Afleveringen
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The role of the sponsor in a major business transformation is vital and as this episode of the Horizon CIO Podcast reveals, not always well understood or specified by the business. To get some insight into the role of the sponsor HR transformation specialists Joe Ales and Jason West of Underscore Group described how they help organisations get the most from sponsorship.
âSponsors are the most critical role in a business transformation, they define what the transformation is going to achieve and what the end state will look like,â says Ales on the podcast for business technology leaders. Challenged on whether a sponsor should be from the technology leadership team if there is an IT element to the transformation, Ales says: âThey have to be close to the activity that the programme impacts and a leader that can articulate what the future will be.â
West agrees: âBeing the sponsor is a critical role because the vision comes from the sponsor and they have to know what the future state looks like, but they cannot be dogmatic as the vision will change,â he says in regards to change that may be outside of the control of the business, such as technology developments or new regulations.
The duo have delivered a number of business transformations in a wide range of vertical markets and tell the CIO Podcast that it is vital that the requirements of the sponsors role are clearly defined by the business, especially if the sponsor is not from IT, but the change programme has a large technology element to it.
âNo one describes what the role of sponsor actually is in a lot of cases, yet there is a level of risk associated with it both for the sponsor and the organisation,â West says. He adds it is important for the sponsor to be a good user of data to understand where the business is and the reasons for the change programme. In both West and Alesâ experience sponsors need to be able to make quick decisions.
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Download your copy of the Underscore Transformation Scoping Checklist here:
https://www.underscore-group.com/insights/white-papers/This white paper is the first of a series, looking at the four phases of a successful transformation programme: Scoping, Build, Transition, and Sustain. In the Scoping Checklist, we explore the 10 critical success factors to scoping a successful transformation programme, covering everything from requirements gathering, through to how to write an effective business case.
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Ratings agencies are a fact of life for the financial community and as cyber security rises in importance, so too must the security of an organisation be rated. Security rating platforms is a rapidly growing area of the security technology market.
âRatings give you the ability to tell a story that is not just about firewalls. There has been an evolution of the way that we present to the CEO and the board,ââA security rating is a measurement of the cyber security performance carried out by an independent agency,â says Jake Olcott, VP of BitSight a security ratings provider. Adding that they are used for third party analysis of suppliers as well as first party - internal performance management.
âWe are rating organisations by their performance using externally collected data and then we place them on a measurement scale of 250 to 900; 250 being poor and 900 outstanding,â Olcott says. BitSight was founded in 2011 and has been adopted by a number of Fortune 500 businesses in the USA and is incerasing its UK and European presence.
Olcott says adoption is being driven by organisations keen to gain a better understanding of their security against rivals or the wider business community. Rising levels of transparency are part of this adoption. Investors and insurance companies are looking to get a better understanding of how the businesses they insure or invest in are performing.
Olcott says CIO customers use the ratings to improve their management and relationships with third party suppliers and also demonstrate to the organisation where there are gaps in the organisational security.
âRatings give you the ability to tell a story that is not just about firewalls. There has been an evolution of the way that we present to the CEO and the board,â Olcott tells the Horizon CIO Podcast.
âThe major use case is for third party monitoring, as there has been a dramatic increase in attacks on vendors, contractors and the supply chain,â Olcott adds of how CIOs and CTOs are using security ratings.
To learn more, listen in.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Wellcome Trust chief technology officer (CTO) James Thomas told a Horizon CIO Network roundtable how his organisation has built a new operation with data and change at its heart.
Talking to CIO and CTO peers from FTSE 100 organisations Thomas gives a frank insight into how to deliver change and reveals how he created a new culture and set of measurements to benefit the organisation and its technologists.
The Wellcome Trust is headquartered in central London, but owes its philanthropic heritage to an American, Sir Henry Welcome who moved to the UK in 1880 to set up a pharmacy business, one which thrived and went on to become one of the most important global makers of treatments, for example inventing the tablet.
As well as building a pharmaceutical giant, Sir Henry Wellcome was passionate and curious about medicine and travelled the word collecting artefacts and history about the treatment of illness and its cures, all of which is today housed in the Wellcome Collection in London, just a stoneâs throw from the St Pancras Eurostar terminal.
Over the last three years Thomas has been operating on getting the technology and technologists of the Wellcome Trust fit for the changing landscape any organisation faces.
âWe created a new target operating model (TOM) which set out how to get us away from old ways of working. For example, we delivered projects to parts of the Wellcome Trust to a timeline they set,â
Thomas adds that this had the potential to create issues with the technology operations.As CIO of the UCLH hospital in London, Thomas pioneered the use of customer journeys for patients visiting a hospital for a treatment and the CTO brought that same level of experience to the Wellcome Trust. For scientists seeking Wellcome Trust funding to research a cure or treatment the route to funding, Thomas found, was complicated and did not serve the Wellcome Trust or the scientist well.
Tune in to hear more.
https://wellcome.ac.uk/
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The first Horizon CIO Network roundtable event of 2019 focused on how organisations can implement artificial intelligence (AI). CIOs from major financial services, medical, retail, education, manufacturing and housing joined the debate.
Keynote for the event was Alistair Maughan, who has been a partner with leading law firm Morison Foerster LLP since 2004 and at the forefront of technology law throughout his career. Maughan told a room full of CIOs about ethical and legal implications of AI.
âFor almost 30 years now I've seen successive waves of technology evolution breaking on the shore from, offshoring and cloud and robotic process automation,â Maughan said of his career in technology law.
Maughan told the CIOs that AI differs from previous iterations of technology implementation as the relationship between the CIOâs organisation as a user and the supplier of the AI technology is far more âcollaborativeâ. The lawyer goes on to describe how the relationships are complicated as the data belongs to the CIOâs organisation, and arguably the customer, but the AI technology of course belongs to the supplier.
âLawyers tend not to like things that are joined as it does not work well, from a legal perspective, it sets my teeth on edge, a joint obligation means I can't really enforce it. Joint ownership of intellectual property doesn't work very well. It's just much more complicated.â
Scare stories
Maughan has worked on a number of legal cases involving AI and reassured the CIO community that this technology is not the worrisome replacement for workers that it is portrayed as:âYou know, the scare stories out there in the Daily Mail on The Daily Express are all about AI and robots replacing humans. But the business cases that I've seen are almost exclusively around making humans more efficient.,â he said.
In Maughanâs experience organisations are experimenting with AI to find an efficiency or to solve problems. Maughan said he hears organisations state their AI ambition is: âWe've got 15 steps between identifying the problem and selling something to the consumer, if we can make step number one 3% more efficient, step number two 5% more efficient,â then their business just might remain sustainable.
âThe common theme is around the business case, it's not necessarily about saving money and reducing headcount, it's about what can we do more effectively as a business in order to improve the business going forward?â
But Maughan says the CIO community must be ready to act and consider the ethical impact of AI on their organisation.
The technology will improve the way organisation âengage with their customersâ, âBut be prepared to say, this isnât meeting our ethical or our technical standards, as meeting your business case is more important.â
Maughan warned CIOs to be keeping abreast of the changing nature of business as a result of AI.
âThere are certainly some issues around who owns the intellectual property in something that's been created by a machine. And there are lots of legal arguments, there was a famous case of a photograph that was taken by a monkey that a photographer set up well, that legal cases is still running as to whether that wasn't created by a human, so who owns the IP in that?
âWe certainly have not yet got down to the position of being able to work out who owns the property in something created by a machine.â
Maughan concludes that the legal sector is, as ever, lagging behind the technology industry. âThe law and regulation is miles behind what you guys in the technology field is doing and it's been that way, ever since I've been a technology lawyer. The lawyers have barely got to grips with cloud and offshoring, they are certainly nowhere near getting to grips with a legal
regime to deal with AI and machine learning.â -
The media industry has been highly disrupted by the internet and the move by consumers to digital media. This has led to major changes in the business models of media organisations. For the March Horizon CIO Podcast, three leading media business technology leaders came together to debate the impact, but more importantly the opportunity, for technology to change the shape of the media.
CIOs from three unique media types joined CIO Community Editor Mark Chillingworth to describe how their sector is changing in shape. Chris Fosberry represented the subscription critical business data sector as CTO of Argus Media, which is a publisher of commodities market data, prices and analysis. Sean Harley CIO of Ascential is also from business-to-business, but this former magazine publisher is now a leading provider of events. Whilst Richard Walsh us Group Technology Director at The Telegraph Media Group, best known for its broadsheet newspaper.
âThe media is always reinventing itself,â CTO Chris Fosberry says of the sector and why it is a fascinating place to be a CIO. But as Walsh says: âThe media has been one of the first areas to be disrupted over a sustained period of time,â and challenges to the sector continue, whether from social media, citizen journalists or startups.
Throughout the podcast these senior CIOs describe how being a technology leader in the media shares many of the same challenges as sectors being disrupted. Of major interest is how the sector is having to reshape its operating model and adopt multi-function teams models, something that the sector has never been good at. Throughout its history the media has been led by sales directors who have relied upon a divisive âmanagement styleâ to ensure sales and editorial do not work together. However the three CIOs describe how, as a result of technology, this is changing to a collaborative ethos.
âThe pace that we are moving at and the reliance on the digital economy and the data is becoming more and more important and that leads to innovation in structure, the business, your global reach and in the customer sets,â says Ascential CIO Sean Harley.
Tune into listen tor how these three CIOs are dealing with:
Data science
Recruiting data scientists
Business Analytics
Agile practices
Board level operations
Artificial intelligence
Organisational structure
Argus Media
Ascential
The Telegraph Group
Audience
Consumer behaviour
Embed yourself into business teams
Understanding user disciplines in tools usage
Targeted premium services
Qualitative data
Quantitative data
Digital delivery
Listening to the customer
Maintaining a business advantage
AI
Editorial quality
Customer journeys
Marketing
Compelling content
Real-time data
Adding value
Automation
Unstructured data
Natural Language Processing
Advertising revenue
Market volatility
Scaling up the team
Best in class products
Print media
Journalism
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A quarter of major business technology leadership hires in 2018 were for a CTO role. 2018 saw a small decrease in role changes amongst the UKâs CIOs and CTOs.
Speaking to major search providers, they too are seeing an increase in demand for CTOs and at both ends of the country.
Financial services was one of the most active sectors throughout 2018, perhaps indicative of the rising awareness that technology led challengers are fast encroaching on their business models. Early in the year Duncan Gray moved from automotive auctioneers BCA to Premium Credit, a provider of specialist loans and James Holmes joined North P&I to continue the transformation begun by Mark Aikman.
The insurance arm of the financial services sector saw Paul Carris return to the CIO fold at Collinson Group, owners of the Columbus brand. Mark Collins remains within insurance moving from Vitality to the UK business of Belgiumâs Ageas. Also staying with insurance is former HMRC technology leader Mark Hall, moving to Legal and General from Aviva as Group IT Director.
Challenger banks were amongst those driving up the trend for hiring CTOs with both the popular Monzo and Civilised Bank recruiting CTOs, as Meri Williams and Simon Bateman joined their senior leadership teams respectively. Similarly specialist financial services provider CDC hired Gavin Stubbs from Close Brothers.
