Horizon CIO Podcast (Mark Chillingworth)

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 stone’s 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. 

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/

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. 

“Sponsors 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,” 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: “They have to be close to the activity that the programme impacts and a leader that can articulate what the future will be.” 

West agrees: “Being 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,” 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. 

“No 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,” 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 Ales’ 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. 

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.

“The media is always reinventing itself,” CTO Chris Fosberry says of the sector and why it is a fascinating place to be a CIO. But as Walsh says: “The media has been one of the first areas to be disrupted over a sustained period of time,” 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 “management style” 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.

“The 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,” 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
Consumer choice

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. 

“A security rating is a measurement of the cyber security performance carried out by an independent agency,” 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. 

“We 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,” 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. 

“Ratings 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,” Olcott tells the Horizon CIO Podcast. 

“The major use case is for third party monitoring, as there has been a dramatic increase in attacks on vendors, contractors and the supply chain,” Olcott adds of how CIOs and CTOs are using security ratings. 

To learn more, listen in.  

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.

“For almost 30 years now I've seen successive waves of technology evolution breaking on the shore from, offshoring and cloud and robotic process automation,” 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 CIO’s organisation as a user and the supplier of the AI technology is far more “collaborative”. The lawyer goes on to describe how the relationships are complicated as the data belongs to the CIO’s organisation, and arguably the customer, but the AI technology of course belongs to the supplier.

“Lawyers 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.”

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:

“You 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.,” he said.

In Maughan’s experience organisations are experimenting with AI to find an efficiency or to solve problems. Maughan said he hears organisations state their AI ambition is: “We'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,” then their business just might remain sustainable.

“The 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?”

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 “engage with their customers”, “But be prepared to say, this isn’t meeting our ethical or our technical standards, as meeting your business case is more important.”

Maughan warned CIOs to be keeping abreast of the changing nature of business as a result of AI.

“There 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?

“We 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.”

Maughan concludes that the legal sector is, as ever, lagging behind the technology industry. “The 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.”

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 UK’s 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 Belgium’s 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 Sainsbury’s George Goley joining as CTO, alongside Goley’s 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.

“I wanted to work much more closely with students and people who were at the cutting edge of working with technology,” 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.

“This 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,” Jones tells the Horizon CIO podcast.  “It 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.”

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 “provide different solutions for different schools”.

“One 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,” 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.

“We 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

“In 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 customer’s 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.

“I 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 don’t invest will be left behind,” Jones observes from Paisley. “That was one of the reasons why I joined the university.”

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.  “A 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,” 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.

“We 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.

“I was concerned with the map functionality,” she says of one recent improvement to the student App. “Paisley is a big campus and university campuses are a bit like a little city. The mapping on the App was Google Maps, which didn’t 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.

“In 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,” 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.

“There 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 si...

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 wasn’t 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.

“My glib answer is anything that is not the upstream,” Walker jokes of the difference between the Upstream and Downstream parts of the business. “The 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,” he says of the two sides. Downstream is the larger business, but also has the narrowest margins.

“As 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.

“Every 12 seconds somewhere in the world we finish fuelling an aircraft, it is a phenomenally large company and you don’t get the scale of it until you come into it,” 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 UK’s 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.

“I live in central London, outside the apartment block I live at, there are two Zipcars, it costs £8 to belong as a member and £5 an hour to rent, and there is a fuel card in there that says please as a curtesy to the next person don’t bring it back with less than a quarter of a tank in it. Where is Shell in all of that?” Walker is acutely aware of how businesses like Zipcar have the potential to cause  disintermediation of the oil sector.

“If I didn’t 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 don’t 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,” he says of how IT is central to Shell responding to new models.

Customer care

“As 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 customer’s desires were changing. Thankfully around 2008/2009 we had a substantial change in the leadership team and we became very customer focused,” Walker candidly admits.

“As we globalised, we lost site of the customer and became obsessed with standards and ‘how do we run this as efficiently as we can?’ 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,” he tells the podcast.

“When 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,” he says of being part of the transformation.

“We have stated that our purpose is that: ‘we power progress together by providing more and cleaner energy solutions’; 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.”

“What 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 wasn’t becoming mainstream fast enough.

“As 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 doesn’t matter how many hydrogen points or electrical charging posts you put down, if there isn’t 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.”

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.

“I don’t 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 won’t be in business in 20 or 40 years time if we don’t become an energy company,” he says.

Energy service

What ever energy Shell ships in the years to come the business has to become as service oriented as ba...

“I think it is really important that the customer can take responsibility,” 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,” Lamkin says.

“So 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,” the CIO says candidly.

“Too 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,” 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.

“They are both rubbish,” he says of the argument. “The customer owns the customer journey. I am traveling because I know why I am going and don’t you as an airline tell me what I have to do.” 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.

“As 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,” 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.  

