Tech-Exec Issue 16

DENHOLM HESSE ON DATA AS A STRATEGIC ASSET AND BEING BDO UK'S FIRST EVER CHIEF DATA OFFICER

I'm focused on usIng data as a competItIve advantage"

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LETTER FROM tHe edItoR

Someone always has to go first. In this instance, it’s Denholm Hesse. In most large corporations it’s not always easy to build something from scratch – the vision, the strategy and culture, the team and, ultimately, the success. But that’s exactly the scenario Hesse found himself in when, six months ago, he joined professional services firm BDO UK as the company’s first ever Chief Data Officer.

Hesse took a brief moment out of his busy schedule to talk us through his approach to the new role, what it’s like to build something from the ground up, and the progress he and his team have made to date. He explains how his 100-day plan, developed before starting, has enabled him to explore and understand several key themes such as knowing the current data landscape, immersing himself in the company’s vision and objectives to get a grip on how data can contribute, focusing on people, culture and relationships, and building competency

and responsibility. It’s a complex and multifaceted challenge, but one that Hesse is clearly passionate about.

Transformation, people and culture, and driving strategic value are themes close to the hearts of all our interviewees in this issue. Take, for example, Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust’s Andrew Raynes, who talks us through the incredible change programme he and his team have led and how it’s changing patient care, Syncron’s Vatsan Govindarajan and Kathryn Narayan and their discussion on the rise of the service economy, or dunnhumby’s Martyn Booth who chats about the rapidly evolving security landscape. And if it’s passion you’re after, look no further than ISG’s Wayne Butterfield and marcus evans Group’s Martin Leedham – both have successful careers built on their love of technology and its potential in the enterprise environment.

Enjoy the issue.

Content Director

Matt High

Creative Director

Steve Shipley

Marketing Director

Jack Pascall

Project Directors

Henry Allton-Jones

Will Tottie

Alex Neagu

Managing Directors

Charlotte Clarke

James Pepper

06 | INSIGHT

News, views and tech insight

12 | INTERVIEW BDO UK

On forward-looking data strategies and empowering the business

32 | PORTFOLIO TECH YOU NEED

Innovations for work, leisure and the environmentally conscious

42 | INTERVIEW ISG

On being at the cutting edge of AI, automation and innovation

56 | INNOVATOR

PLASMONIC PAINT

Goodbye synthetic paint, hello sustainability, butterflies and… squid?

58 | INTERVIEW SYNCRON

On digitalisation and the rise of the service economy

72 | DISRUPTOR MENSE KORTE

No stones, no prefabrication, just 3D printing

74 | INTERVIEW

ROYAL PAPWORTH

On digital transformation and how tech is changing patient care

90 | INTERVIEW

BIZANALYTICA

On the data modernisation and optimisation journey

106 | ENTEPRENEUR

DARREN PERIES

Using AI and data to democratise elite-level sport

108 | INTERVIEW

MARCUS EVANS GROUP

On leadership, tech and successful IT transformation

122 | INTERVIEW

DUNNHUMBY

On the evolving enterprise security threat landscape

134 | CITY GUIDE

48 HRS: BRISTOL

Business and pleasure in the UK city

142 | CALENDAR EVENTS

The best events for 2023

gaLactIc 01

Virgin Galactic has completed its first commercial flight and first dedicated commercial research mission. At the end of June its VSS Unity launched from mothership VMS Eve and rocketed towards the edge of space – some 52 miles above Earth. On board were three crew members from the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council of Italy, who conducted experiments in the biomedical field, thermo-fluid dynamics, and the development of innovative and sustainable materials in microgravity conditions. The company has already scheduled Galactic O2 – its first commercial spaceflight for private astronauts.

www.virginatlantic.com

© Virgin Galactic

TAKING CONTROL OF AI

The disempowerment of humanity, or even human extinction: two things we don’t want. Mercifully, neither does OpenAI. To [hopefully] ensure this never happens, the company is establishing a dedicated team to manage and control superintelligence

– AI systems smarter than the smartest humans. The group will be co-lead by OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever and research lab Head of Alignment Jan Leike, and will develop an automated alignment researcher that can help make sure superintelligence is safe to use and aligned with human values. www.openai.com

50%

of CEOs are now integrating generative AI into products and services

IBM Institute for Business Value’s CEO decision-making in the age of AI report www.ibm.com

Illustration: Ruby Chen

ON THE BUZZ

Small, connected, digital and all-electric, Volkswagen’s innovative ID. Buzz has a good shot at any of the ‘future of mobility’ titles willingly thrown out to every new EV. It’s ideal for urban transport and it doesn’t need a driver. The brand has been testing an autonomous ID. Buzz service in Germany, where it intends to launch commercial robotaxi and delivery services in 2025. It’s now going to extend those tests to Austin, Texas, along with four other US cities, with a view to launching a robotaxi service in 2026. www.theverge.com

cYBeRtRucK LIves!

Tesla has built its first Cybertruck at its Giga Texas factory in Austin, Texas. Back in 2019 when first announced, Elon Musk said the company wanted to “try something different” - cue stainless steel body, ultra-tough windows and more. Since then Tesla has pushed production of the truck back but, now, it’s finally here. In a shareholder meeting in May 2023, Musk said the company would like to produce a quarter of a million Cybertrucks a year depending on demand.

www.reuters.com

SMART CARE

Smart watches could be used to identify Parkinson’s disease, according to scientists at the Medical Research Council-funded UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University. By collecting and analysing smart watch data over a seven-day period and using AI they found they could accurately predict those who would later develop the disease up to seven years before recognisable symptoms occur. Dy Cynthia Sandor, Emerging Leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute said: “With these results we could develop a valuable screening tool to aid in the early detection of Parkinson’s.”

www.ukri.org

More than 100 million people [early July] have signed up to Threads , making it the fastest-growing app in history. The new social media platform is a ‘friendly’ rival to Twitter, according to Meta CEO Mark Zukerberg. Threads lets users post up to 500 characters and upload photos and videos.

Counterpoint finds US EV sales jumped 79% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2023, making it the world’s second largest electric car market after China.

A first-edition, unopened 4GB Apple iPhone – considered the ‘Holy Grail’ by collectors – sells for £145,416 at an auction in the US.

The Biden-Harris Administration publishes the National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan, setting out a roadmap for its recently released National Cybersecurity Strategy.

The UN warns that ‘potentially harmful’ advances in neurotechnology could allow AI to compromise a person’s mental privacy.

GROUND-UP DATA TRANSFORMATION

DENHOLM HESSE ON BEING BDO UK’S FIRST EVER CHIEF DATA OFFICER, BUILDING A FORWARD-LOOKING DATA STRATEGY, AND EMPOWERING AN ORGANISATION

DENHOLM HESSE

Not everyone gets the opportunity to build something from scratch – the vision, the strategy and culture, the team and, ultimately, the success. Denholm Hesse does. Having joined BDO UK, one of the largest specialist professional services teams in the UK, just six months ago [at time of writing] in a newly created role as the company’s first ever Chief Data Officer, it’s not unfair to still consider Hesse ‘the new guy’. But, as he goes on to explain during the course of our discussion, a lot can happen in six months.

“Two things have driven it,” he says of the company’s move to building a dedicated data office. “First, there was a realisation that the firm has good data foundations and plenty of expertise in data and analytics already, but that it could do a lot more with the data at its disposal. Secondly, there was a good understanding that it would take more than just having a data team to provide additional value but, rather, a specialist or dedicated data leader was absolutely necessary – someone who could come in and be responsible for data everyday in a way that was business focused and aligned with the objectives of the organisation.

“It meant lots of discussion, even before I started, around understanding the business objectives and determining exactly what the key stakeholders actually wanted out of the CDO role, which I think is

particularly important with it being a new position,” Hesse continues. “My mandate wasn’t agreed before I started but was actually firmed up between me and the board after I’d settled into the role, which I think is pretty unique. It essentially revolves around three core areas of value, liability, and culture. In short, I’m focused on how we enable BDO to utilise data as a competitive advantage or strategic asset that adds value; protecting the company from liabilities that come from collecting, storing, processing, and provisioning data that is fit for purpose; and ensuring an organisation that consists of around 8,000 people is empowered to use the data at its disposal.”