In the building society market Nationwide recruited CIO Patrick Eltridge to be its COO, again a reflection of the impact technology has on all aspects of financial services.
Retail, like financial services is well aware of technology changing its business model. Health food chain Holland & Barrett made probably the largest hire in retail for 2018 with former J Sainsburyâs George Goley joining as CTO, alongside Goleyâs recruitment, the Russian owned business also recruited transformation director Doug Nesbitt, the duo will work alongside Mark Fabes, who remains as CIO. Adrian Thompson joined Specsavers from vacuum cleaner makers Dyson, Mark Phillips returned to the CIO role at estate agents chain Countrywide from consulting.
Serving the world of retail is data and logistics. Former Trainline CIO David Jack moved from logistics tracking services provider Metapack to become CTPO of Dunhumby the data firm famed for its role in the development of the Tesco Clubcard. At Metapack former Collinson Group CDO and Daily Mail CIO Steve Homan took up the leadership chair, while former Drax Group CIO James Robbins is leading technology at delivery firm ArrowsXL.
Engineering had a busier year than normal, sector veteran Steven Capper moved to Royal BAM from AECOM. In specialist engineering for the oil and energy sector Darren Martin became CIO of Wood Group, the organisation stated its hire of a CTO was to ensure it was able to be competitive in the move to connected internet of things services. Also in the energy engineering sector, Allan Cockriel moved from GE to Petrofac and just as with Wood Group, Petrofac said the hiring of a CIO was to be at the forefront of the technology change coming into the market. Leaving the world of engineering for plates and saucers was former McLaren Technology Group CIO Craig Charlton who joined Compass Group as Group CIO.
The biggest move of the year was the news that Mayank Prakash, the CDIO of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) since 2014 announced in late 2018 he was leaving DWP to join energy and utilities firm Centrica. Prakash told the Horizon CIO Podcast and .Next conference how DWP has become data and customer oriented over the last four years.
In the media Trevor Attridge moved across to be CIO of Young & Rubicam in the advertising sector. The Economist Intelligence Unit hired Sharon Cooper from the British Medical Journal as its CDO and consumer magazines publisher Ti Media hired former CIO and Gartner analyst Lisa Gannon (pictured). Whilst former News UK architect and director of engineering Adam Griffiths became the CTO of electronics firm RS Components.
The need for academia to be utilising technology to deliver an improved experience for its students is increasing by the year and former Science Museum Group CIO Jason Oliver moved from Kensington to Sussex to become the CIO for the University of Sussex.
Although slightly quieter than 2017, the roles that CIOs and CTOs took demonstrates that despite the challenges of the UK economy at present, there remains strong demand for good technology leadership and that those business technology leaders with imagination, a good track record and an ability to work with all members of the organisation, are highly sought after.
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The Horizon CIO Podcast is brought to you in partnership with Future Processing:
To discover what to include in your RFI, download How to write an RFI for outsourced IT Projects from Future Processing at: www.startnearshoring.com/rfiâItâs hot on the exoplanet Wasp 107 Bravo, 500 degrees celsius and that is very important. A team of experts from the University of Exeter has detected helium in the atmosphere of this exoplanet, they used the Hubble space telescope to analyse light passing through it and they have discovered helium by looking at the data and analysing it,â says Alan Hill, Chief Information and Digital Officer for the University of Exeter.
Hill, speaking at a Horizon CIO Network roundtable recently, has been leading technology at the Devon university since January 2016 when he joined the institute from the British Army. The move into academia wasnât an effort to avoid being shot at, the former Army CIO was attracted by the opportunity to completely change the way a university operates.
Universities are under going significant change. The move to tuition fees in the UK has been headline news since it was introduced by the Labour government, as a result academic institutions now compete for students, because students means revenues. The tuition fees for UK resident students are set by the government, but for international students the institutions set their own fee rates.
âAn annual fee is around ÂŁ9000 a year, for international students that can be double, so recruitment of those is a highly competitive market, so the offer you give has to be compelling. You need to respond to their application quickly and get them signed up,â Hill says of enrolment pressure Exeter faces, âthat sounds like retail,â he adds.
Research too drives revenue, both in terms of grants to carry out research, but it also attracts students.
âFocusing on research and changing the IT operating model without dropping the ball is a risky business,â Hill tells the CIO Podcast. âResearch is vital for the university as part of Russell Group â the research intense universities. Because research drives big money, creating the capability to support research means buying high performance computing.â
New role for IT
âWe find ourselves as an IT organisation pushing our people up, forward and getting close and personal to the staff driving those research opportunities,â Hill explains of how research into exoplanets, dementia or energy require bespoke technology and analysis. âWe are having to transform from an old style IT organisation providing infrastructure and applications to be right down in the business colleges, a central shared service, business driving activity.
âThe skills of the IT staff make the difference, they are the people who do the specialist programming to support the research into the atmosphere of exoplanets light years away. So we have really had to focus on digital services,â Hill says.
âWe are pushing IT staff up into the marketing and admissions teams, designing CRMs that are about closing the deal and driving income. We need to move ownership of the IT and digital services up and out of IT. We need to get people who understand education to own the digital services, not me as an IT expert. What do I know about how to educate or research?â
Hill adds that his team has been changing the governance âso they own it, they describe what they want. To do that we needed to pick up the whole operating model and turn it upside down. We need an IT operating model that is fit for the modern environment. So its design led, service centric and absolutely customer focussed.
âAnd that empowers the IT staff in a way you havenât seen before and during that process, we kept an important aspect of delegation to the point of discomfort,â Hill says of his leadership style.
âI am not the controlling authority on all things, I have to delegate to ensure the delivery is at pace, so delegation to the point of discomfort is a really important part of what we are trying to achieve. That is not my idea, that is something that comes from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.
âCustomer is not an easy word in higher education, but student journey is entirely applicable. Can you recreate an Amazon online shopping experience for students who are submitting their work for marking? Can we design so work goes through the plagiarism checker, it goes through online marking, the comments by the academics are in short videos or text and it arrives back in the students inbox at the right time and the grades are instantly put in the analytics database and it arrives on their smartphone in an App? That is the kind of customer journey we are talking about,â Hill says of how a university has to have a technology ecosystem akin to retail.
âThis means creating immersive digital services that create an environment around the student, they get everything they need in one click in the format that is highly personalised to that student. So if you learn in pictures, if you understand and conceptualise things in that way, that is how stuff is pushed to you, or if you want things in pure text that is how you get it,â Hill says of taking lessons from personalised offerings in financial services for example and placing them in academia.
âIn research we have management systems that pick up an academicâs slightly hair brained idea and take it all the way through bids, grants, analysis, delivery and the impact, which is what research is all about,â Hill says of creating new workflows. âIt is all about being data and insight driven.â
Secure university
âWhile we are doing all of that change, we have to talk about security. My experience in the Ministry of Defence is extensive in security, the game there is to understand where people were landing in your enterprise, in your network. Can you pick out three or four needles in the haystack and put them together and understand why they are there before you take any action?â Hill says of security management during his career in the Army that saw him rise to the rank of Brigadier.
âIn a university, where is the data? Who has their hands on it? What is valuable? The University of Exeter is big into bio science and energy. Who is interested in our energy research? There is probably quite a few state actors that would be quite interested in our battery research.
âI moved from a military environment where we have some quite clear threat actors to an environment where university and IPR (intellectual property rights ) has to move forward. We are dealing with academics who are very single minded, they are completely dedicated to their cause, they do not trust many of the systems, but they trust to keep it themselves. How do I put more security around them? Because I know they are acting as a honey pot,â Hill says of the security challenge.
Business continuity
âWe have worked really hard to get the university to understand what are you going to do when the website goes down? We run a lot of services through the website, the recruitment, confirmation and clearing activity it is really important.
âWe did two exercise at our silver level command we worked up a scenario, working with the police of having our website hijacked. Basically ransomeware and we had to move to an alternative.
âHow long can we last without our website? Hang on, we are right in the middle of a major recruitment campaign. If you are off the air they will sign up to other universities as there is an offer available. The next scenario was the website was off and another site pops up and all the student financial details are captured.
âWe did that at gold level then, the directors, we run the same scenario, are you going to pay the ransom, big debate between the CFO and others who say we need to get back up and running, so we are working on alternative plans. We are trying to work out where we are in the battle rhythm of the university to understand what it is, what we need to do and we have a really productive discussion about how we will respond. Because we know this will happen, it is about how you respond that matters.â
We asked Hill if there were military and education parallels. âWith the customer, it is a mix of demanding age ranges all determined to succeed that is true of both,â Hill responded. âSpecial services are required by some, they might be very demanding academics or generals. Data is more important than ever before to these people.â
The Horizon CIO Podcast is brought to you in partnership with Future Processing:
To discover what to include in your RFI, download How to write an RFI for outsourced IT Projects from Future Processing at: www.startnearshoring.com/rfi -
As bank TSB knows all too well, how people perceive your brand is based on their technology experience. In the highly competitive world of online book retailing this is especially the case because of the dominant position of Amazon, which of course has transformed not only the retail of novels, but every shopping story you can name.
Despite the scale and success of Amazon, here in the UK a technology driven service, developed by a UK development house demonstrates that a good technology consumer experience allows organisations to flourish alongside a US giant like Amazon.
World of Books was founded in 2000 by three Sussex entrepreneurs who had started out selling books at car boot sales and is now a primary partner to retail giant Amazon, but also the charity sector.
âWe sell books across 30 different marketplaces, essentially these books were going to landfill,â says Head of IT for World of Books Ben Edwards. âCharities receive so many of these book and they struggle to sell them. Just because you have a book about thermodynamics that is sitting on a high street in Middlesbrough in a charity shop, you have to rely on the right person walking in, finding it and buying it. Whereas if you sell online across all these different marketplaces at the right price, the likelihood is someone will be able to buy it at the right price.â
In 2013 World of Books saw an opportunity to capitalise on the mobility wave and build a direct to the consumer service and developed Ziffit, a mobile service for selling books, games, DVDs and CDs. Mobility allows organisations to build services that become unique businesses in themselves.
âFor us, the question was, how can we get more books and how can we leverage the technology to get more goods in to be recycled and sold?â Edwards adds: âThe obvious solutions was a B2C direct to the consumer App. Ziffit is a site where you turn your mobile phone into a barcode scanner and you get an instant price for the item.â
âZiffit has grown massively in the last couple of years and now trades over seven million items a year,â Edwards says of how the four year old business has grown. âFor us mobile was a key part of the strategy.â World of Books set out to ensure that Ziffit and its App were not âan extension of the website,â and worked with mobile technology development agency to ensure it developed a mobile first customer centric service. âIt is so much more convenient than typing in your barcodes manually you can upload them with the camera App,â the IT Head says.
Right, Josh OâRiordan of Brightec with left CIO Francesco de Marchis at the Horizon CIO SummitCustomer centered mobile Apps
âRespecting the voice of our customers is critical to us. One of the things that Brightec helped us organise is the user testing, where we would sit in a room and watch users interact with the App and that really brings everything to life.
âYou can often get really bogged down in Google Analytics with bounce rates and conversion rates, which are not very real. Whereas when you see a user hitting something in the flow of the App that doesnât work properly, it brings those figures to life and how you can influence them,â Edwards says of not being overly data focused. Brightec, a Brighton based development agency has been a partner to World of Books from the outset with the development of Ziffit.
