm calls, you can use it so many different ways."

BT has been collecting data by customer as well as by product, she says, and can tell with a few key-strokes who is ringing where and to what pattern. This will allow the company to target very narrow, highly specific markets, building individual relationships with its customers, generating loyalty.

Can it be long before BT is demonstrating similar products to its customers south of the border?