While Hesse is new to the company and role, he’s by no means unfamiliar with data. Prior to joining BDO, he spent 10 years working in data and analytics, first at Deloitte as a management consultant in financial services then as Head of Data, later Director of Data, at insurance and asset management firm M&G. “I had some great experiences there,” he says of the latter. “I built a team from the ground up, and worked on several different data strategies for Prudential and M&G, which merged during my time there. That strategy and team building is the area I really like to focus on.

I’m a firm believer that getting those two things working together in the right way is how you deliver true value with data.”

DATA EVOLUTION

Over the decade that Hesse has been working in data and analytics, the space has evolved significantly he says citing several trends that have put the technologies at the forefront of the enterprise.

“Digital transformations have been a major factor,” he explains, expanding on the theme. “Essentially, any transformation of this nature enables the greater collection of data because things are being built on modern systems – more databases and greater capability from a technology perspective in the back-end means there’s larger volumes of relevant information now being collected, stored and used that simply weren’t before.

“A second driver is the increased focus for organisations on building digital experiences,” adds Hesse, “which sees them collecting behavioural data, touchpoints about what customers are doing on websites or how they’re interacting with the business, its content or products. That’s really important data for companies to have. If I consider my background in financial services and now professional services, they’re two industries that are typically quite transactional, and that data and insight is absolutely useful. But when you add in the behavioural element it takes the potential value of that data to the next level by enabling things like greater

“I’M FOCUSED ON HOW WE ENABLE BDO TO UTILISE DATA AS A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OR STRATEGIC ASSET THAT ADDS VALUE”

personalisation and service for the customer. Of course, there’s other hype cycles around AI that are driving change, which is obviously around its peak at the moment with Generative AI and ChatGPT. If you look at most c-suites, all of them want to be data driven. But do they 100% understand what that means and how to get there? I honestly think the answer is no. So, considering the pace of evolution we’ve just discussed, that’s why the CDO role is emerging and becoming increasingly important. Which is great.”

The result of this evolution and growth in digital adoption and use is a shift in the role of data, analytics, AI and more when it comes to strategic importance or the potential value that can be brought to the business. Gone are the days, says Hesse, where data teams and their leaders are tucked neatly out of view in an IT or technology department that doesn’t engage directly with stakeholders. Instead, they’re an established and independent function that plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between IT/technology and the various departments within the organisation.

Within this context, he adds, the role of the CDO underpins much of the change that organisations are experiencing.

“Certainly one of the most important things I’ve realised in data leadership roles, in particular the CDO, is that in reality it’s a change and collaborationfocused position more than anything

else. On top of that, you have to be able to shape out an exciting vision that appeals to two core parties: the business area and the data team. Getting both those excited about the potential of data is the most critical thing to bringing effective change, particularly if you can build a motivated team that’s behind your vision, enjoys the work and applies what they’re learning. That’s one of the things that always amazes me about working in data – you meet so many incredibly talented and intelligent people who are absolutely dedicated to learning and developing.

“In terms of working within the data team, I see the role of CDO as being supportive, acting as an advocate and – when needed – an umbrella for them,” Hesse adds. “The pace of change in our world is incredible and there’ll likely be data teams feeling a bit of pressure from things like ChatGPT and the perceived ease with which it can provide answers and information. As a data leader you have to protect your team and demonstrate their value to the business because, if you can give the space to use their talent they’ll deliver the very best solutions. As part of that, I think data has to be discussed at board level to cement the fact that it’s a strategic asset. Data is across everything in the organisation and so we have a huge voice that should absolutely be at the table and informing strategic decision making.”

PUTTING DATA CONSUMERS FIRST

Harbr co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Anthony Cosgrove talks to us about empowering people with data, collaborating with BDO, and providing a self-service data consumer experience

Tech-Exec: You’ve spoken before about the need for CDOs to give users quicker access to data. Why is this the first thing they should be looking to achieve?

Anthony Cosgrove: I think it all comes down to thinking about the data consumer experience. If you want to empower your people with data, you need to make it easy for them to get their hands on it. And when you talk to data consumers to understand what they want, they’ll tell you the quality they need, which format they prefer, the location they want it, how often it may need to be updated. These attributes will define the specification, and they’re all important. But if you start with focusing on getting the data to them in the first place, all of these questions can be answered in good time.

One of our partners recently said to me that when you give people access to data, the best way to demonstrate the need for quality and structure is to experience the lack of it. That’s why I think it makes sense to focus first on enabling this access.

TE: How do data marketplaces enable this access and empower users?

AC: Quick point, but the terminology around this stuff tends to vary depending on who you talk to. With BDO, we’re talking about a platform that primarily enables internal users

to access the data they need. Some people call this a private data marketplace, some people call it an exchange. We have other customers who use their platform for distributing commercial data products to external parties.

The business model and terminology can vary, but these are enabled by a common set of capabilities: a self-service user experience; the fact that users see a curated set of data products; a subscription system that helps enforce governance, with controls for who can access what, and what they can do with it; and automated distribution in the format and location preferred by the end user.

TE: You and Denholm have both spoken about providing a self-service experience. Why is self-service so important?

AC: I used to run a data and analytics function within a major global bank. I think a lot of people will recognise the challenges I faced: Where do you find data? How do you evaluate that data for your use case? How do we get that data into a shape where it will be useful?

“WITH BDO, WE’RE TALKING ABOUT A PLATFORM THAT PRIMARILY ENABLES INTERNAL USERS TO ACCESS THE DATA THEY NEED”

Getting answers to these questions involves countless emails, meetings, and dead ends. And it goes without saying that most of the time, people just give up. Or the process takes so long that the opportunity is gone.

But CDOs like Denholm realise that they can provide a self-service user experience more akin to consumer digital technologies. Self-service means less friction for users to get the data they need. It also means lower operational overheads because rather than setting up custom pipelines, users can provision these resources on-demand. It means being able to work with data at source, without necessarily having to move it across systems and organisational boundaries. It also means customising data products with tools that people already know how to use.

TE: What do you see as the biggest challenge for CDOs, and how can they overcome them moving forwards?

AC: If data isn’t being treated like an asset, CDOs are at risk of being stuck as a cost centre within the business. And because the volume of data grows every year, these costs are only going to increase, outstripping any value they are able to generate.

To get around this, CDOs should focus on optimising value extraction. You need to be

good at quickly understanding the value of the data. You need to be able to quickly iterate on your data products. Traditionally, data teams spend a lot of time cleansing, moving, and structuring data to start the process of working out its value. But this isn’t agile. We need to take inspiration from the product mindset, with agile, rapid development, if we want to change the reality of data simply being a cost centre and transform it into a value generator.

harbrdata.com

Anthony Cosgrove MBE is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Harbr. Anthony started his career as an intelligence analyst in the UK government. He later joined HSBC and built predictive analytics capabilities including two data platforms as a Managing Director. He co-founded Harbr in 2017 to address the problems he encountered with sharing data across and within organisational boundaries.

ANTHONY COSGROVE Co-founder, Harbr

PUT YOUR DATA TO WORK

DATA AT BDO

It is this kind of change Hesse is bringing to BDO UK since joining in January 2023, where he is responsible for enterprisewide data strategy and execution across data analytics and engineering, data platforms, data governance and management, and data culture and literacy. The business provides tax, audit and assurance, advisory and business outsourcing services to companies across all sectors of the economy and is part of the BDO global network of public accounting, tax and advisory firms that provides business advisory services in 156 countries worldwide.