Brightec specialises mobile App development and has delivered technologies for financial services providers Willis Towers Watson, retailers Morrisons and automotive firm Jaguar Land Rover.
âIt was interesting doing the user testing, it wasnât just the learning that we could take from the user experience, it felt like we were learning a lot about the actual brand as well; and how people perceive the brand through interacting on the website and App. I think a lot of that was taken back to the marketing and internal teams,â says Andy Ferrett, managing director of Brightec.
âA lot of the fixes were not IT fixes. The CMO sat in and it was useful to him and a lot was actually the messaging and what we say to the customer,â Edwards says of how user involvement shapes the experience for all members of the organisation and its C-level.
âOne of the biggest conversations is the context and when someone is interacting with your product,â says Joshua OâRiordan, Creative Director of Brightec says. âOn most desktop systems you are making the assumption that they are at home or in an office, relatively fixed moments when they are interacting with your product. When it comes to mobile testing, you have to really take into account when someone is interacting with your account, but also how quickly, how long they take to get your core message and value proposition, are they using it outside in the sun? If so donât create a black app?
âFor these guys it was about where is someone going to be. We were trying to gauge with customers, whether it is living rooms, grandparents houses or loft spaces. So making sure we have high contrast rates and many of the big learning points were about how we optimise this app for the customer.â
âIt gave everyone a direct insight into communicating the charitable and recycling benefits came from this room here,â Ferrett of Brightec adds.
Context, content and technology
Not only is there are high number of front end customer demands on developing a mobile App, but the customer expects a technology experience as rich as they would receive on a desktop device. That means a strong focus on using Application Programming Interface (API) and context centric networking.
âWe provide Brightec with an API that hooks back into our systems and algorithms to provide the buying rules and selling engines,â Edwards of World of Books says of how the Ziffit App connects to the Amazon and eBay platforms where the Sussex retailer sells the bulk of its inventory.
But Edwards says CIOs and organisations donât always have to rely on heavyweight technologies to deliver a great customer service. âIt is not always as complex as APIs, somethings work on SFTP file drops, so it varies by company,â he says.
âOne thing I would say is that not all APIs are equal and not all API documentation is equal. So a key consideration is, what is the level of work is required to interrogate this API and work with it,â Edwards says.
âThe biggest challenge is again context, when people are on 4G and 3G connections, especially 3G there is a whole lot of stuff to deal with, especially around how efficient and optimised a connection is and to make sure that people can load data quickly, so there is a lot of design around that,â Brightecâs OâRiordan says. âOn a desktop you can get away with giving away more data that then gets parsed and you can rely on a powerful machine that can process that data. On a mobile, if you lose a connection halfway through how do you go back and get that data again. There is also a bunch of considerations on how often an App is opened, it could be once a month, a year, 18 times a day, so there are a host of considerations about stale data and cache and how you update, and how you hit the API for the next data. There are considerations around assets and imagery and mobiles have a whole range of screen densities,â the creative director says of the myriad considerations in App development.
Developing new businesses requires a strong partnership between clients and the technology service provider and Edwards of World of Books believes this was crucial in the development of Ziffit.
âWe couldnât really have got the success without this long term relationship. Our business is quite complex and in terms of time saving and I think we have access to fantastic talent in all areas of this business,â he says of the relationship with Brightec.
âTo serve anyone well you have got to know them well and know what their needs are. For us as a service provider, it does take time and partly it is psychological, you get involved and for us itâs years and all of our team are massively invested in it,â OâRiordan of Brightec says.
Horizon Innovation Partner:
Brightec â customer centred App developers
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For the second year in a row insurance business RSA Group has announced good results. During 2017 RSA Group, which in the UK is better known for its More Than general insurance (GI) brand, recorded profits of ÂŁ322 million after tax, up from ÂŁ20 million in 2016. The good results of 2016 prompted CEO Stephen Hester to state that the international insurance business was out of recovery.
In late 2016 David Germain joined RSA Group as CTO working alongside stalwart RSA business leader Darren Price and a year later became Group Chief Information & Technology Officer.
Germain invited the Horizon CIO Podcast to the RSA Group headquarters in the Walkie Talkie building in central London to discuss the turn-around story of RSA, his career, diversity and how technology is reshaping general insurance.
âWe have around 13,000 employees and we deal with what we call core GI products, so anything like home, pet, business and on the commercial side, developments, property, schools and hospitals,â Germain says of the RSA Group business that also operates in Canada, Scandinavia and the Middle East.
Written by Mark Chillingworth Photographed by Matt GoreâOur profitability in 2017 and our operating profit was ÂŁ660 million and our net written premiums was ÂŁ6.7 billion and our combined operating ratio was around 94%. We have come to the end of the recovery and we have made it clear to the markets. We have three strategic pillars to focus on; one is our service to customers, second is our underlying service results and the third is the cost efficiency across the organisation. Those pillars have kept us honest as we have gone through the recovery,â Germain says.
âI think technology was, has and will continue to be integral to how we look at our cost ratios,â Germain adds of how technology played a key role in the turn-around of the business. Since RSA Group found itself in difficulties in 2014 the business has been reshaping its operations and as Germain reveals, modernising and rationalising the technology estate. Germain reveals claims platforms have been centralised, data platforms have been unified in an effort to provide better insights to the business and the latest wave of technologies are being adopted.
âWe need to continuously industrialise what we do, everywhere and continuously educate and learn with our people about how these technologies work and figure out where these technologies can take us,â Germain says. But despite two years of reporting good results, competition is fierce in the insurance sector and challenges to the economy have a major impact to the sector.
âWe have to continue to focus on our cost base and we have to continuously have to prioritise. And one of the key areas for me as we look at our cost base is robotics. What can we do with processing and automation, AI and where can we take that in our contact centres and how can we create the more ecocentric environment? At the same time, ensuring we are not degrading the customer experience, we are improving the customer experience,â Germain says.
CTO to CITO
Germain is one of a growing number of business technology leaders to have a job title that has a remit of both information and technology.
âIt is three hats, the first one as a CTO was the transformation programme with multi-million pound projects happening in every region, replatforming and consolidation and new data platforms, new web based platforms and designing the digital experience, that was my CTO hat, alongside a very technically competent organisation and trying to get them to work out the right road maps.
âThe second element is being the CIO and that is like going home for me, I had the opportunity to look at the operating environment, and again and what the senior execs asked was to get a good understanding of the operating environment, where we spend money, how we spend money and what are the benefits and outcomes we get for it,â he says. Germain adds that as CIO he is also looking at ensuring where RSA Group outsources IT and business processes it understands what skills it must keen in-house.
âSo the CIO and the CTO hat have been tightly coupled. The further strand is about innovation. We all talk about AI (artificial intelligence) and cognitive intelligence, we all talk about connected insurance, and the key thing for me is use cases. Where can we see real use cases. We are never going to be bleeding edge as an organisation, it is not something we prescribe to, but what we are looking at, is being fast followers and we are working with great insuretech partners,â he says. Germain says RSA Group is actively looking at startups that âwill that plug into our business processesâ.
During his career Germain has also held COO roles and in the process oriented world of financial services Germain believes that experience has been vital.
âMy historical COO hat has stood me well and it is another string to my bow and working with teams and meeting different cultures and getting close to the application end user state is part of the way forward.â Like many of his peers in a variety of sectors, Germain is working on cultural change across the organisation, including the adoption of Agile, which he says is flourishing in Scandinavia. âI am very keen to learn to how we can leverage that across the organisation.â
Germain says the adoption of a new culture using the latest working methods is crucial as the expectations of customers changes. General insurance businesses have to have a omnichannel approach he says with communications to the customer across a variety of platforms.
That approach is not only about the internal culture, Germain says that partners to RSA Group are now being tasked to âchange and adaptâ he says.âWe have 630 technologists across the group and an additional 170 are contractors and we have a number of SI providers, and we ask them to help us to learn and as we build out our centres of excellence to enable us to grow.â
Connected diversity
âOur business development leaders are highly focused on connected insurance. We are looking at Bot, sensory and IoT technologies. Connected insurance is in our pipeline, we will be fast followers we have to create an architecture that allows us to create API solutions with third party providers,â Germain says of how major insurance firms have to be ready to react to challengers such as Neos in the UK and Lemonade in the USA, just two of the challenger brands to enter the market.
âWe are aware that connected insurance is a disruptor, and there is a very real awareness that customers will expect solutions and services to be added to our products and service. We are constantly having a healthy tension and debate around our digital agenda and our digital operating models and our customer experience and constantly bring hypothesis to the table and what our customers will want,â he says.
As a black CIO leading a FTSE 100 financial services business, Germain is passionate about increasing diversity in technology, financial services and the top table of the FTSE 100.
âI am very privileged and honoured to be in this position. I would say to anyone, to focus on a few core things: focus on your strengths, make sure that the organisation can see them and what you are adding in terms of value. Focus on your development and ask for feedback, broaden your network.â
Most importantly, Germain advises those from diverse backgrounds: âdonât be scared to speak up, that is why those organisations have hired youâ. Germain says good mentors are crucial to help gauge speaking up.
âFind ways of working with people who can help you and your career, but the starting point is always going to be your performance.â Asked if he had mentors who shared his background Germain laughs: âThere wasnât, that didnât come until a decade into my career,â but the CIO has a confident outlook and believes business technologists from diverse backgrounds have a broader set of champions to model themselves on than he did.
âI think the world has changed and there are a few more David Germains around the FTSE 100 and globally, so there are different relationships around diversity that is more than just a gender or a colour.â
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In the spring of 2018 enterprise resource planning (ERP) software giant SAP announced that from 2025 its ERP software will be built to operate with just one database platform, its own SAP HANA database.
Between now and 2025 SAP will continue to support ERPs using Oracle, SQL, IBM or a myriad of other database formats, but beyond 2025 it will no longer support ERP applications not using the HANA database. Discussion on CIO forums that the Horizon CIO Podcast is a member of displayed a fear amongst business technology leaders that SAP is imposing a restriction on agility and technology spend on CIOs. This restriction comes at a time when CIOs must display an increased focus on the needs of the customer and business agility.
CIO Mark Lockton-Goddard and Bryan Oak, COO of Searchlight Consulting agree with this sentiment and debate the issue on the Horizon CIO Podcast.
âHANA is still a very nascent product, it is increasing in adoption and the product set is maturing, but at the same time we have a lot of existing SAP customers who have invested a lot of their time and are struggling to see the business case for moving from their existing platforms to HANA,â Oak says analysing the current database market.
Analyst houses believe there are over 36,000 instances of the SAP ERP platform in place globally and although 2025 may sound some way off, it is less than seven years away.
âOften in our businesses we have customised them and that may not be a good thing, but it is often right for our business. That doesnât really leave a lot of time, as a complex implementation means there is not a lot time,â Fidessa financial services business CIO Lockton-Goddard says. âUpgrading therefore is often an expensive process and it is time consuming and the business benefits may not be seen.