“I am a big fan of having many different ways to access the data, it would be arrogant of me to say ‘use my App’.  That only works if I can also check on Google and the airport’s App and they all say that your flight is going to leave at 6.55 because they all have access to that same information.

“All 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 don’t know if you have 10 minutes or 20 minutes for your flight,” Lamkin says. As a result Lamkin and Brussels Airlines are working on the hallowed single version of the truth.

“How can we aggregate the data and use it to create a seamless experience? That is the big challenge for any transport operator,” 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.

“If 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,” Lamkin says.

“As 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,” he says referring to how his previous career is impacting his current role. Lamkin says one of the challenges is fare classes: “It is a constant source of frustration to ticketing teams as we don’t 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.”

Not only are digital methods changing how the consumer is treated on the aircraft, but also in the airport.

“When...

“In 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,” says Head of Information Technology at The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) Damian Smith.

Smith is CIO for cricket’s 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.

“We 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,” 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.

“Most 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,” 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.  

“In 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,” Hackland says.

“We are now a global brand with a website with premium content that you have to register for,” Reynolds of Southampton FC says. “We 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.”

“The 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,” Smith says of why sport needs technologists to play a major part in developing a fan and customer relationship. “People don’t 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 people’s time.”

Sport relies on sponsorship for revenue to invest in the best players, venues and teams and in today’s digital environment the sponsors expect more audience value from teams, clubs and sports.  

“The 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,” Smith says.

“For 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,” 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.  

“With augmented reality they may be able to compete against their favourite driver at their favourite track,” 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.

“We have dipped our toes into it,” Hackland says. Williams has invested in games where fans can become part of a virtual F1 pit team and change the wheels. “We have experimented with driver eye view, you get that experience of being in the car.”

The greatest challenge that clubs face at the moment is making their revenue performance agnostic,” Bohndiek says of these opportunities.  “There 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.

“Ultimately sponsors now want to know ‘who do you know that we can connect with and what is your global reach?’ That drives back down to how do you capture that data and analyse it and that is where digital transformation becomes the answer.”

Data logging

“The 1979 car was the first conn...

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 ‘skills gap’ for the last five years, although there is a shortage of skills, recruitment and employment practices are exacerbating the issue.

“We 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 don’t support the juniors where are you going to find the seniors of tomorrow?” Patrick Crompton, CEO and co-founder of eSynergy Solutions tells the Horizon CIO Podcast.  Crompton and his organisation began as a “traditional recruitment company” but today is “delivering software outcomes through our communities”. Customers include CIOs at major government departments like HMRC, traditional bank HSBC and financial services challengers Nutmeg.

“It 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,” Crompton says of whether the skills gap issue really exists.

“For every candidate we get a minimum of five offers,” 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.

“At 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. 

“It 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,” 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 Solutions’ Crompton says: “There is some very outdated hiring processes that take too much time to hire people, I don’t 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.

“There 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 don’t offer those things they will not work for you and your organisation, they will go and work for Google or Facebook,” Crompton says.

“You 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,” he says.

Christmann-Cooper adds: “As 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.”

Crompton believes organisations face no alternative but to modify how they treat staff and recruit them: “There 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.

“You 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,” he says.

Diversity beyond gender

“There is plenty of people coming through from the more disruptive learning pathways like the coding bootcamps,”

Christmann-Cooper says. “And 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.

“Remember 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,” she says.

To prove the point CEO Crompton has lost team members to new careers. “Four 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.

“There 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,” he says.

“Skillsmatter they have done a really good job of att...

Throughout this week London’s technology communities will come together to discuss, announce and consider the role of technology in the nation’s 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.

“It 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,” 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.

“We 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,” 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.

“My 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,” 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.

“I 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,” Blackwell, a former cabinet member in the London Borough of Camden says.

“Fundamentally 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.

“We 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.

“The 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,” Blackwell says of his working relationship with Docherty and his organisations.

NHS CIO Docherty adds: “What 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.”

The collaboration, Docherty explains is making sure that funds available for public sector transformation don’t end up in duplication projects across neighbouring NHS trusts or local authorities.

“We 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,” Docherty says of how the city is working towards increased coordination.

Devolved power

“This is really really interesting time for digital transformation of public services, we have had devolution of local authorities,” Blackwell says. The capital and its mayor have power over further education, health, police and transport, more than in any other devolved institution.

“So 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,” 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.

“The first step that we will take is to take a step back,” Blackwell says.  “Too 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.

“We want to reboot London’s 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 p...

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.

“HANA 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,” 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.

“Often in our businesses we have customised them and that may not be a good thing, but it is often right for our business.  That doesn’t really leave a lot of time, as a complex implementation means there is not a lot time,” Fidessa financial services business CIO Lockton-Goddard says. “Upgrading therefore is often an expensive process and it is time consuming and the business benefits may not be seen.

“So 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.”