“In terms of data, and where the real value is in our work and in the professional services industry, I break it down into some key areas,” says Hesse. “One is about opportunities for driving growth and maximising the client portfolio. It’s a really broad range of clients and businesses, so we have to use data to make sure we’re first to market when it comes to helping them with challenges, providing services and value. Alongside that, I think about internal efficiencies. Our industry, and BDO, is based on people and their knowledge and expertise, which is very

high. If we can collate and use that knowledge, build it into large language models like those behind ChatGT then that’s hugely powerful as a competitive advantage that we can use for responding to RFPs and RFIs, for forecasting and predicting markets and intellectual property R&D, as well as emerging trends. It’s one of the areas I really see data adding huge amounts of value both at BDO and in professional services.”

Upon joining the business, Hesse recognised the depth of intent and appetite for maximising data value. Working initially as a self confessed ‘one man band’ his core focus was centred around first understanding the organisation and its goals, then considering how to best build the team that could deliver on this.

“I always think it’s useful to set a 100day plan,” he explains, “which I’d already developed before I even joined and was broken down into several main parts. In terms of understanding the business, it’s key to consider how it’s structured and how it works, then to build that picture across all levels of the organisation – don’t just focus on the c-suite, but involve every single person

“THE MARKETPLACE WILL BE THE PLACE WHERE THE WHOLE ORGANISATION CAN COME TO GET FRICTIONLESS ACCESS TO SAFE, TRUSTED, DISCOVERABLE, AND FLEXIBLE DATA”

“ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS I’VE REALISED IN DATA LEADERSHIP ROLES, IN PARTICULAR THE CDO, IS THAT IN REALITY IT’S A CHANGE AND COLLABORATION-FOCUSED POSITION MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE”

who will be making decisions and running the business day to day. My initial assessment was that we had an organisation where there was lots of very good work happening but in pockets, which is pretty normal. We’ve invested a lot in technology, our data platforms are very modern and capable, which is an exciting proposition and shows the level of intent, but there was the need for a strategy, vision and focus to pull it all together in the right way for the business.

“The second and third areas of that initial plan were around knowing the company’s objectives, so how we measure success and what matters because that informs where we focus on data opportunities, and building rapport and relationships across the organisation,” says Hesse. “The latter is important; people have to see the value you can bring to their work and, certainly in the beginning stages, I always look for early supporters, the people who really want change or are looking for the kind of support we can give them because they’ll be the ones that will help demonstrate value to others across the organisation.”

From a pure technology perspective, says Hesse, the focus has been on assessing the company’s technology and data estate, as well as the existing capabilities with the data and analytics team and more broadly across BDO. He explains that key considerations in this area include what data the organisation has

and how siloed it is, where and how it is being used, and the current pinch points or data challenges in the business.

“The final piece of the puzzle is around competency and responsibility,” he explains. “I want to know how data is used to make decisions, and to what extent, as well as questions around who takes responsibility for data, and whether there’s a data governance team already in the organisation and how they’re operating. It’s building a complete picture based on technology, people and processes and once I had an understanding of where BDO was with data, I was able to move into the planning stage, developing the strategy and defining and building the roadmaps that would allow us to achieve the exciting vision we’d collectively set out.”

EMPOWERING AN ORGANISATION

The data strategy Hesse has developed is centred around one core theme: empowerment. This will be underpinned by federated access to trusted and high-quality data, and the business contributing data to the rest of the firm, and will involve the creation of a data marketplace that Hesse describes as central to the overarching strategic objectives.

“There’s a lot of talent and confidence with data already in the business, so what I’m trying to do is stretch that out more and build these ‘horizontal stripes’ of sharing data and information across BDO,” he says,, discussing what

empowerment looks like in more detail. “There’s a few ways of doing that. People need to realise they’re engaging with data every day, whether using client data for a tax return, updating details in a CRM, or doing some analysis on an M&A deal. The shift for me is evolving that into conscious and deliberate engagement that’s about wanting people to create and manage data in a way that’s mindful of its value for themselves, their teams and the wider business, and ensuring they understand there’s inherent value in all our

data. I want it to be exciting, and for people to want to learn and have fun.

“Building our enterprise data platform and central data marketplace are absolutely crucial to achieving this, and providing that layer that brings empowerment,” explains Hesse. “The marketplace will be the place where the whole organisation can come to get frictionless access to safe, trusted, discoverable, and flexible data. That means they can use their deep domain expertise to make decisions, to run

“I’M A FIRM BELIEVER THAT GETTING STRATEGY AND PEOPLE WORKING TOGETHER IN THE RIGHT WAY IS HOW TO DELIVER TRUE VALUE WITH DATA”

their own analysis, to build their own data products, and to embed insight into other applications, processes, and products they have – it immediately makes data available at that sharp-end of the business.

“If you consider that from a consumption perspective, there’s a ‘producer’ angle around who’s going to put that data into the marketplace and who’s going to make sure it’s trusted, understood and discoverable, and can be used for X, Y, Z purpose,” he continues. “I see those producers initially being the central data office that we’re building. But over time, I would love it if people across the organisation begin to contribute data to that platform themselves. Imagine an environment where you’re recognised in some way for the contributions you make to the data marketplace because you’re putting in an asset you’ve maybe collected in one area and making it available to the rest of

the organisation. That’s what we’re driving towards with the marketplace; we’re doing a POC this year to test what it looks like and the aim is to scale it out over the next few years to a place where it’s the go-to for the whole organisation for data.”

COLLABORATION AND THE FUTURE

To deliver on these objectives, Hesse explains that collaboration with key strategic partners is essential. In such relationships, he says, a premium is placed on shared values and buy-in on the wider vision, but also important traits like trust, transparency and a willingness on the behalf of the partner to engage in problems and opportunities together.

“I WANT A CHIEF DATA OFFICE THAT’S MARKET LEADING, DIVERSE AND PACKED WITH A BREADTH OF SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE READY TO CONTRIBUTE TO OUR VISION”

Two key partners involved in the journey are Harbr and Alteryx. Hesse elaborates: “We’re collaborating with Harbr to build out the data marketplace. When we talk about how central it is to our data strategy, that’s Harbr’s bread and butter. At the moment we’re exploring what the marketplace can look and feel like – I want it to be the most frictionless experience possible for a user, an environment in which finding a data set is as easy as finding a product on Amazon. I want them to have all the information required to understand why and how their data can and cannot be used. One really interesting point is that, if you’ve got a central marketplace where everybody comes to engage and work with data, you can measure engagement and start to understand what data products are getting the most engagement, what they’re being used for and who they’re being used by. That’s really important for measuring ROI.

“Alteryx is also a key partner,” he adds. “They’re a business I know well and that I’ve collaborated with in all of my previous roles and, actually, they provide a solution that’s perfectly suited to professional services. That’s largely because it’s about automation, analytics, and intelligence. When you look at the challenges we’re trying to solve, both internally and for our clients and audit entities, automation is a way of reducing risk, errors and the amount of time it takes to deliver value to a client. Alterxy’s technology allows us to pass value onto

the client and one of the benefits of that is that we can use the brain power, skills and domain expertise for more value-added tasks and projects. It’s so powerful for us.”

In just six months, Hesse and the team at BDO have made significant progress but, he concedes, there is still a lot to do. On starting the role he set four priorities for 2023, he says: “The first thing is to establish the Chief Data Office. And I want that to be market leading, diverse and packed with a breadth of skills and experience ready to contribute to our vision. Second, we want to deliver £1m of tangible, recognised value from the CDO either across efficiencies delivered to the organisation or through revenue generation. Thirdly, we need to establish an approach to data management that focuses on mitigating risk effectively and encourages data contributions and, lastly, I’ll continue to build out those horizontal stripes of communities and peer groups that can share knowledge and experience, and transform the pace at which we can move in one direction towards delivering our strategy.”

www.bdo.co.uk

PORTFOLIO

I NNOVATIVE AND INSPIRED ITEMS FOR WORK , LEISURE AND SUSTAINABLE LIVING

ELECTRIC MOKE

If James Bond drives one [the original MOKE appeared in four movies] it’s good enough for us. Although, you now can do an even better job of saving the planet than the British secret agent. Crafted in the UK, the electric MOKE takes just four hours to charge, has a top speed of 80 km/h and reaches 0-55 km/h in just 4.3 seconds. MOKE says it’s designed for the most beautiful places – picture a coastal drive in St Tropez or a cruise around a Caribbean island for starters – making its whisper-quiet, sustainable drivetrain perfect.