âSo to have a conversation with the board about doing an upgrade that will cost a bunch of money, and you are not going to get the business benefits is not a great conversation to have right now.â
Oak agrees with the CIO, but believes the industry must not look at SAPâs plans as an âupgradeâ. âThe architecture is such that for most people it is a re-implementation. The customisations you have will have to be considered. If it is a reimplementation and a significant investment, you donât want to start those conversations with âwe have got to do this because the database technology is forcing us to do itâ. That is the tail wagging the dog. It should be a conversation about what are the business drivers and what are the capabilities we want,â Oak says.
âHaving already a lot of investment on the balance sheet around SAP, you cannot just wipe that off and say letâs start again,â Lockton-Goddard adds.
âBy 2025 normal support for the existing versions of SAP running on other database platforms will be reduced,â he says, though Oak believes it is highly likely that SAP will offer an extension.
SAP in danger
âIt is a challenging conversation for SAP. If you are saying the right thing is to revisit our business plans and processes, I am not sure how many businesses would say SAP is the answer,â CIO Lockton-Goddard says of how organisations are constantly revisiting their strategies and business processes and as a result drop application suites as part of this review. The CIO adds that organisations are beginning to question the reasons for having an ERP platform.
âMaybe an ERP solution is not a great answer for a dynamic, customer focused very agile business, so it is very risky for SAP to force people down a route where SAP will not be the answer.
âThe nearer you are to the customer, the more you need to be agile, the more likely you are to be digital and therefore the more that will impact the systems on a regular basis. So these large complicated systems donât have the agility that we need. So again we end up pulling the ERP back into itself and it becomes a system of record and you deploy more agile tools around that,â Lockton-Goddard says.
Oak (left) agrees and Searchlight Consulting see an increasing number of organisations assessing a component view of the applications they need and selecting applications depending on their âbusiness landscape..and the capabilities neededâ.
âSome of this is also a bit old school, we talk of a replacement journey of three to five years, I canât operate in three to five year cycles, I am lucky if I can operate in three to five months. So the concept of something that is complicated and deploying in that old waterfall style of way is just a non-starter. I donât think it works for a lot of businesses now, we need to be pacy, agile and able to flip systems based on what is going on in the market right now. It feels like SAP are being product focused and not customer focused,â Lockton-Goddard says.
Oak adds that this old school thinking, as CIO Lockton-Goddard dubs it, suggest SAP do not understand the needs of their CIO customers. âYou still have got to have a core set of transactions that are stable, and you donât want to be told that if you want to open a new channel or a new supply to market, you have got to go and rip out all the finance, supply chain and HR.â
Another threat to SAP is the rising adoption by CIOs and organisations of SaaS tools such as Salesforce and Workday, to name just two. Both tool sets are expanding beyond their traditional sales management and HR into business processes such as procurement and payroll.
âWhen you integrate all of these systems together and a transaction takes place in a third party application, which accesses the SAP business logic, that is an indirect user,â Oak says of the increasingly common application landscape CIOs operate. But it is this complex architecture which led to the court case back in February 2017 ruled in favour of SAP against FTSE listed beverages firm Diageo and others for infringement of the software licence. âThey settled for huge amounts of money where they are deemed to be outside of their licence agreements,â Oak says.
âYou are in an environment with other products and that is where the existing SAP customers will be well aware of the well documented legal cases of indirect access.
âSAP has tried to remedy that and they have got some bad press about how they were using that case as a stick for the way they worked with clients. They remedied that a bit with talk of outcome based license payments,â Oak says. âThat is going to be really confusing for the CIOs and how do we factor that in so that we have predictable costs. With user based pricing it is fairly easy to factor. When you look a business transaction volumes it becomes a very difficult business to model.â
âPricing is not overly simple now. These organisation are not known for having clear and simple pricing now,â Lockton-Goddard adds.
âI think the desire to get more revenue from existing clients was a period of time where the licence audit was being used as a bit of a stick. It shows you must understand your license agreements and the chances are you donât have one agreement, and understanding the lay of the land and getting good legal council is essential,â Oak adds.
Does the database matter?
âTo some extent it should be irrelevant and it should be based on outcomes. I donât want to give that decision away, because I know that data, how we look at data and use it, that is increasingly a strategic question for us,â CIO Lockton-Goddard (left) says. âI worry when a service provider starts to regiment and restrict what you can do as a business.â
Oaks argues: âAs long as you can get to the data, and it performs and this is where SAP is going with the HANA cloud offering.â He and Searchlight believe the real concern for CIOs is âwhether all of these software providers are geared up to be a support partner. The management, support, responsiveness and the service levels that the users are used to,â the COO says.
Lockton-Goddard says: âI totally understand why SAP want to go down this route, what is concerning is the cost of the upgrade is so high for a lot of people that it might have a negative effect on their businessâ.
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Picture by Matt Gore/icon
Throughout this week Londonâs technology communities will come together to discuss, announce and consider the role of technology in the nationâs capital at London Tech Week. Driving a great deal of change and wider adoption of data are the first Chief Digital Officer (CDO) for London, Theo Blackwell and CIO for the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust and chair of the London CIO Council Stephen Docherty. The duo tell the Horizon CIO Podcast how CIOs in the public sector as well as their peers in startup and service providers are reshaping the city.
âIt has three main functions, in 2015 the tech community got together, so people from progressive digital leaders from technology and public services to put forward the idea that London suffered from a collaboration deficit,â Blackwell says of why Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has a business technology leader on his team at City Hall by the side of the Thames.
âWe had all these moving parts, 32 boroughs, NHS trusts, schools, higher and further education and yet together we were less than the sum of our moving parts. Although London does great things and is a hotbed for innovation. The innovation that happens has somehow clouded the sense that we could move to the next level,â Blackwell says. In the 2016 London Mayoral elections the technology community clamoured for candidates to appoint a city CDO as already existed in New York.
âMy role is focused on public service transformation and making us more open to the innovation in the technology community and our major institutions, so it has three main functions: one is to promote leadership in the city, secondly to create an institution that enhances collaboration within all our moving parts and thirdly to really push forward the boundaries of public service innovation and to help us explain our needs and citizen needs in a way that the tech sector can fully grasp,â the CDO says.
The role is more than just making public sector technology better, as CDO Blackwell is also ensuring that technology plays a role in the economic growth of London.
âI remember sitting in Kings Cross and sitting in those meetings deciding what was going to happen here and we have seen a wonderful transformation and it is a major tech hub in its own right,â Blackwell, a former cabinet member in the London Borough of Camden says.
âFundamentally my role is to ensure that organic growth is fully supported in connectivity, we are open for talent, how the public sector is responsive to that opportunity that is happening around it.
âWe are two-thirds of the way through a big listening tour and we are bringing that together as a list of missions for London to solve the collaboration deficit.
âThe NHS is a key part of us being a smart city. Unlike other cities in the world, our closeness to the NHS, the learnings that go on within it, the data that it has, it is fundamental to a vision of London as a smart city,â Blackwell says of his working relationship with Docherty and his organisations.
NHS CIO Docherty adds: âWhat is really heartening, since I became the chair of the London CIO Council, the collaboration is there, across CIOs, from a health perspective, London is split into five sustainability partnerships, that is bringing people in your patch like the south east or the south west and working with your commissioning groups, GP practices and for social care the local authorities.â
The collaboration, Docherty explains is making sure that funds available for public sector transformation donât end up in duplication projects across neighbouring NHS trusts or local authorities.
âWe are all trying to achieve the same outcomes, we potentially have five lots of activity trying to achieve the same outcome, which is not efficient so we have formed the London Digital Board and the idea behind that is to oversee that activity and make sure that you have senior representation across the patch,â Docherty says of how the city is working towards increased coordination.
Devolved power
âThis is really really interesting time for digital transformation of public services, we have had devolution of local authorities,â Blackwell says. The capital and its mayor have power over further education, health, police and transport, more than in any other devolved institution.
âSo we have a moment where we have technological convergence, more power to local and democratic authorities and a thirst for reform. And I think crucially you have got citizen expectation rising, as people get more comfortable with technology in their daily lives, in their homes and at work, which means there is a moment for reform which has not existed in this combined way for some time,â Blackwell says of the opportunity.
Docherty (left) and Blackwell are also taking some innovation inspiration from other leading cities in the UK and highlight the high level of collaboration that exists in Manchester between local government and the NHS, something Rachel Dunscombe, who spoke on the Horizon CIO Podcast described last year as part of her focus on using local providers to deliver technology change and improve the local economy. The London duo also cite Scotland and Leeds, where in latter another former speaker on the Horizon CIO Podcast Richard Corbridge is working closely with Dylan Roberts of Leeds City Council.
âThe first step that we will take is to take a step back,â Blackwell says. âToo much of the debate around tech is focused on AI, robots, drones and smart mobility, there is great innovation and we are testing these in London. But what lies behind innovation is data. And so what we need to do first is look at the fundamentals, so we need a better way of working collaboratively, so we are setting up the London Office for Technology and Innovation that will bring leading public service organisations together.
âWe want to reboot Londonâs approach to sharing data, improving data access agreements with local councils and the NHS and we want a new deal for public data. That involves the mayor speaking about the civic importance of public data and there is a real space for us to talk about that it is not just for private organisations to play with.â
âFrom an information and technological point, we are at an inflection point, this is an important moment, the public awareness has been heightened with GDPR, and obviously recent events around data, so the public are very aware, but everyone is on devices and they are generating lots of data, so we have to have the sensible conversations with our population about data and be fully transparent about what we want to achieve. It would be a shame if we didnât foster innovation by making use of the data and we are at an important point now and we listen to the people and make them a partner,â Docherty says.
Docherty believes the new Local Care Records Exemplars (LICRE) announced by NHS England and its CIO Will Smart is an example of the new data debate surrounding the public sector.
âThere are areas where the care records are joined up for the patch, we are going to create a shared care record for London so people can traverse different parts of the city and it will all be joined up,â Docherty says. Blackwell agrees and says it is a great example of how London and its CIO community is ârebootingâ data.
âThe integrated care record might not mean much to the average punter, but will be really revolutionary to how we can deliver care.â âYou go into proactive and predictive care around population management, so you can understand what is going on with a more joined up approach and you can use that data to drive the innovation on top of that. I think that is where we get stuff to happen,â Docherty adds.
By working together Docherty and Blackwell believe that Londonâs CIOs can also improve the technology available to them and the citizens of the capital. Docherty agrees and adds that the London Digital Board is already seeing NHS and local authority CIOs come together to develop services together.
âWe want to mobilise public assets, to improve the fibre network, we can do bids to improve the fibre networks and that eradicates not spots,â Blackwell says. Adding that this is an opportunity to improve training, diversity and the development of digital services.
âIf you were to look at Londonâs technology estate as a birds eye view, and the service you provide to the citizens, how computable is that, how do we tackle vulnerabilities, we donât have a full enough picture of what our tech estate is and our capabilities for the future?â Blackwell said.
New institutional thinking
âYou have to have a little moment where you are building institutions of like minded CIOs and CDOs and can come together, share information and create forums where they can bid for projects together and do things in groups rather than alone,â Blackwell says.
âThe momentum is there now, people are joining. The bid for local health care records, a few years ago that would have been unheard of as you would have multiple agencies and trusts joining up and the fact is that we put our name to it, the Mayor has put his name to it, the document is One London and we are all coming together to make this happen,â Docherty says.
