When a major corporation files for bankruptcy, senior executives can take one of two paths: stay and help build the company to be better than ever, or bail out in search of greener pastures. Dan Wagner, the CIO of Global Crossing, the fourth top U.S. telecom company, as ranked by InformationWeek, is a builder, a survivor, and a you-can-achieve-anything optimist.

Two months before Wagner was appointed to the CIO role at Global Crossing in 2002 , the company filed for bankruptcy. John Legere, Global Crossing's CEO, immediately enlisted Wagner, who had been running the company's European operation, to be part of the turnaround team. Global Crossing, a darling of the dot.com days, had racked up $12.4 billion in debt as a result of building a 100,000-mile fiber optic network.

Today, Global Crossing, which sells telecommunications products and services to organizations in 50 countries, is a leaner, more efficient and customer-oriented machine with improved IT business processes. In fact, the company's headcount has gone from 16,000 employees to 3,400 employees.

During the past four years, Wagner has diligently rebuilt IT, reducing spending from $300 million a year to $60 million a year, and cutting the IT workforce from 1,600 to 350 employees. He is involved in integrating the company's recent acquisition of Impsat, a Latin American-based telecom company, which will give Global Crossing, 1,200 new employees and 4,500 new customers.

Enterpriseleadership.org recently spoke with Wagner about some of the things he did to help turn the company around, especially in IT operations.

EL: Can you sum up some of the initial things you had to do as part of your turnaround work?

DW: It has taken a massive, five-year effort to get to where we are today. We had no choice but to change and improve operations. Initially, we focused on reducing costs. For example, we reduced our IT cost by 80 percent from what it was in 2001. We also realized we had to increase our IT capabilities to the business.

We reduced our IT spending from $300 million to $60 million. Our operational expenditures were reduced by 50 percent or more. Our cash burden in 2001 was $400 million a month, and we are now cash-flow positive. This is a better place to be than the place we were in before.

EL: Can you talk about some of the key restructuring actions you took?

DW: Before the restructuring, we had dozens of competing projects and lots of capital going out of the door. The first phase of restructuring included consolidating applications, servers, data centers and infrastructure, as well as closing down millions of square feet of real estate. We focused on the key applications that were good for our customers, good for our products, and good for revenue growth. For example, we reduced 17 billing systems to two, and took provisioning and order management systems from 25 to seven.

The next phase consisted of building an intelligent front office to make all of our employees more productive. Built on the Microsoft.net platform, the intelligent front office, for example, enables our sales force and our customers to see, and to manage, their services directly. This platform powers our external portals, enabling us to focus today on what's important to Global Crossing -- customers!

EL: Can you go into more detail about how the intelligent front office works?

DW: We incorporated many things into our intelligent front office to improve the way our employees collaborate with each other as they do their work. We deployed a pretty extensive next-generation platform based on Microsoft Communicator. In fact, we built some of these capabilities into many of our applications, as well.

Take the org chart: you can look at it and see whether people are online or not. You can immediately click and talk to them, click and send them email, or chat with them. This presence-enabled infrastructure and functionality carries over to most of our applications. You can click and communicate in real time, while you're in a corporate application, such as order entry.

More than 90 percent of our employees use IP telephony, which is part of this integrated intelligent front office. Wherever I am in the world, I can pop on calls that have been flowed into my laptop and can communicate with anyone on our network or outside of our network.

EL: What have you learned from the traumatic experience of Global Crossing's bankruptcy?

DW: I've learned that you can do anything you want if you set your mind to it. Of course, you need to have the right people with the right attitude. I have an irritating go, go, go model. However, it exemplifies what Global Crossing is about. Because of what we've gone through, we've created a culture of people hungry to serve customers passionately.

EL: What does your IT governance model look like?

DW: Reporting to the president, we have an executive team that sets strategies and priorities. I'm part of this team.

Below that, we have a portfolio action committee consisting of the IT executives in the company, along with members of product marketing and finance. This committee manages all of the major projects and capital expenditures. Every two weeks, we look at the status of the priorities for product development, for operational efficiencies, and for IT spending

We also have a steering committee made up of people who represent different functions in the company. They meet weekly to look at the progress being made in about 55 active projects. The goal here is to make sure everything is on track. If there is an issue, they come back to our action committee for resolution.

The good news is that there are no disconnects between these groups.

EL: You have 350 IT people reporting to you today. How have you allocated these resources?

DW: About half of them include operations people who man the data center or the help desk. The other half of the workforce resides in strategic product development. We've decided to increase the number of people doing this software development. Our IP products, along with the intelligent front office, require a lot of software development. On occasion, we'll hire a team of developers -- perhaps a dozen -- to work on specific projects.

EL: What are you doing to keep customers excited about Global Crossing's future?

DW: We're a huge carrier of VoIP, providing more than 5 billion minutes of it each month to about 600 carriers. We're also a big consumer of VoIP services internally, It's important for an IT shop to sell what it consumes, especially since it has saved us huge amounts of money. I spend about 50 percent of my time selling to customers.

In 2006, I went on 100 sales calls. Members on my IT team made 500 sales calls in 2006. Making sales close differentiates us from our competitors. Customers like that we pay attention to them and provide the products and services they're looking for.

The IT team has a lot of credibility because we can talk about our experience using our products. I go out as a testimonial to our product capabilities and technology know how. When I talk to a customer's CIO, I know there is an innate trust between us. We've become our own success story about why customers should do business with us.

At the start of 2006, I said, let's go from restructuring to revenue growth by helping the sales force as much as we can. IT people know more about the business than anyone else, especially how everything works across functional areas.

We've put IT at the center of our company's strategy, and it's been working for us. Perhaps the passion in our IT team's voice while talking to customers helped to drive revenue growth by 17 percent in 2005.

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Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a freelance technology writer based outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.