mokeinternational.com

PORTFOLIO

I NNOVATIVE AND INSPIRED ITEMS FOR WORK , LEISURE AND SUSTAINABLE LIVING

APPLE VISION PRO VR

Phone, computer, tablet – whichever you choose, Vision Pro brings it to life. Innovative spatial computing technology blends digital content with the physical world, meaning apps come to life around you, your room transforms into your own personal theatre when watching movies, 3D camera tech lets you ‘enter’ your own photos and videos, and meetings and chats on FaceTime become meetings right there with you. We can’t do the amount of tech packed into its singular, 3D laminated glass frame justice. Needless to say, there’s enough to keep you busy.

www.apple.com

PORTFOLIO

I NNOVATIVE AND INSPIRED ITEMS FOR WORK , LEISURE AND SUSTAINABLE LIVING

SIGHTFUL SPACETOP

At first read, a portable computer with a 100-inch display might seem like a hard sell. But what if that ‘display’ weighed nothing. Or wasn’t even there most of the time. That’s more like it, right? That’s the USP of Tel Aviv-based startup Sightful’s Spacetop, the world’s first augmented reality laptop. Slip on a pair of NReal AR glasses and from its unassuming keyboard/ touchpad base rises a giant, floating and high-res screen that can display up to 100 inches – more than enough, however many tabs you leave open.

www.sightful.com

PORTFOLIO

I NNOVATIVE AND INSPIRED ITEMS FOR WORK , LEISURE AND SUSTAINABLE LIVING

DYSON ZONE

We’ll get one thing out of the way: people are going to stare at you. But let them stare. And breathe their normal air. You, on the other hand, get to have your head nurtured with high-quality sound and twostage purified air simultaneously. Dyson’s Zone headphones are the result of seven years of research and work. The visor that covers your nose and mouth contains a purification system that filters out pollutants and pumps purified air out of two streams – an accelerometer measures speed and movement and alters the airflow accordingly.

www.dyson.com

PORTFOLIO

I NNOVATIVE AND INSPIRED ITEMS FOR WORK , LEISURE AND SUSTAINABLE LIVING

RECARO X PORSCHE GAMING CHAIR

There are times in life when you just have to make do. Can’t afford a Porsche 911 GT3, for example? Then this exclusive gaming chair, a collaborative effort between the German brand and race seat stalwart Recaro, is the next best thing. It’s designed by Studio F.A. Porsche using high quality materials and the same colour scheme you’ll find if you keep saving for that Porsche motorsport vehicle. The seat is ergonomically designed to deliver an ‘authentic racing feeling’, has lumber support, a unique 5D armrest and, Porsche being Porsche, is a limited edition design. To just 911 seats.

www.porsche-design.com

A LIFE IN TRANSFORMATION

ISG’S WAYNE BUTTERFIELD ON BEING AT THE CUTTING EDGE OF AI AND AUTOMATION, WHAT IT TAKES TO BE AN EARLY ADOPTER IN CONTACT CENTRE TRANSFORMATION, AND GUIDING COMPANIES THROUGH COMPLEXITY

Igot the bug for working in a different, more digital way early on in my career,” Wayne Butterfield tells us, “using automation and innovative new technologies to transform the way we work in the enterprise and how consumers interact with brands became an obsession – these same technologies we’ve seen explode in usage over the last decade.” There’s something to be said for doing things differently. And doing them first. Even if, by one’s own admission, we have to learn some valuable lessons along the way. Butterfield is a perfect example of this, spending the formative years of his career at the cutting-edge of automation technology – a self-confessed ‘early adopter’ – delivering it to revolutionise customer service at O2 and transform the way the company’s contact centre and back office worked. Like many early experiences, they’ve remained both a passion and key focus of his work ever since.

Today, Butterfield is Partner & Global Lead for AI & Automation at global technology research and advisory firm ISG, working within its automation business, helping some of the world’s largest enterprises who are now on their own AI & Automation adoption journeys, with Butterfield strategically advising his clients on the latest technology to hit the headlines, such as Generative AI.

“It’s a focus and line of work that stems from my early days, particularly four or five years at O2 where we were industry leading in our forays into automation,” he says, expanding on the theme. “I landed my first digital role in 2010, at a time when the contact centre environment wasn’t really digital at all. Our large offshore back office, which was predominantly manual, was my responsibility and at around the same time I discovered Blue Prism, an intelligent RPA software that we adopted to automate our processes, and made some initial inroads into early providers of Chat Bots.

“It was my first experience of taking very manual processes and digitising them through that kind of technology,” Butterfield continues. “Over the subsequent three or four years that digitisation grew rapidly from back office to front across several of the areas I was responsible for, including our online chat community which, in 2012, saw us delivering around 700,000 online interactions between sales and service for our customers. It was probably one of, if not

the largest online chat operation in the world at that point – we were really innovative. It was also one of the largest RPA deployments anywhere at that time, plus we had one of the largest digital chat deployments, and more than half a million downloads of our selfservice app. The whole role was about being very early on in the adoption curves of these kinds of technologies and demonstrating what they can do for the wider business and its stakeholders.”

“THE CONTACT CENTRE IS A PART OF AN ORGANISATION THAT I’M STILL REALLY PASSIONATE ABOUT, AND I DON’T THINK ANYWHERE ELSE IN A BUSINESS IS AS COMPLEX TO CREATE MEANINGFUL AND POSITIVE CHANGE”

By their very notion, early adopters are exploratory, engaged and intrigued by new technologies or ways of doing things, and prepared to make mistakes in the pursuit of achieving their goals. To this end, Butterfield concedes that his approach brought several important lessons that are still relevant today.

“I was one of the first five or so people to deploy this kind of technology globally,” he says, “and we essentially had to learn as we went along. There’s a couple of lessons that really stick with me. One occurred when we were automating part of a process as a proof of concept and were pushing quickly to innovate, so we didn’t inform everyone of the developments happening at pace. It was a good demonstration that you can adopt tech and set it up really quickly, but it’s not going to be anywhere near as successful as it could be if you don’t take everyone on that journey with you. A second one was a few years later around the launch of a new iPhone – at the time, probably one of the most important annual telco events in the world. Everyone was aware of the automation work and what we were doing in terms of delivering savings for the business, but because we hadn’t taken human error into account as part of an automated process, some customers didn’t receive their iPhones. It was the first time that RPA had made it up to board level (and clearly not for a good reason), but we didn’t make the same mistake again.”

Since that time, the adoption and use of automation technologies, AI, chatenabled solutions and more has risen exponentially as organisations evolve while looking to make processes more efficient and cost-effective, and also improve customer experience. Says Butterfield: “Adoption and deployment has exploded, largely driven by cost. Whether it’s a digital deployment for a new automation tool in customer service, generative AI, online chat or RPA, most of the business cases are built around doing more with less and making the lives of agents in contact centres better.

“That being said, I still believe that technology is evolving a lot faster than the enterprise,” he continues. “Consider the massive rise of generative AI right now and all the incredibly powerful things it can do. The reality is that businesses are still years away from being able to fully adopt any of those technologies. I started with RPA in 2010 and even seven or eight years later, very few organisations had fully replicated what we’d done at O2 despite the fact the technology itself hadn’t really evolved that much over that time period. That’s changed now, but if you think about the deployment, creation, and revamp of these technologies every six, 12 or 18 months, organisations can take two to five years to adopt. You can’t make it a race, but it’s a really interesting time in which there’s a lot of change needed in how the enterprise works, and that’s before you consider things like the impact

of COVID and the new workforce. Bring people and technology together like that as an archaic enterprise, and there’s some significant challenges to overcome over the next decade.”