âIt will make our services more efficient and responsive without a doubt and there will be a transformation on the workforce. There are a lot of professionals who spend a lot of their time in meetings who will now be able to be more hands on,â Blackwell says of how Londonâs CIOs are helping reduce the burden of the state. âThe challenge for leadership is how to direct that in ways that increase the productivity.â
âComing back to population health management, if we can join up then you can start to look at that data and be more proactive around predicting and intervening on improving the health of citizens, but also you are able to enable those people to self manage, so that is outside of the hospital and that is where the burden is,â Docherty says of how digital methods can reduce pressure on the NHS, which is critical in the current government funding turmoil.
âWe donât need new infrastructure,â Docherty says of how the vision is to make more of existing technologies. Docherty and his peers have already shown the way forward, working with the Crown Commercial Services organisation to create a single aggregated procurement process for links into the NHS spine.
Both technology leaders are also aware that their programme must not just add new interfaces to old methods. The CIO and CDO discuss on the Horizon CIO Podcast of the need for system design and service based thinking.
âWe have to be mindful that we donât just digitise our processes and care pathways, but take people on the journey so they can begin to reimagine the care pathways,â Docherty says.
âFundamentally if you are changing the service to the user, that is changing the way the organisation works. A public authority wonât look like it did in the early 2000s and that means change and that requires leadership.â
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Old fashioned processes and approaches to human resources are hampering organisations from employing the technologists they need to become relevant digital businesses in 2018. Business technology leaders have discussed the âskills gapâ for the last five years, although there is a shortage of skills, recruitment and employment practices are exacerbating the issue.
âWe need to see companies really begin to invest in people and to put a stop to this reactive culture that will be self perpetuating, because if you donât support the juniors where are you going to find the seniors of tomorrow?â Patrick Crompton, CEO and co-founder of eSynergy Solutions tells the Horizon CIO Podcast. Crompton and his organisation began as a âtraditional recruitment companyâ but today is âdelivering software outcomes through our communitiesâ. Customers include CIOs at major government departments like HMRC, traditional bank HSBC and financial services challengers Nutmeg.
âIt would be almost impossible to deny that there is a skills gap. There is a huge skills gap, but there is also a challenge in the approach for CIOs, HRs and there is a disconnect in that approach,â Crompton says of whether the skills gap issue really exists.
âFor every candidate we get a minimum of five offers,â Crompton says as an example of the skills gap and he believes it is the processes of many organisations that means four of those five organisations miss out on the talent they desire. He adds that the rate of change in technology means that certain technologies and skills fall out of favour as rapidly as they enter demand and that is increasing the challenge for CIOs.
âAt one end of the pipeline you have companies busy fire-fighting, trying to get the best talent from a pool that is ever decreasing. But they have very specific requirements for experienced people who can come in and get on with a problem with very little input from the companies, but the consequence is they have no capacity to manage an intake of juniors, says Nathalie Christmann-Cooper, a Full Stack Rails Developer with Skills Matter, the technology community and events organisation.
Christmann-Cooper has first hand experience of how challenging it can be for a newly qualified technologist to enter the workforce, despite having skills in one of the most sought after technologies.
âIt is very difficult to open those doors. I have seen job specs with what I feel are a really unrealistic set of requirements for a junior, but they want three years plus experience, they ask for a computer science degree,â she says of a miss-match between organisations wanting people with the latest technology skills, but applying old school thinking in terms of qualifications and work experience.
eSynergy Solutionsâ Crompton says: âThere is some very outdated hiring processes that take too much time to hire people, I donât think there is a reasonable understanding of what is out there on the market, there is very very little flexibility and there is a serious lack of understanding of what candidates want.
âThere is a lot of talk about millennials, it is understanding what this generation want and expect, which was not relevant 10 years ago and is absolutely relevant now. If you donât offer those things they will not work for you and your organisation, they will go and work for Google or Facebook,â Crompton says.
âYou can draw a lot of parallels with what has happened over the last 15 years. If you look at software development it was traditional waterfall methodology where you would capture the requirements, you would define the specs and that could take a year to 18 months before you even develop any software. If you take a look at these organisations like Facebook and Google they are delivering software every day. So these software processes are defining the way that you hire people and the way that they are trained,â he says.
Christmann-Cooper adds: âAs technologists some of the onus is on us, we need to have an area of expertise, but to be successful you have to understand the bigger picture and how your specialism fits not only in the business, but also in the wider picture of how your customers are thinking and reacting to what you build and develop.â
Crompton believes organisations face no alternative but to modify how they treat staff and recruit them: âThere is a handful of ways that you can build teams. You can either build teams yourself, you can hire contractors or you can go to traditional systems integrators and consultancies, unlike 10-15 years ago they do not have a bunch of developers sat on the bench waiting to be engaged as they cannot keep hold of their developers. All of these angles are coming under scrutiny in their ability to deliver software effectively.
âYou are having to change and adapt and look at new roots. Organisations are missing out on a huge pool of talent by only being very blinkered about their approach, by saying I can only hire senior experienced people, if you are prepared there are options out there to consider it, there is a blended approach,â he says.
Diversity beyond genderâThere is plenty of people coming through from the more disruptive learning pathways like the coding bootcamps,â
Patrick Crompton of eSynergy SolutionsChristmann-Cooper says. âAnd you have a complete diverse mix of students they are not all computer science based, it is less conventional candidates that have lots of important soft skills to bring to the mix.
âRemember diversity is not just a discussion about gender, it is age, accessibility, culture and background experience. People are looking at having three to five career changes in a life time,â she says.
To prove the point CEO Crompton has lost team members to new careers. âFour or five of our recruitment consultants have retrained as DevOps or software engineers. But what a great opportunity after seven or eight years in one industry to change careers.
âThere is a bunch of extra skills that they have, the interpersonal skills, the business skills, customer experience that they have learnt and then have moved into technology, it is fabulous for the industry,â he says.
âSkillsmatter they have done a really good job of attracting a really diverse workforce. This is the first job I have had in over 20 years and not once while I have been there have I felt out of place; and it is just such an inspiring place to work,â Christmann-Cooper says.
âI think the diversity piece stems from people not really understanding what diversity is â it is not just one set of people,â Crompton says of those that over focus on the important need to increase gender diversity. âThe problem with diversity is a lot of people do not buy into the fact that it genuinely creates a better work environment. I genuinely believe it does. The best software engineering teams we create are diverse in relation to everything, in all areas,â Crompton says.
âThere are so many different perspectives you can bring to a problem,â Christmann-Cooper adds. âSociety is diverse and you have to reflect that in your teams otherwise you will not reflect that to your customer.â
Helping AvivaMajor insurance business Aviva has recruited eSynergy Solutions to help the general insurance business build more diverse teams. Aviva recognised eSynergy Solutions unique abilities and its partnership with Skillsmatter and the community events to help Aviva attract a diverse workforce.
eSynergy Solutions has seen examples of organisations trying to recruit women engineers, they get some great candidates apply, but they then face an all male recruitment panel.
âThey are not going to take that job because there is no female role models in those organisations. You are not going to attract that talent, so we are working with Aviva about how can we address that problem and then put some measurable metrics around it and then the final stage is how they share their story with the community so other people can learn,â Crompton says.
âIt was Dr Sue Black who was a role model for me because she was relatable and real and she was the first person who made me realise it was possible,â Christmann-Cooper says of the need for role models.
Both Crompton and Christmann-Cooper are far from negative about the diversity issue though: âWe are in one of the best positions we have been in. The fact that there is a bunch of events and meetups that celebrate diversity and offer ways to get involved. You go back 10 years ago that didnât exist,â the eSynergy Solutions CEO says.
Christmann-Cooper agrees: âThe meetup community is so strong now and it is really supportive and encouraging, so if you are not strong or confident, get along to these meetups they will really give you a boost.
This weeks Podcast is brought to you in association with eSynergy Solutions -
Graeme Hackland CIO at Williams Formula One, Damian Smith, Head of Information Technology at The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), IT Director Matthew Reynolds from Southampton Football club and sports portfolio CIO Mike Bohndiek formerly Head of IT at West Ham United.
âIn cricket we capture all the data about every head strike, which goes into R&D about helmets and concussion protocols and data is turning that from an anecdotal method to a data led approach,â says Head of Information Technology at The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) Damian Smith.
Smith is CIO for cricketâs governing body, his peers IT Director Matthew Reynolds, from Southampton Football club, Graeme Hackland at Williams F1 team and sports portfolio CIO Mike Bohndiek are all at the forefront of ensuring sport uses data to improve safety, entertainment and performance. The CIOs, came together at the Williams F1 factory in Oxfordshire to discuss how sport needs technology to drive transformation as much as any vertical market.
When it comes to data and the rising importance of technology there is much in common between the four leading UK sports CIOs.
âWe are a small club, we cannot compete financially for the top players, so we have to grow cleverly with fan engagement and money through commercial activities,â Reynolds says. Although Southampton fought hard to remain in the English Premiership, the highly lucrative championship is so competitive the IT Director is a key part of helping the club increase revenues and therefore become winners. All four CIOs describe how sport has gone through a transformation of attitude. In the recent past IT was seen as a necessary evil to keep the shop tills operating, but whether it is in the Premiership or on the global race track, technology is now part of increasing fan engagement and therefore revenue, which leads to a better performance.
âMost people are awakening to digital transformation and what that means. You are running a multi-million pound retail business, you are also running a doctors surgery, the professional game and the development of players and the match day,â says Mike Bohndiek. The former CIO of West Ham Football Club is now working in rugby, golf and two different leagues of football as all levels of the sport realise the benefits of technology and good technology leadership.
Customer engagement
A key area of opportunity for CIOs in sport is using digital methods to connect directly with fans and increase the customer experience.
âIn F1 the teams have been a bit removed from the fans and the governing body has owned that relationship. That is definitely changing, with the new ownership of F1 that has happened in the last year, which is unlocking digital channels, that allow us to put content in the hands of Williams fans,â Hackland says.
âWe are now a global brand with a website with premium content that you have to register for,â Reynolds of Southampton FC says. âWe now have to look at Saints globally and its new markets, which are China and India and obviously the States, so it is becoming engaged with a bigger community, not just Hampshire.â
âThe more participants we have, whether it is playing the game, attending or following the game the more we have a relationship with those people and the more we understand how they follow it,â Smith says of why sport needs technologists to play a major part in developing a fan and customer relationship. âPeople donât have those long stretches of time at the weekends to play cricket, so we have to find new ways of engaging with them in shorter time scales, because we are not just competing with other sports, we are competing with Xbox and mobile devices for peopleâs time.â
Sport relies on sponsorship for revenue to invest in the best players, venues and teams and in todayâs digital environment the sponsors expect more audience value from teams, clubs and sports.
âThe more participants and fans we have, the more investment we can attract from sponsors and investors and the government to invest in our game. Part of that underlying model is, if we can demonstrate to sponsors why it is more effective to sponsor our sport over others, the more we can show them what they are getting we can unlock budgets that had not previously existed.
The days of sponsorship being a bit of hospitality and signage for a city firm, those days have gone,â Smith says.