Oak agrees with the CIO, but believes the industry must not look at SAP’s plans as an “upgrade”.  “The 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 don’t want to start those conversations with ‘we have got to do this because the database technology is forcing us to do it’. 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,” Oak says.

“Having already a lot of investment on the balance sheet around SAP, you cannot just wipe that off and say let’s start again,” Lockton-Goddard adds.

“By 2025 normal support for the existing versions of SAP running on other database platforms will be reduced,” he says, though Oak believes it is highly likely that SAP will offer an extension.

SAP in danger

“It 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,” 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.

“Maybe 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.

“The 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 don’t 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,” 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 “business landscape..and the capabilities needed”.

“Some of this is also a bit old school, we talk of a replacement journey of three to five years, I can’t 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 don’t 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,” 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. “You still have got to have a core set of transactions that are stable, and you don’t 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.”

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.

“When 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,” 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.  “They settled for huge amounts of money where they are deemed to be outside of their licence agreements,” Oak says.

“You 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.

“SAP 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,” Oak says. “That 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.”

“Pricing...

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 £322 million after tax, up from £20 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.

“We 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,” Germain says of the RSA Group business that also operates in Canada, Scandinavia and the Middle East.

“Our profitability in 2017 and our operating profit was £660 million and our net written premiums was £6.7 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,” Germain says.

“I think technology was, has and will continue to be integral to how we look at our cost ratios,” 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.

“We 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,” 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.

“We 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,” 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.

“It 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.

“The 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,” 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.

“So 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,” he says. Germain says RSA Group is actively looking at startups that “will that plug into our business processes”.

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.

“My 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.” 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. “I am very keen to learn to how we can leverage that across the organisation.”

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 “change and adapt” he says.

“We 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.”

Connected diversity

“Our 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,” 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.

“We 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,” 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.

“I am very privileged an...

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.

“We sell books across 30 different marketplaces, essentially these books were going to landfill,” says Head of IT for World of Books Ben Edwards. “Charities 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.”

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.

“For 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?” Edwards adds: “The 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.”

“Ziffit has grown massively in the last couple of years and now trades over seven million items a year,” Edwards says of how the four year old business has grown. “For us mobile was a key part of the strategy.” World of Books set out to ensure that Ziffit and its App were not “an extension of the website,” and worked with mobile technology development agency to ensure it developed a mobile first customer centric service. “It is so much more convenient than typing in your barcodes manually you can upload them with the camera App,” the IT Head says.

Customer centered mobile Apps

“Respecting 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.

“You 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 doesn’t work properly, it brings those figures to life and how you can influence them,” 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.

“It was interesting doing the user testing, it wasn’t 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,” says Andy Ferrett, managing director of Brightec.

“A 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,” Edwards says of how user involvement shapes the experience for all members of the organisation and its C-level.

“One of the biggest conversations is the context and when someone is interacting with your product,” says Joshua O’Riordan, Creative Director of Brightec says. “On 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 don’t create a black app?

“For 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.”

“It gave everyone a direct insight into communicating the charitable and recycling benefits came from this room here,” 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.

“We provide Brightec with an API that hooks back into our systems and algorithms to provide the buying rules and selling engines,” 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 don’t always have to rely on heavyweight technologies to deliver a great customer service. “It is not always as complex as APIs, somethings work on SFTP file drops, so it varies by company,” he says.

“One 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,” Edwards says.

“The 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,” Brightec’s O’Riordan says. “On a desktop you can get away with giving...

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

“It’s 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,” 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 wasn’t 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.

“An annual fee is around £9000 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,” Hill says of enrolment pressure Exeter faces, “that sounds like retail,” he adds.

Research too drives revenue, both in terms of grants to carry out research, but it also attracts students.

“Focusing on research and changing the IT operating model without dropping the ball is a risky business,” Hill tells the CIO Podcast. “Research is vital for the university as part of Russell Group – the research intense universities. Because research drives big money, creating the capability to support research means buying high performance computing.”

New role for IT

“We find ourselves as an IT organisation pushing our people up, forward and getting close and personal to the staff driving those research opportunities,” Hill explains of how research into exoplanets, dementia or energy require bespoke technology and analysis. “We 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.

“The 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,” Hill says.

“We 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?”

Hill adds that his team has been changing the governance “so 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.

“And that empowers the IT staff in a way you haven’t seen before and during that process, we kept an important aspect of delegation to the point of discomfort,” Hill says of his leadership style.

“I 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.

“Customer 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,” Hill says of how a university has to have a technology ecosystem akin to retail.

“This 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,” Hill says of taking lessons from personalised offerings in financial services for example and placing them in academia.

“In research we have management systems that pick up an academic’s 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,” Hill says of creating new workflows. “It is all about being data and insight driven.”

Secure university

“While 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?” Hill says of security management during his career in the Army that saw him rise to the rank of Brigadier.

“In 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.

“I 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,” Hill says of the security challenge.

Business continuity

“We 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 recruitm...