Butterfield expands on those challenges in more detail: “Technology-wise, many of the underlying systems and infrastructure often aren’t flexible enough to allow quick plug-and-play updates. If you’re not able to swap out something simple like an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) within six to nine months – and I’ve seen companies or IT teams quote between

five and seven years – then you’ve got some significant issues. Any kind of technical debt just slows down a company’s ability to innovate. At the same time, you have to focus on people and process. The winners and losers in the enterprise of the future won’t replace people with technology, but will marry the two to create the best outcomes for the business. That involves creating the right culture, hiring the right people, and building less structured processes that allow innovation to flourish. If you can get all that working in harmony, it sets you up for a successful future.”

“ANY KIND OF TECHNICAL DEBT JUST SLOWS DOWN A COMPANY’S ABILITY TO INNOVATE”

BUILDING TOMORROW’S CONTACT CENTRE

At ISG, Butterfield’s role is to help organisations navigate these kinds of complex technology adoption and change programmes. ISG helps clients across multiple industries and sectors confront emerging challenges and prepare for new opportunities. As a leading global technology research and advisory firm, it partners with clients to develop future-facing strategies and vision, drive innovation and change and maximise the value of digital investment and adoption.

“I’ve been here six or seven years now,” says Butterfield, “and my main responsibilities are around the future strategy and our solution set. So, who we work with, why we work with them, and how we help them understand and simplify the complex world of technology. In practice, that means working with people all the way from CIOs through to automation leads and, acting as a strategic advisor, helping them make the right decisions and choices around their technology and innovation investments. Typically, I work with clients to think about the bigger picture, everything we have to consider from a customer and stakeholder perspective through to leadership strategies and IT, and bridge the gap between them so that when organisations make a change they’re doing it for the right reasons and in the best way.”

Considering his experience in the field, Butterfield spends a lot of his time working with clients undergoing change and technology adoption in the contact centre. “It’s a part of an organisation that I’m still really passionate about, and I don’t think anywhere else in a business is as complex to create meaningful and positive change. It’s challenging. You’re dealing with customers, you’ve anywhere between 500 and 15,000 agents in the environment that absolutely need that change to work for them, there’s layers of systems and processes, a great deal of variation and flexibility in how the contact centre works, and things like new policies and regulation, evolving mandates from the business, and disruption from COVID. It’s a delicate ecosystem that never rests and so, when you’re introducing technology and process changes, it’s rare you move one lever without impacting something else.”

Despite this, the contact centre of today is a significant evolution from the environments Butterfield worked in in the early 2000s. In particular, he explains, advancement in technologies like AI, IVR, automation and more have brought significant benefit to both customers and agents. “One thing doesn’t change,” he says, “a customer has a query, and it’s our role to answer it. The big evolution is in how we do so, which changes constantly. Some of the most significant developments include online communities, asynchronous messaging, in-app

messaging, conversational AI and the shift from the landline to smartphone – the ability to augment voice interaction with a digital screen is a huge change. Using technology that can listen to or read what’s being said by both parties and proactively provide help, guidance, prompts

on next steps or best actions makes the process easier for the agent and the level of service for the customer far better.

DELIVERING SUCCESSFUL TRANSFORMATION

With this in mind, the work of Butterfield and his colleagues at ISG is

“THE WINNERS AND LOSERS IN THE ENTERPRISE OF THE FUTURE WON’T REPLACE PEOPLE WITH TECHNOLOGY, BUT WILL MARRY THE TWO TO CREATE THE BEST OUTCOMES FOR THE BUSINESS”

crucial in helping companies successfully navigate these kinds of challenges. In particular, he advocates against technology for technology’s sake, instead putting the customer at the heart of decisioning and strategy and selecting the right tools for the specific purpose.

“Don’t boil the ocean with your channels,” he explains. “Don’t even think about trying to create the most joined-up journeys between systems, just get things resolved. When developing a contact strategy, you have to think about customers first and foremost – you can build the

greatest chatbot in the world, for example, but if they’re not going to the place you’ve deployed it then there’s zero benefit to the business. There’s two strategies for achieving this: first, you can gently nudge them in the direction you wish to take, which we did back in 2010/11 with online chat when people began using their mobile devices more as a way to contact the business. But, if you’re doing that, you have to be able to demonstrate that the new technology or service you want customers to use is an improvement on the way they currently communicate with your business.

“The second approach is to really understand customers – who they are, what they do and where they’re already doing it,” says Butterfield. “We use the concept of ethnoecology, which centres around how people in different societies understand, experience and interact with the environments around them. If you want to make improvements in the contact centre, you have to speak with the customer who will be going through that journey with you. Don’t presume – the whole purpose is to serve, and so it’s important to understand that the greatest experiences you can create aren’t about the big ‘wows’ or the latest software or technology, they’re about taking ownership of a question and solving it with as little effort or disruption as possible for the customer. If you’re not doing that, whatever technology or transformation you’re going through means absolutely nothing.”

Butterfield predicts that the pace of change and innovation both in the contact centre and beyond will continue unabated in the coming years. In terms of the former, he points to several key trends around the ongoing automation of processes and employees’ workloads to bring greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness. “That’s where we’re seeing a lot of the developments in generative AI, as one example,” he says. “Augmentation is also increasing. Some of my work at ISG is around augmented intelligence, which focuses on pairing people and technology in the most effective way. Interestingly, we’re seeing traction in self-service, which isn’t exactly a new innovation, but again is about delivering the best service for customers. It might be a chatbot or a new screen on the app, and so is quite simple in reality, but it gets the job done. It’s an interesting time in which you have a real spectrum of the most innovative and cutting-edge technologies right through to something as simple as selfservice – whatever is the best tool for resolving issues in the simplest way.

“IT’S A REALLY INTERESTING TIME IN WHICH THERE’S A LOT OF CHANGE NEEDED IN HOW THE ENTERPRISE WORKS”

“I think there’s several key things companies and leaders can focus on to make sure they remain competitive in the contact centre space,” notes Butterfield. “First, context will be key, particularly in the next evolution of technology and where agents fit in that environment, because context will influence where the customer contact ends up, with who and how it is dealt with. Within that, technology won’t stop evolving, so organisations have to approach this in a way that enables them to plug and play in an efficient manner if they’ve any ambition to stay ahead of the competition. Standing still at any point will be going backwards because of the pace we’re moving at. Lastly, and despite the fact we’re talking a lot about technology here, the customer service agent will continue to be the most important asset in your organisation. Our job is to use technology as one of the tools we arm them with to meet future objectives and bring success around things like higher revenues, more sales and, most importantly, higher customer satisfaction. Despite brilliant technology innovations, the service agent is still king of the contact center.”

isg-one.com

PLASMONIC PAINT

INSPIRED BY BUTTERFLIES

The volatile organic compounds found in many synthetic paints are harmful both to us and our environment. Whatsmore, in an ever-warming world where cooling is king, surfaces painted with many commercially available paints can absorb significant levels of heat.

There’s an alternative solution, though. And we’ve butterflies, flowers and squid to thank. Debashis Chanda, a professor at OCF’s NanoScience Technology Center, looked to these and more to create the first environmentally friendly, large-scale and multicolour alternative pigment-based colourants. The result is plasmonic paint, which uses nanoscale structural arrangements of colourless materials – aluminium and aluminium oxide – instead of pigments to create colours.

While traditional pigment paint colourants rely on the light absorption properties of their molecules to determine colours, plasmonic paint uses light reflection, absorption, and scattering from its nanostructural geometric arrangements to make visual palettes. It’s also longer lasting, efficient, eco-friendly, and light – Chanda estimates that instead of the 1,000 pounds of synthetic paint typically used to paint the exterior of a Boeing 747, just three pounds of plasmonic paint would do the job.

www.ucf.edu

“THE RANGE OF COLOURS AND HUES IN THE NATURAL WORLD ARE ASTONISHING –FROM COLOURFUL FLOWERS, BIRDS AND BUTTERFLIES TO UNDERWATER CREATURES LIKE FISH AND CEPHALOPODS”

DRIVING THE SERVICE ECONOMY

SYNCRON’S VATSAN GOVINDARAJAN AND KATHRYN NARAYAN DISCUSS THE RISE OF THE SERVICE ECONOMY, THE IMPORTANCE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY, AND HOW THE COMPANY HELPS CUSTOMERS TRANSFORM

RIGHT: VATSAN GOVINDARAJAN

BELOW: KATHRYN NARAYAN

Industry-wide evolution is rapidly changing the operating environment for global manufacturers and distributors who, faced with cost pressures, greater demand to satisfy customer experience and growing focus on areas like sustainability, are moving away from traditional business models. The days of pure product sales are over. Instead, organisations must shift to a new service economy in which end-to-end aftermarket sales, increased resiliency and predictability across the business, and better service lifecycle management underpin competitive advantage.