âFor a F1 fan they are never going to get behind the wheel of a F1 car, but us getting data into their hands, that is what excites them,â Hackland says. Above the Williams museum we record the podcast at fans are using simulators, the team has a high end restaurant and cinema venue that fans come to on race day to be with the team as its drivers take on Spa, Monaco and Silverstone.
âWith augmented reality they may be able to compete against their favourite driver at their favourite track,â Reynolds adds. The Premiership IT Director led IT for the Renault F1 team from 2006 to 2011.
Gaming and physical sport are converging too Hackland and Reynolds reveal as eSports continue to grow. Failure to recognise this could see eSports become a digital disruptor to sport.
âWe have dipped our toes into it,â Hackland says. Williams has invested in games where fans can become part of a virtual F1 pit team and change the wheels. âWe have experimented with driver eye view, you get that experience of being in the car.â
The greatest challenge that clubs face at the moment is making their revenue performance agnostic,â Bohndiek says of these opportunities. âThere is a huge amount of revenue that goes into the on the field performance, but with attendance starting to fall, that model is falling away, so a lot of engagement work I am seeing at the moment is very much to do with getting to know the fans and the individuals and what drives them to the stadium and what does their non-match day looks like.
âUltimately sponsors now want to know âwho do you know that we can connect with and what is your global reach?â That drives back down to how do you capture that data and analyse it and that is where digital transformation becomes the answer.â
Data logging
âThe 1979 car was the first connected car, it had a small data logger that took 20 minutes to download one lap of data, now on a Friday we generate 10 gigabytes of data and over the whole weekend 60-80 gigabytes of telemetry data,â Hackland says of how the Internet of Things and connected devices and vehicles are nothing new to Formula One. But having had sensors on the cars since the days of Alan Jones and John Watson, F1 is now putting sensors on team members.
âWe have put biometric sensors on the pit crew and we have been talking about how we extend that across the organisation and how do we keep our people performing at their best, and when they are not, how do we support them if someone is unwell or stressed and you can deal with it.
âAt the sharp end, how do you make sure the fourth pit stop of the day is as good as the first,â the Formula One CIO says of the instrumentation of human data.
âOne of the great challenges in football is the inflated transfer fees and the amount of money you invest. So a lot more is being invested in scouting again and looking in the farther reaches of the world, the challenge is that the data is not as rich and you donât understand the flow of the league, so how do you compare that with someone playing in Argentinian division two?â Bohndiek says of how CIOs in football are helping scouts discover and analyse data to make sure every signing delivers goals per pounds.
âThere is a huge amount of movement in that space to centralise and globalise a data set for a global game to find that next star, that next multi million pound player, but pay a fraction of the price to them.â
âWe have now put technology in place so we can track all our players and we can correlate injuries from not what they have done, but where they have done it and we can learn and we did have the lowest soft tissue injuries in the league. For a club like Southampton it is total cost of ownership and what can we sell that player for and how can we grow our commercial revenues,â Reynolds says with direct honesty about the players being assets.Reynolds adds that at Southampton the focus is on a âdigital coreâ where not only is the club collecting data, but also has the right skills available to analyse the data and ensure the team and organisation are using the data beneficially.
Smith adds that like Reynolds, at the ECB he and his team are working on making sure everyone in the organisation has access to the data so interesting ideas and useful outcomes are fielded.
âYou can ask for every ball bowled at Virat Kohli and then have sports science, medical and coaches looking at how to get him out. Then we add all of the hawkeye telemetry for how fast the ball is going when it leaves the bowlerâs hands, where it ends up, revolutions and we have biometric and GPS data from the players,â Smith says. As an organising body the ECB is also capturing data in the amatuer level and fan engagement.
âThat helps us understand massive diverse sets of dynamics about our game and our sport, ranging from where our game is being played through to open source data sets on whether there are planning applications for developments that will be built on cricket grounds and where can these people play cricket.
âAre they using the venues in the way they are because the venue is forcing them to do that or are they choosing to use the venue in that way? I always use the example, an hour into the game, some of the children are bored, they have bought a bat, screwed up a newspaper as a ball and a bin as a wicket, so perhaps we should be creating venues where they can all play cricket with the players helping them and then that affects the development of the venue. All this data makes us more evidence based.â
âThe streamlining of operations is that people, process and technology piece and there is a lot going on to understand the business protocols and the technology that can help with that,â Bohndiek says. The head of PTI Consulting says a lot of sports organisations are only just on the starting grid for technology centralisation.
âFor many if the commercial director wants a new CRM they go an buy one, if the analyst wants a new scouting system, they go and but one and disparate data is spread all over the organisation. Bringing technology into the centre of the business so you can understand what role technology will play in the business and help you drive it. So you move away from anecdotal to âI can tell you how much that wasâ and we can measure the revenue, the conversion rate,â Bohndiek says.
Hackland and Smith add that data is also increasingly important in making sport safer.
âAs well as injury surveillance and making sure you have the fittest and healthiest players on the pitch, we also do a lot of research around spine MRI, which feeds into insight into what is the best bowling action for children and how to coach children more effectively so they donât get injured,â Smith of the ECB says. This strategy aims to keep players not only safe, but engaged fans for life.
âIt helps tie things together, you look at the medical data, different times of the year, seasons, competitions and you can then partner and commercialise the relationships with the nutrition vendors and take that into the health and wellbeing parts of our organisations. Which you can take that out to the younger players to show how a star eats on a match day. You have gone from performance analysis and how we get the best out of your players on the pitch for performance and results, you have generated revenue and then you have gone out into the community for impact,â Bohndiek says.
Returning to engaging with fans and customers Smith says: âWhen you go to a live sporting event you have a far less informed experience. So we are continually researching ways to put more insight into the hands of the fan and the connected fan.
âWe know that some batsmen, because they are busy batsman, in the course of scoring a half century they would run a half marathon, whilst others will smack boundaries and not run at all. And that is interesting insight for the spectator and plays into how that batsman trains.â
âOne of the great challenges in football is the broadcast deal and what you can and canât do in the stadium,â Bohndiek adds of how the connected fan doesnât exist due to existing broadcast rights. He describes how fans try and contact friends outside of the game âthat speaks to the less immersive experience at the groundâ and how sports CIOs are looking for networking opportunities to improve that experience.
âWhat can we do with the base level infrastructure inside the stadium so that it is the same as what people have outside of the stadium?â
âIt is connecting that person who canât come to the sport through augmented reality and bring the armchair fan closer to the sport,â adds Reynolds.
Performance driven
âWe exist to turn potential into excellence in everything we do,â Southamptonâs Reynolds says in a sentence that any Premiership coach could use. âIf my team want to do well, there is no such thing as an IT project it is a business project. I challenge all my staff to be leaders not followers. Because you are in a pinnacle of your industry,â Reynolds says of ensuring IT is part of the team, just that some members of the team wear red and white stripes and score goals.
âWe have been on a bit of a journey from being that traditional IT organisation to now working in lock step with our post grads and developing apps really quickly in one, two or three week lifecycles,â Smith says.
Hackland agrees and says Williams has also been on a transformation of the team. âWhether you are in IT, marketing or composites we are one team and focused on one single mission. If you are having to align IT then you are out of step. We have people that travel with the race team and they look like everyone else, and the idea of a separate IT function will completely disappear and the CIO will look after the risk.â
Just as in enterprise, CIOs in sport are using cross-functional teams to deliver results. Reynolds at Southampton FC says data scientists from his team are spending a day a week with the sports scientists and medical teams and other parts of the organisation work in IT as and when required.
âI love the sport environment,â Hackland says; âEven when times are tough, you know you will be able to improve things for the next race or season and there is something about the environment,it is amazing to work in.
âYou enjoy it, but you have to perform, It is so much more enjoyable than a proper job, I get to work with athletes every day and with the best in the world or at the pinnacle of their career or people with a passion for engaging with children and women to enjoy our sport,â Smith says of joining cricket from insurance.
Diversity
No one can have failed to notice the rise of womenâs sport in recent years. Womens football, cricket, cycling and many others has been a breath of fresh air for many sports fans and an important part of increasing diversity awareness in society. Yet as the podcast panel demonstrated, diversity in technology teams continues to be an issue. So as team leaders, what are our sport CIOs doing to increase diversity?
Hackland at Williams is heavily involved, as is the whole Williams organisation, in STEM programmes with schools. Williams is led by Claire Williams. âThere is no reason why there shouldnât be more women,â Hackland says. âYou miss out on so many skills if you end up with an all male environment.â
Smith of the ECB adds: âIf you employ the same we will find the same. Find people with the potential, find those who are not the norm and so that means getting into education.â
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âI think it is really important that the customer can take responsibility,â says Simon Lamkin, CIO of Brussels Airlines. Lamkin, speaking at a Horizon CIO Podcast roundtable debate, revealed to peers how digital transformation in the airline sector is reshaping the customer experience, but also the business processes of airlines and airports.
Lamkin has been CIO of Brussels Airlines since April 2016. The Englishman joined the airline headquartered in the Belgian capital following a 12 year career with the pioneering low cost airline easyJet. You can hear Lamkin discuss the major disruption easyJet had on the airlines sector with fellow former easyJet CIOs Mike Sturrock, Andy Caddy and Colin Rees on this Horizon CIO Podcast.
Brussels Airlines is a full service airline operating different fare classes, long and short haul; and freight. Its aircraft fly to 120 destinations and was previously known as Sabena. German airline Lufthansa took a 45% stake in Brussels Airlines in 2009 and last year purchased the remaining share.
Lamkin says the airline industry operates in two distinct environments; increasingly consumers are used to and demand a digital experience, but as a safety conscious and highly regulated market, the airline industry is still using many legacy technologies. As Lamkin and his peers describe in the easyJet Horizon CIO podcast, full service airlines with a long heritage, such as Brussels Airlines, are carrying a great deal of legacy technology and processes.
In aviation we are a bit schizophrenic, as we have these web platforms that are driving business and on the other hand, we are a regulated travel company where we have to follow all sorts of rules,â Lamkin says.
âSo it is very much we have to look at two sides. Technology is at the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution and the Internet of Things, the aviation industry, despite being glamorous is still grappling with the third industrial revolution of computers,â the CIO says candidly.
âToo many organisations focus their thinking on the consumer end, it is a way for the workforce to come together, this is the thing that really exciting me. What is really exciting is how the consumer has changed our way of thinking, especially in aviation. If we go back 10-15 years we all went through the airport the way the airline told us to, now we all have smartphones in our pockets and we have access to Google maps, flight stats and maps of the airports so we can navigate and that consumerisation has taken some of the control away from the airport,â the airlines veteran says.
Lamkin points out that for years the air travel sector has been beset with a difference of opinion over the relationship with the consumer. He says at air industry conferences airlines and airport operates will claim they own the customer journey.
âThey are both rubbish,â he says of the argument. âThe customer owns the customer journey. I am traveling because I know why I am going and donât you as an airline tell me what I have to do.â Another former easyJet CIO, Trevor Didcock told this scribe of how Michael Ibbitson, who was CIO of Gatwick Airport from 2012 to 2016 was a breath of fresh air for his collaborative approach to working with airlines.
âAs a frequent flyer I get up at 4am on a Monday morning to get my 6.20 flight and I just need to get through the airport as fast as I can to maximise my sleeping time,â Lamkin says of his own personal regular flight needs, and how airlines and airports really need to understand each and every consumer and their unique demands.