Digital transformation, including maximising the use of data and analytics to provide insight across the entire service value chain and bring long-term stability and profitability is essential to thrive in this new environment. Smart businesses must use innovative technologies to put service at the heart of their organisational thinking, revolutionise the way services are delivered to their customers, and accelerate transformative growth that drives higher revenue and supports future ambitions. Syncron supports organisations on this journey across three core pillars of the end-to-end service lifecycle management value chain: plan, price, and service. We spoke with Chief Technology Officer Vatsan Govindarajan and Head of Solutions, GTM Kathryn Narayan to find out how.

Both are highly experienced professionals in supply chain management, technology, and service transformation across several industry sectors and different organisations. Narayan joined Syncron in spring 2022 and leads its solution go-to-market organisation, having previously worked at service execution management company ServiceMax and spent more than 30 years in pre-sales roles in ERP, supply chain management and transformation. Govindarajan has more than 20 years’ experience, including nearly two decades at SAP working across several industries including financial services, developer trading, fashion, supply chain planning and ERP development. He worked on technologies including dealer management systems, engineering and architecture, corporate strategy including go-to-market, product strategy and financial reporting, and product and service lifecycle management innovation. He joined Syncron in July 2022.

Ready to transform your business?

THE RISE OF THE SERVICE ECONOMY

Combined, the two possess a wealth of experience and, during their respective careers have seen firsthand the evolution of the service economy model and the greater adoption and use of digital technologies. “Historically, the focus has been from the point of time a product is designed to when it’s manufactured and sold – the moment any industrial equipment or a car, to use the automotive industry as an example, is sold the whole part of the

business process and model that happens after has never been considered, leveraged, or digitised,” says Govindarajan. “Countless organisations we’ve both worked with, probably up to around 2015, have just had very little insight into that aspect of their work. That’s fundamentally changed over the last five years or so. We now know the importance of first having that insight, analysing it and making sense of the data available, then basing actionable decisions on it.

“ORGANISATIONS HAVE TO BE ABLE TO FORECAST DEMAND EFFECTIVELY, CALCULATE THE LEAD TIME FOR REPLENISHMENT, HAVE THE RIGHT STOCK VOLUME AND MORE AND, TO HELP THEM DO THIS, WE PROVIDE SOME OF THE MOST ADVANCED SOFTWARE AVAILABLE”

VATSAN GOVINDARAJAN, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, SYNCRON

“There’s several driving factors behind this change,” he continues. “Technology and innovation is the first, particularly around solutions that can track the lifecycle of products far more effectively. Sustainability is a significant influence. People that engage with a brand want to see end-to-end processes that are run in a responsible and sustainable way. To use our automotive example: in the past you’d buy a car, use it until it reaches a high mileage or you’re finished with it, then sell it before, ultimately, it is scrapped. That value chain needs to fundamentally transform to incorporate circular principles, have a better understanding of who is responsible for the asset, and its recycling or reuse potential.”

Narayan expands on this period of evolution: “At the same time, customer expectations have risen dramatically,” she says. “A lot of b2b organisations are finding that consumers expect them to behave more like a typical b2c company, and the way in which people want to engage with technology has permeated into the b2b space – there’s a real blurring of the lines. Lastly, in the OEM sphere we’re seeing a realisation by companies that have distribution channels that the equipment lifecycle is elongated. People want more out of their equipment, they want it to last longer, and to have better interoperability and potential for upgrade.

“This opens the whole notion of ‘as-aservice’ models, in which people don’t necessarily want to own an asset, just use it for the intended outcome,” Narayan explains. “For example, imagine I own a hospital chain. We no longer want to buy MRI equipment from major manufacturers like Siemens or Phillips, but instead want a contract that states the number of scans the equipment will provide and that it will be maintained and serviced to give what I need, when I need it. The whole way of thinking is shifting. Service is such a huge margin contributor to businesses and as assets age there’s more compression in that margin, meaning that the notion of ‘service’ becomes an absolute differentiator for manufacturers and distributors. Combine this with all Vatsan’s points and you understand why our focus on the aftermarket is so relevant right now and, most importantly, that digitisation is the only possible way to make this work.”

“THE NOTION OF ‘SERVICE’ IS NOW AN ABSOLUTE DIFFERENTIATOR FOR MANUFACTURERS AND DISTRIBUTORS”

KATHRYN NARAYAN, HEAD OF SOLUTIONS, GTM, SYNCRON

THE TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY

Syncron’s technology supports organisations as they make this complex transformation, enabling them to optimise inventory planning, pricing, and service delivery. These three pillars of plan, price, and service, say Govindarajan and Narayan, underpin the end-to-end service lifecycle management value chain and each are brought together through three best-of-breed solutions and delivered through Syncron’s Connected Service Experience (CSX) Cloud.

It’s inventory management solutions and data harmonisation capability, for example, optimise service parts planning for companies and their networks. Intelligent pricing solutions help to create consistent, transparent parts and service contract pricing, improve profit margins, aid pricing decisions through the use of machine learning, and contribute to greater customer loyalty. Lastly, Syncron provides service execution modules which enable service growth, experience, and optimisation. The three solutions together enable real service transformation by leveraging a common

data layer, meaning organisations get continuous optimisation, harmonisation, and synchronisation across their service value chain, and Syncron’s predictive analytics and unified business intelligence technology give complete visibility and a full range of controls.

“Purely from a value chain perspective, it’s these three pillars that we work on with our customers,” explains Govindarajan, talking through each in more detail. “Effective planning is essential. If you need a part for some equipment, how long are you prepared to wait for that and how should your expectations be managed? From an OEM’s perspective, there are millions of pieces of equipment across the country that need new or spare parts, and servicing each day, and each of those parts needs to be at the right location when needed.

Organisations have to be able to forecast this demand effectively into the future, calculate the lead time for replenishment, have the right stock volume and more and, to help them do this, we provide some of the most advanced software available – it’s an important value driver for us.

“PEOPLE THAT ENGAGE WITH A BRAND WANT TO SEE END-TO-END PROCESSES THAT ARE RUN IN A RESPONSIBLE AND SUSTAINABLE WAY”

VATSAN GOVINDARAJAN, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, SYNCRON

Syncron, powered by EPAM, transforms the Aftermarket Service Lifecycle Management

Syncron helps manufacturers and distributors capitalize on the new service economy by optimizing aftermarket profitability, increasing customer loyalty and enabling the transition to servitization. Syncron aligns all aftermarket services with its Connected Service Experience (CSX) cloud platform, helping companies differentiate themselves through exceptional aftermarket experiences while driving significant revenue growth. The world’s top brands trust Syncron, making it the largest privately-owned global leader in intelligent service lifecycle management SaaS solutions.

JOINING FORCES WITH EPAM

As a valued strategic partner to Syncron, EPAM plays a significant role in many of their key projects - important achievements include:

• Contributing to developing their pricing management product for aftermarket parts, intelligently adjusting pricing based on demand.

• Cooperating on a solution that uses advanced data science tools to optimize complex contract pricing, leveraging predictive technology to reduce risk and maximize margins.

• Working on an enterprise solution for visualizing equipment health data, maximizing reliability, and preventing costly failures.

• Contributing to developing cross-dealer collaboration functionality, enabling automatic backorder fulfilment by identifying potential selling dealers through a dealer network.

• Conducting research projects to explore methods to integrate their data platform into clients’ SAP S/4HANA platforms to simplify onboarding new clients and accelerate data exchange.

EPAM complements Syncron by providing them with:

• Access to a vast talent pool of best-in-class engineers: EPAM’s vast global talent pool offers skills and knowledge for tackling complex projects or specific technology requirements. Supported by EPAM’s AI-driven staffing approaches, projects are staffed quickly with the right people.

• Project Management, Governance & Agility: EPAM ensures effective collaboration leveraging project management frameworks and aligning with Syncron’s objectives. EPAM also helps Syncron adopt Agile practices, enabling iterative and incremental development, frequent feedback cycles, and enhanced collaboration.

• Innovation and technology advice: EPAM assists Syncron in identifying emerging technologies, assessing their feasibility and potential impact, and making recommendations for integrating them into projects.

CONCLUSION

Syncron’s expertise in aftermarket software, combined with EPAM’s software engineering skills and resources, enables manufacturers, distributors, and suppliers to remain competitive in a rapidly changing market.

www.epam.com

“The second is price,” he continues. “Specifically, around how to maximise profit margin around spare part inventory and service, and remain competitive in the market. There’s very complex demand signals that need to be captured at any point in time, and our technology helps organisations to do that. Lastly, with regards to service, we help our customers to manage how they execute their service, manage the deployment of technicians into the field and the information they need to repair the asset, control the warranty processes and more.”

“Our main purpose is to make the world a better service place, and we see this as a digital transformation journey around the service lifecycle in which we address whatever pillar we need to for the customer,” says Narayan. “CSX Cloud brings together those best-of-breed technologies and we believe there’s exponential value in using all three of the pillars together on a common platform, rather than integrating with existing solutions that a customer may already be using. I often use the phrase ‘getting all the rights, right’, and that’s impossible to do in silos.

“WE SEE THIS AS A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY AROUND THE SERVICE LIFECYCLE”

KATHRYN NARAYAN, HEAD OF SOLUTIONS, GTM, SYNCRON

Bringing all the technologies together as we do and introducing AI and ML to undertake the forecasting means customers are ultimately moving towards true predictability so they don’t have to build in buffers or cushions. In the equipment industry the worst thing that can happen is unplanned downtime – your customers are planning their business around equipment being available and ready to use, and so the closer we can get to true predictive outcomes, the more streamlined the whole value chain becomes.”

THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY

The effective use of data insight across the service value chain underpins each of these solutions and is essential in driving service transformation. “It’s not new,” says Govindarajan, “the data has always been there – we have technicians going into the field analysing how equipment has failed, how long parts have lasted and reasons for the failures, and so on. Now, we start categorising all that data and information as a signal and, based on those signals, we can forecast and build effective planning algorithms. Data is also important not just for fixing the problem, but also the root cause of the problem. We call it closed-loop product development, and it’s the holy grail of product manufacturing because it’s not just about building better designs, but creating new business models upon which manufacturers can monetise the assets they’re building and move closer towards equipment-as-a-service. For all

of this, the dots are there, you just need a vendor like Syncron to connect them.”

To drive the best transformation outcomes Syncron engages very closely with customers, sharing experience and capabilities to collaboratively evolve the business. “It’s part of what makes us unique,” Narayan shares. “We don’t try to be everything to everyone. Instead, we’re focused on the aftermarket segment of asset-intensive industries, including automotive. Take our inventory planning as an example. Our focus is downstream planning. Service parts by their nature have erratic demand behaviour, which is very different from finished goods. Many of the supply chain planning solutions on the market are good at the finished goods, manufacturing, supply chain, and logistics. But they often fall short on aftermarket downstream planning because, in industries that are highly capital intensive, it’s a very different type of planning.

“Then there’s a channel or network that exists,” she continues. “If an OEM that sells through a dealer/distribution type model, they’re further away from the point of demand, and so effectively planning that demand stream requires a very different model. Pricing of aftermarket parts is the same – it’s an erratic demand pattern that goes through a tiered value chain. Syncron’s entire history has been in this space, which is why our algorithms, machine learning and AI, and other technologies are the right solution

to these problems. We marry that to a high level of experience and domain expertise, our own customer advisory board and our unique perspective, which enables us to help them transform at a much greater scale.”

These transformations aren’t a linear journey for customers. Rather, they are an ongoing, flexible process influenced by market evolution, changing requirements of the business, and developments in technology and solutions. To this end, as CTO, a core aspect of Govindarajan and team’s role is to work closely with other parts of the business to identify these trends and develop appropriate solutions. “Our product management team works closely with our sales division and our customers to build an understanding of the market and the requirements of the industry, and also gain foresight into potential future developments,” he explains. “This product management team then works closely with the engineering team that I head up and Catherine’s marketing team to set out key areas of focus for products and solutions.”

Narayan elaborates: “Our engineering team, especially under Vatsan’s leadership, not only builds these new products but is also the central point for highlighting advances in technology or innovations that we might need to consider more strategically down the road, whether it’s AI, machine learning, or to do with underlying architecture, that kind of

thinking creates a very complementary relationship between engineering and product teams. To really consider ‘I know you want me to build X, but what about Y and Z, and the impact they may have on X in two or three years?’ requires a longer lens from an engineering perspective, and a combination of great engineering and architecture skills with strategic business acumen. From a digital transformation perspective, it’s not only bringing that to our customers, it’s ensuring that it’s

sustainable as we grow. There’s a value chain within Syncron that has to be considered for anything to work and evolve.”

Several trends are on the pair’s radar moving forward. “The influence of consumer behaviour is important,” Govindarajan explains. “Today’s generation don’t always want to own their own cars, apartments and houses. That’s a cultural shift that’s hard to ignore and, on the industrial side, I predict a similar trend in which people move from a CapEx to an OpEx model. For us, that means understanding our customers before we can consider how our technology can actually help. Sustainability will continue to rise up the agenda, including a greater focus on the circular economy which could potentially change everything. For our customers, that means questions around how to drive efficient and sustainable outcomes and taking endto-end ownership of the product. Lastly, we believe that the convergence of technology and commercial models will drive profitability for our customers. That’s really important to remember – it is possible for a company to be profitable and sustainable at the same time. Our job is to make that happen.”

www.syncron.com

“IT IS POSSIBLE FOR A COMPANY TO BE PROFITABLE AND SUSTAINABLE AT THE SAME TIME. OUR JOB IS TO MAKE THAT HAPPEN”

VATSAN GOVINDARAJAN, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, SYNCRON

MENSE KORTE

THE PRINTED HOUSE

When completed in August 2021 after just eight months of work, this was the first house in Germany born not from the hands of builders or expert craftspeople, but a printer. Albeit, a big one.

The two-storey 3D-printed home in Beckum, North Rhine Westphalia, was designed by architecture firm Mense-Korte and built using COBOD BOD 2, an autonomous 3D construction printing machine built by PERI. Mense-Korse focuses on residential construction and the

production of individual prefabricated parts, using intelligent designs, optimised materials and 3D printing to bring new construction methods to life.

Using this approach has several advantages. 3D printing allows for the construction of a greater number of buildings more quickly and cheaply, offers an alternative to economies facing labour and housing shortages, and is more environmentally friendly and sustainable.

mense-korte.de

“FOR THIS HOUSE, NEITHER STONES WERE LIFTED NOR PREFABRICATED PARTS WERE ASSEMBLED. AND THAT IS JUST THE BEGINNING”

TOMORROW’S TREATMENTS,

TREATMENTS, TODAY

ANDREW RAYNES DISCUSSES DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AT ROYAL PAPWORTH HOSPITAL NHS FOUNDATION TRUST AND EXPLAINS HOW TECHNOLOGY IS CHANGING PATIENT CARE

When Royal Papworth Hospital

NHS Foundation Trust moved to its new and state-of-the-art hospital building on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in May 2019, it was the culmination of more than two years’ work on an all-encompassing digital transformation strategy designed to make life easier for staff and improve patient care. The overarching vision for this work, to bring tomorrow’s treatments to today’s patients, has already seen the trust do both – the hospital carried out several world-first treatments in its first year, the Trust rapidly increased its digital maturity to HIMSS Level 5, and became a Digital Exemplar for the Lorenzo IT system… we could continue.