âI am a big fan of having many different ways to access the data, it would be arrogant of me to say âuse my Appâ. That only works if I can also check on Google and the airportâs App and they all say that your flight is going to leave at 6.55 because they all have access to that same information.
âAll too often today you see two or three different variants. For you as a consumer it is already a stressful experience, but the stress increases if you donât know if you have 10 minutes or 20 minutes for your flight,â Lamkin says. As a result Lamkin and Brussels Airlines are working on the hallowed single version of the truth.
âHow can we aggregate the data and use it to create a seamless experience? That is the big challenge for any transport operator,â Lamkin says. The CIO says the challenge is expanded by the proliferation of Apps and different ways the consumer wants to travel through the airport, for example those that use a printed boarding pass and those using their smartphone and now the entrance of biometric technology.
âIf we fly a long haul A330 you are looking at 230 on board, do we treat them all exactly the same? Do we segment them as a business passenger and an economy passenger or can we be a bit more specific and know that the business traveller is a frequent flyer that flies at least six times a year and has loyalty points? We are starting to drive that more and digital can make that happen. It is driving massive change in our industry,â Lamkin says.
âAs an airline we try and differentiate ourselves and have different products and pricings to accommodate the changes that these low cost carriers that are disrupting our business have caused,â he says referring to how his previous career is impacting his current role. Lamkin says one of the challenges is fare classes: âIt is a constant source of frustration to ticketing teams as we donât have enough fare classes to create the innovation that they want. And the reason being is that we are all reliant on reservation and global distribution systems that all have one alpha character to differentiate the different classifications. So there are very few airlines that have an ability to have anything other than fare classes that match the 26 letters of the alphabet. It is your classic Y2K problem.â
Not only are digital methods changing how the consumer is treated on the aircraft, but also in the airport.
âWhen you start looking at an airport it is a massive ecosystem of players and different partners that have to come together, so we have baggage handlers, fuel suppliers, tug drivers, check in and boarding agents, security and immigration control. It becomes really complex as you are reliant on third party IT providers,â Lamkin says of the complexity that has to be digitised.
Culture change
All forms of transportation are being disrupted by digitisation and this is impacting internal processes and the consumer. Lamkin references rail ticketing CTO Mark Holt from Trainline, who Lamkin says told CIO peers that organisations âneed cultural change to be ahead of any technological changeâ.
âHolt then went on to say, by going through the transformation you go through another wave of cultural transformation as people really adopt the change. That really struck a note with me as when you go through that cultural change you enable your people to go and do so much more and come up with new ideas and new ways of working,â Lamkin says. Holt spoke to the Horizon CIO Podcasts first CIO Summit and you can hear his presentation on this podcast.
Successful take offs
Since joining Brussels Airlines Lamkin has achieved a number of successful technology takeoffs that are enabling the airline to pilot a new course. The airline has removed all paper from the flight deck of its aircraft with the introduction of the Electronic Flight Bag.
âThis computer has all the charts, all the safety manuals, flight plan and the characteristics of the flight, the weights of the aircraft, the fuel the correct speed for takeoff and we have really pushed the boundary with that. That is a game changer, as we can now think about different ways of working.
âSo the crew donât necessarily have to come to a crew room and report and talk about what is going on, as we can digitise that process. So we can think about savings in terms of crew space, reporting and we can think about different ways of running our operations and even change crew contracts. One of the leaders of this is one of our pilots. The digital transformation has really changed the culture of the organisation,â Lamkin says.
Lamkin believes the Electronic Flight Bag is an example of how mobility can improve the organisation through increased usability, reduced complexity and a reduction in business cost.
âIf you have a mobile device and you can stand in front of someone and help them, and if they drop something you can bend over and pick it up, it is a very different experience and you can quickly see if someone has bought two or three bags,â Lamkin says of experiments with mobile device check in replacing desks.
âOne of the exciting things about creating change in this space is you find the opportunity to find something different that you had not anticipated. Last summer in Belgium they have a monstrous dance festival called Tomorrowland. You have this large contingent of festival goers, they are all going to be travelling with bags and you are going to create an influx of bags at the same time, so we created a bag drop at the festival, a couple of trucks, the same mobile technology and it takes the bags off the travellers. They were happy as they didnât have to lug their bags to the airport, we were happy as we were taking a blockage out of the supply chain and they could get through the airport. It was a simple disruptive process that we could do for the airport and it was a simple change that took two or three weeks to create the change,â Lamkin reveals.
Brussels Airlines operates a large number of routes into African states. As a result the CIO and his team have had to work on ways to improve the flight turn around and therefore business processes in environments that are not always technology friendly.
âWe have spent a lot of time looking at the problems of turning an aircraft around in Senegal or Freetown in Rwanda and they all have their own different problems. In Europe we take for granted the access to energy and the internet. We now expect it in our seat in an aircraft. These things are not always available 24/7 in some of our stations and I witnessed it myself in Senegal and Gambia,â Lamkin says of environment completely different to the holiday hotspots easyJet typically flies to.
âThe power does goes off, during the check-in it went off five or six times during and we all know that if the power goes off you have to wait for the system to reboot and you canât do that in the middle of a check-in process. So I have talked for many years about having an airport in a box and we have created one. A packing case with a laptop, USB peripherals to keep the power down, a UPS and a 4G router to connect it and irrespective of what is going on with the local telco and the power we have removed risk. It has really been a massive game changer in those countries.â
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In 2017 Royal Dutch Shell (Shell) announced it was exiting the controversial oil sands sector in Canada and was focussing on becoming an energy company. As Fortune reports, the company wasnât making a rash decision, it had invested expertise and research into understanding the disruptions to energy production and usage. According to Fortune, Shell realised the disruption was arriving sooner than many in the oil sector predicted. Since March 2017 the company has been expanding its portfolio and diversifying its business.
Craig Walker is CIO for the Downstream business of Shell and tells the Horizon CIO podcast about the transformation of the Anglo-Dutch firm, how technology is core to that transformation and how he is changing how IT operates in order to enable Shell to become an energy firm.
âMy glib answer is anything that is not the upstream,â Walker jokes of the difference between the Upstream and Downstream parts of the business. âThe Upstream part of the company looks for the oil and gets the oil out of the ground and then they hand it over. Downstream starts with trading and supply, manufacturing and includes all our refineries, our petro-chemical plants and on into our B2B businesses such as aviation, bitumen, lubricants, marine and then onto the retail sites that the general public are aware of,â he says of the two sides. Downstream is the larger business, but also has the narrowest margins.
âAs a trading company we are the biggest by someway with 27 major refineries around the world and a similar number of petro-chemical and lubricants plants.
âEvery 12 seconds somewhere in the world we finish fuelling an aircraft, it is a phenomenally large company and you donât get the scale of it until you come into it,â Walker says. During a long career with Shell he has worked in both downstream and upstream sectors.
In moving to become an energy firm Shell is responding to recent and rapid changes in the energy market. Sustainable energy from wind and solar has become economically viable and is growing at unforeseen rates. Wind energy powers over 20% of the UKâs electricity needs on an almost daily basis and the price of solar panels is dropping rapidly, which in turn is being boosted by developments of batteries for buildings from the likes of Telsa. Electric car sales are also on the rise, as is the adoption of ride hailing and car club usage. All of which is disrupting the Shell business model.
âI live in central London, outside the apartment block I live at, there are two Zipcars, it costs ÂŁ8 to belong as a member and ÂŁ5 an hour to rent, and there is a fuel card in there that says please as a curtesy to the next person donât bring it back with less than a quarter of a tank in it. Where is Shell in all of that?â Walker is acutely aware of how businesses like Zipcar have the potential to cause disintermediation of the oil sector.
âIf I didnât work for Shell, do I care if I put in the fuel that makes it perform best? Costs the least? It is not my car and it is not my money and I donât care. So I am going to go to the place that is most convenient. So how do I take all this technology and commercialise it in a way that you still want to come to me? The same problem exists with rotating equipment, if you run a factory and you have a bunch of gas turbines and you are buying lubricant from Shell and then the firm you buy those pieces of kit from offers the classic pay by the hour model, I get pushed out and become a commodity. So the threat is not just the automotive industry it is the threat of the Internet of Things,â he says of how IT is central to Shell responding to new models.
Customer careâAs we came into the early 2000s we got obsessed with volume and we lost site of the thing that was starting to happen, that the customerâs desires were changing. Thankfully around 2008/2009 we had a substantial change in the leadership team and we became very customer focused,â Walker candidly admits.
âAs we globalised, we lost site of the customer and became obsessed with standards and âhow do we run this as efficiently as we can?â Of course the pendulum starts to swing back when you realise you have lost something of your heritage, which is being known as a member of the community and somebody special rather than just being an oil company,â he tells the podcast.
âWhen I joined the company we were very much an oil company. We had six rivals, the so called seven sisters, now the world has changed and it is an incredibly exciting time to be in Shell,â he says of being part of the transformation.
âWe have stated that our purpose is that: âwe power progress together by providing more and cleaner energy solutionsâ; and I think those words are very interesting. Its about having to do this together. Back in those days you went alone, now you know that whatever you do it is with an ecosystem of players, be that NGOs, government, the public and energy firms.â
âWhat is interesting now, is that the technology has reached a tipping point; with solar panels and wind. It was all there in the past, but it wasnât becoming mainstream fast enough.
âAs an oil or energy company you can only go where the public want to go. If people want to buy petrol you have sell petrol. It doesnât matter how many hydrogen points or electrical charging posts you put down, if there isnât the customer to come to it, but we believe right now, with the experience we have to generate, store and deliver energy to the customer now is the right time to step in and be part of a greener more sustainable energy solution.â
Cynics might believe an oil company is bound to say this as an exercise in PR, but as Walker points out, businesses like Shell have made the investment in the infrastructure and the skills that will be necessary for sustainable energy proliferation.
âI donât think anyone can go it alone. Governments can create the right policy and regulation to encourage both companies and people to go in the right direction, but we need to be a leader in that. We wonât be in business in 20 or 40 years time if we donât become an energy company,â he says.
Energy serviceWhat ever energy Shell ships in the years to come the business has to become as service oriented as banks, insurance, retail, technology and as we have heard on the podcast of late, academia. Walker says Shell has traditionally been a product company, but the energy revolution will also bring about a service revolution.
âFor 100 years we have sold product and we are very proud of that and our brand heritage, but as we all know, product isnât good enough any more and the public want the service that goes with it. That is a real challenge for a company that produces something that you burn or you stick it in a machine and lubricate with. So how do we take 100 years worth of heritage and product and turn it into a service that people will come back to?
âI genuinely believe that selling it once and hoping that people will come back again is not a sustainable model. You have to have a reason why they will come to me and that is a big challenge. As a CIO helping the business think through how technology can make that a reality is the biggest challenge and opportunity that I have,â he says of his role.
âThis really is ITâs time. There is a lot of good technology out there. If you go back five years, most of us had great ideas, but we couldnât turn them into reality or we couldnât turn them into delivery as the service was not fast enough. Now we are not limited by the technology, but by peopleâs imaginations.
âIt is a fascinating time, as I am not only working in an industry that is revolutionising itself in terms of its image and the way it wants to work, but also with a technology set that is moving so fast,â Walker says.
Just as with becoming part of sustainable energy will require Shell to be part of an ecosystem of government and other energy firms, its ability to remain competitive on the roads will also require it to be in an ecosystem.
âI canât do it alone any more. I have to work with a car manufacturer in order to create something that you want and desire, because it is all about making your life more frictionless.â Walker says Shell is working with Jaguar Land Rover to create dashboard enabled Apps that will allow parents and the disabled to have the car refuelled without having to leave it, paying from the dashboard.
These developments help the existing petrol station infrastructure, but Walker admits that the next generation of cars pose a greater challenge. âAutonomous cars is a completely different story. When are they going to turn up at my retail site, is it 3am in the morning? Are my sites open at 3am? It is not easy to work out what it is going to do to your logistics operations.â
Whatever type of car or car service the next generation use, Walker believes that customer data and service will be crucial.
âIf I recognise you the minute you come onto the station and I say you can have a half price cold coke and I can reward you in different ways. It is not just about price,â Walker says. And he expects this to go beyond the petrol stations. In February 2018 Shell completed its acquisition of energy retailer First Utility.
âIn acquiring First Utility we have acquired about 700,000 consumers in the UK and I think the success of this is how you integrate that into our other businesses. The interesting thing is, I donât have better electricity, so how do I bring together a set of services, that are part of your lifestyle choices and there is a lot of synergy for a broader energy portfolio.â
Re-energising ITâWhen I took over we were slow, we were inefficient, and we had lost site of why we were there, we were doing IT,â Walker says of becoming Global CIO in 2014. âWe sat down and covered a board in why it isnât working well and came up with three themes and they have stayed with me,â Walkerâs three theme are; commerciality, which he says is the need to understand âhow you add value to a barrel of hydrocarbon as it comes down the supply chain,â. He says without commercial understanding IT professionals do not know âhow to prioritise your day, how do you make decisions, you have to understand to a basic level how the business really operates.â His second theme is that all of Shell is âOne teamâ. âWe were victims, anything that went wrong it was because HR or Finance, it was the business,â he says of a common refrain many transformational CIOs hear. The third theme is the business outcome and understanding what the business is trying to achieve.
During Walkerâs time the downstream IT team has removed major levels of cost from its IT operations, reducing spend by 40%.
âThat meant the conversation changed; it stared to be about digital, tell us about disruptive business, so suddenly the quality of the conversation changed.â Walker says he educates his team to be involved in business conversations and to use their technology knowledge to have âgreat business conversationsâ.
âWe should all be seen as equals and IT has allowed itself to be treated as a service. You have to have the right people, the IT sector didnât hire people for those skills. So learning now is so important, so I say to my people will you once a week spend 10% of your time educating yourself about technology or what Unilever is doing. Because our rivals are not the other oil companies it is Alibaba, Amazon, Tesla, not to mention the startups who want to just take away a bit of the business that makes a margin,â Walker says.
âOnce a week, donât switch on email when you first come in, because we all know once you switch on email you are on this little hamster wheel all day. But take that time and go and have breakfast with colleagues, go and have dinner and discuss something that matters and something that you feel that is a problem. We have Fill-up Friday, where a graduate orders their favourite food for everybody and you get 300-400 people congregate in an area and we all eat lunch together and the only rule is you are not allowed to take it back to your desk and people have conversations and people find âoh you have been struggling with thingsâ.â
Walker describes how the oil industry was a pioneer of the campus style working that is now used by the likes of Google and how these centres had dining areas, sports facilities and bars and they led to a community, which in turn created collaboration and innovation.
âYou had discussions, because people knew each other better. Now people come into the office they start doing email, they stick on headphones and they go to meetings. Where is the interaction? Getting back that sense of community really is something that matters a lot to me,â he says.
Shell is currently between homes in London as its iconic Shell Centre opposite Waterloo station is being redeveloped. âI want to bring that interaction back as it drives innovation and creativity,â he says of when Shell moves back in. âI want to create an atmosphere, because we all need to work at home at times, and I want you to think damn I missed out today, because this is a vital part of being a modern company. This is about beating startups, who are all over this from a point of creativity and huddling together and driving something.â
Having removed cost and begun changing the culture of IT at Shell, Walker says the next challenge is working alongside the business to jointly find ways to simplify the business, which in turn will reduce costs.
âThere is a complexity at the local level where we have too many pricing schemes, too many loyalty systems,â he says. And as Shell simplifies and modifies his business, the global CIO expects the suppliers to do the same.
âFor the big players, I am saying you have to come to me with a value proposition. With the little players I have to learn to work in a different way. I tell startups be careful, we could kill you, we donât mean to.
âWe are on that journey, if you look at the way the business is operating, we are constrained by everything being a project and having a budget cycle, which is nonsense in this day and age,â he says of moving to Agile and DevOps.
Walker says a new key technology hub in Bangalore, India is enabling the change to Agile working. Bangalore is a new development for Shell and part of a restructure that sees the majority of technology come from four hubs; Bangalore, Hague, Houston and London.
âShell is very organisationally aligned and structured. In Bangalore people form natural teams around a product, an issue or the problem and they go and work on it. We set out with zero people in Bangalore and now we are at several thousand and that has allowed us to concentrate on a newer operating model. That is not an outsourcing centre, it is not somewhere I throw work. I donât want to treat them as an outsourcing centre and I predict my successors successor will be from Bangalore,â Walker says.
âI sometimes think of Shell as a red and yellow jelly, you can smack it as hard as you like, but if you are not careful it will return to the same shape. I want to disrupt the way I am working and bring in people with new ideas who will help us evolve into a new IT.â
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âI wanted to work much more closely with students and people who were at the cutting edge of working with technology,â CIO Claudette Jones says from University of the West of Scotland, where she is leading technology.
The University of the West of Scotland (UWS) has four campuses in south-western Scotland across Paisley, Hamilton, Dumfries and Ayr and even has a campus in London. The university took on its name in 2007, but can trace its roots to the 19th Century.
âThis university has a real reputation for vocational courses, we have 16,000 students across five campuses and we are the first official training partner in China,â Jones tells the Horizon CIO podcast. âIt is a really big endorsement for the university and we are the first organisation in China to be accredited to provide technical and leadership training across China. I think this is evidence of the wide range of capabilities that the university has, so we will be training in areas like health, environment and smart cities.â
With its focus on vocational courses, UWS provides education on business, technology, engineering, health and sport as well as a range of more academic courses. CIO Jones says therefore her team has to âprovide different solutions for different schoolsâ.
âOne of the bits of heritage of this university is that it was a technical college, back in the day, and it has a real reputation for vocational working and one of the attributes of that is we want our students to leave with, is the notion of work ready,â she says.
At the time of our interview UWS is developing a new technology campus in the heart of an international business hub in Hamilton.
âWe are looking to roll out virtual desktops and lab environments. As one of the issues is that you need very high speed computing for games development, may be not so much in a social work course and what we want to do is provide labs that are flexible in computing ability so that they can be timetabled for any type of class.
New academics
âIn previous roles it felt like the customer was a little bit distant, here in higher education we have 16,000 students you can get really immediate and face-to-face feedback on our services and I like that and I will genuinely stand and try and overhear coffee shop conversations to hear people talking about IT
As the Horizon CIO podcast interview with Alan Hill, CIO of the University of Exeter recently revealed, academia has discovered the importance of technology to attract the students and researchers, which therefore brings in the funding. With funding thus becoming more commercially driven towards a customerâs outcome, institutions have found the need to hire a leading CIO to deliver great operational technology and deliver a range of technology services that delight students in the same way a CIO in retail, financial services or transportation has to. Of late major CIOs such as Jones, Hill and Laura Dawson, previously CIO of the British Council when she was on this podcast have joined academia.
âI have only been in this job for 18 months and it does appear to me that previously the role of a CIO in higher education was to just provide line of business systems and audio visual equipment, but as universities have moved more to providing online training, then that partnership between the department and the rest of the business becomes more crucial and universities that donât invest will be left behind,â Jones observes from Paisley. âThat was one of the reasons why I joined the university.â
Jones adds that at UWS her IT team and the institution have taken the US term to heart and they eat their own dog food, members of her team are taking course at UWS alongside their full time roles in the technology team. âA lot of my IT staff are doing degrees at the uni as there is a big culture of continual development, so having the staff go through the process helps us understand how we impact the students,â Jones says.
And on the flip side of that, the computing academics and their students are becoming part of the innovation community Jones can tap into.
âWe have a really good school of computing and engineering here and I wanted to provide information to students, such as how busy the canteen is. So I am working with some of our PHD students on IoT to see if we can provide a heat map to tell students when the best time is to turn up at the canteen and miss the queues.
âI was concerned with the map functionality,â she says of one recent improvement to the student App. âPaisley is a big campus and university campuses are a bit like a little city. The mapping on the App was Google Maps, which didnât work well for internal mapping. We tracked down a European company who were doing a new way-finding method using photography. It shows you pictures with an arrow and it is really easy to use.
âIn previous roles it felt like the customer was a little bit distant, here in higher education we have 16,000 students you can get really immediate and face-to-face feedback on our services and I like that and I will genuinely stand and try and overhear coffee shop conversations to hear people talking about IT,â she says. As with any business technology leader looking to help an organisation improve its customer focus, Jones has been implementing systems that improve understanding and reducing complexity in the organisation.
An infrastructure upgrade has seen new WiFi installed across the five campuses, which in turn has enabled collaboration technologies to be implemented which benefits the staff and reduces travel between the campuses. An application rationalisation ensured that students have fewer disconnected systems for timetables, learning resources, email and the library for example.
âThere were 14 different systems, each with different log-in details and I was surprised at the number of systems that students had to use. That was the impetus for a single sign-on and single portal project that went live at the beginning of this academic year and that has made things much simpler.â
âWhen I arrived and looked at some of our problems, it seemed to me that a proper commercial CRM would be the answer to make sure that we understood the whole student life cycle,â Jones tells the podcast. Adding that this means the organisation has business dashboards to monitor students as it moves towards becoming a data centric organisation.
âThe business really understands the need to take processes out of the box and run with what everyone else is doing rather than make things specific,â she says of implementing an off the shelf CRM.
And like academic CIO peers that have spoken to this title, Jones is looking at taking working methods from the commercial world to prevent the highly important research community from unintentionally creating shadow IT.
âI am offering a pay as you grow model, so we can allow them to quickly spin up new environments,â Jones says.
Jones joined UWS in September 2016 as Horizon reported. She had been with City of Edinburgh Council since 2012.
âI realised that I needed to work in an environment where I was doing some good in the world and making a difference and I donât think I could work in the finance sector, I really want to work somewhere that I get up in the morning and can help people,â Jones says of making the shift to academia. âUWS is a widening participation university and the opportunity to help people change their lives really appealed to me.â
Another cause close to Jonesâ heart is Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and the CIO is a STEM ambassador. âI think the STEM agenda is important, my ethos is about a meritocracy and I donât worry about females in IT or males in nursing. I am just trying to make as many people as possible aware of the opportunities. I am more about diverse teams and getting kids into STEM, but by dint of being a female out there helps.â