But transformation at this scale doesn’t rest. For the Trust, the 2019 move was a moment to look to the future, a point of reflection that resulted in the development of a new digital strategy for the years spanning 2021-25 and designed to help the organisation build on its strengths, to realise the potential of the new hospital site further, and to support clinical excellence through information, innovation and technology.

Andrew Raynes joined the Trust in 2017 to lead the digital transformation programme, work that he continues in line with the objectives set out in the strategy. He and his team have worked across the organisation since, engaging with key stakeholders, adopting a learn by doing and fail fast approach to driving transformation, helping to support digital clinical leaders, and continuously improving the adoption and use of innovative technologies.

And their work shows – the team were recognised as a UK first to develop interoperability between the electronic patient record (EPR) systems Lorenzo and Epic, featured in the hospital’s 2019 CQC report as an area of outstanding practice for their contribution to the Trust’s overall ‘Outstanding’ rating across all domains [a first for any NHS Hospital Trust in England], and won the 2021 HTN Now Award for Rapid Response to COVID-19. Raynes joined us to discuss his career in technology and leadership, the ongoing transformation at the Trust, and how digitalisation is changing the way healthcare is delivered.

Raynes joined Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in September 2017 having previously worked as IT Programme Director at Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust. He is a vastly knowledgeable technology leader with more than 20 years’ experience working in the health and private sectors including roles overseas, implementing IT in a GP-led practice at HMP Thameside on the Belmarsh Prison Estate, and LiquidLogic, a children and adult social care system at Leicester City Council. A graduate of the Oxford Said Executive Leadership Programme, Raynes

“OUR USE OF INNOVATIONS LIKE IMPLANTABLE DEVICES THAT CAN REMOTELY MONITOR HEART ARRHYTHMIA IS A GREAT DEMONSTRATION OF PROVIDING CARE WITHOUT WALLS”

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holds a Master’s Degree in Healthcare Informatics specialising in education, is a CHIME Certified Healthcare Chief Information Officer (CHCIO), a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS), and a Leading Practitioner in the Federation of Informatics Professionals (FedIP). He is also a former Chair of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Integrated Care System (ICS) Digital Enabling Group and a member of the National GS1 UK Health Advisory Board.

TECH EVOLUTION IN HEALTHCARE

Understandably, such a career has seen a significant evolution in technology, both in the healthcare sector and more broadly. “Digital poverty and divide is real, and a priority, but the adaptation and acceleration of technology has massively advanced and improved,” Raynes reflects. “A statement always comes to mind: ‘when things are at their toughest, you innovate most’. There’s increased innovation in apps, self-help, self-service, and digital tools, but a big leap forward must be the use and adoption of standards. In a more joined up world, the cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) are key to making information accessible and available to clinicians and patients. However, the rapid rise in cyber threats means the need for heightened security, vigilance and resilience around awareness and security best-practice is vital.”

overarching vision of bringing tomorrow’s treatments to today’s patients and, Raynes explains, enables its ambition to provide care without walls – a focus that was particularly important during the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. “It goes far beyond the rollout of things like MS Teams, too,” he says, “although virtual consultations have been an incredible enabler of remote care. Take remote monitoring and exploring opportunities as an example. A usual cardiothoracic centre like ours previously would have patients through the door, but our use of innovations like implantable devices that can remotely monitor heart arrhythmia is a great demonstration of the kind of change to patient care that technology can make.

In the healthcare sector, digital technology plays a crucial role, both in how staff are able to do their jobs and in how care is delivered. It underpins the Trust’s

“Similarly, we’re using standards to connect systems,” he says. “For example, we have a shared care record but the criticality of capturing data that is high in integrity, complete, accurate, and purposeful can’t be underestimated. And, as we continue to evolve and become more joined up as a health and care system we have to speak using a common language. Imagine how systems can talk together. We should expect that to happen far more in a world where we have limited resources and finance – simply removing one system and replacing it with another isn’t a necessary strategy, it’s about how we use standards to help progress.”

One aspect of this evolution from a technology perspective is to work with key

suppliers to ensure systems are fit for purpose and consumable by the NHS and care, and that they’re capable of sharing, says Raynes. “This means ensuring computer systems pass the hygiene test: are they cybersecure, what accreditation do they carry, do they use interoperability standards (FHIR/HL7), and do they use the globally recognised standards for the diagnosis language. Lastly, captured data must be accurate – we mainly rely on human intervention, but by using standards we can make sure that everytime we capture a data item we can guarantee the ongoing integrity.”

TRANSFORMATION AT ROYAL PAPWORTH

When Raynes joined the Trust in 2017, he did so to help drive the transformation programme across the organisation. At the time, he says, the Trust was running an old technology stack, most of which was on-prem. However, it had just introduced its new Lorenzo EPR for all patient records and full electronic prescriptions with a major focus of his initial work being around ensuring its successful implementation. “We achieved this by the work of the great digital team I have around me at the hospital, including collaboration with

“WE BECAME A LORENZO DIGITAL EXEMPLAR AND QUICKLY REACHED HIMSS DIGITAL MATURITY LEVEL 5 IN JUST 18 MONTHS”

our Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO), Chief Nursing Information Officer (CNIO), and Chief Pharmacy Information Officer (CPIO). These roles were recognised in the 2016 Wachter Report, which identified factors for success in IT in health and care, and continue to be critical in terms of clinical leadership, change and engagement having a successful go-live in just seven months.

“In a UK first, we developed an integration with Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s Epic system to gain real-time reporting on lab results and share information digitally,” he continues. “The system from Dedalus uses AWS cloud for resilience and improved security while maintaining better uptime and availability. It also uses standards including SNOMED coding for recording uniform international diagnosis and GS1 barcoding, meaning every patient that visits and has an interaction has a barcode on their wristband. We became a Lorenzo Digital Exemplar [an internationally recognised NHS provider delivering improvements in quality of care through the world-class use of digital technologies and information] and quickly reached HIMSS digital maturity level 5, in just 18 months.”

Additional funding since has supported the implementation of some apps, Raynes adds, such as Lorenzo on an iPad, whiteboards, connecting GP records patient portal with self-service analytics, and a slide and dicing tool that has the potential

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to be a powerful research and analysis tool in the hands of trained clinicians. Benefits of the Lorenzo EPR implementation include a reduction in meds charts, greater speed of lab results and reduced length of stay. In addition, access to in-context GP records means clinical staff have access to a more complete health record to inform patient care and treatment.

“Broadly, the transformation – which is still ongoing – was necessary because we needed to be more efficient, driving out unwarranted variation while being mindful of driving value,” says Raynes of the reasons behind the digital transformation. “Staff are pressured but committed to providing outstanding care for our patients. Change is interesting and can be disruptive, but the idea of having change management is to limit disruption or to create disruption in a planned and carefully managed way. I believe our role is to try and plan activities to implement disruptive technology with careful insight, planning and communication to ensure it lands, that people are involved, there is training, and that the delivery and acceptance of the technology works, and drives value and benefit for services and patients.”

The scope of work completed by Raynes and team to date is vast. Beyond Lorenzo, their achievements include – but are not limited to – implementing a full electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) system, introducing suspend and resume software in Lorenzo, delivering

MOVE TO KINGFISHER HSE 2023

state-of-the-art technology and systems for the new hospital including patient entertainment, full fibre, telephony, IT infrastructure, cabling and a data centre move, opening a new Heart and Lung Research Institute, moving the Trust’s administration team successfully, and moving the EPR system to the cloud.

“We’ve also evolved our data governance standard, which is really important,” says Raynes, discussing other areas of focus for him and the team. “The patient/clinician relationship is based on trust, meaning that how we hold, obtain, record, use and share information can help build or break relationships. Because of that, operating in frameworks such as Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT) and cyber essentials, whereby we create governance around data, must be a critical part of the care we provide. Engaging with our patients and the public through committees, communications, and other channels remains ongoing and a key to this success. When it doesn’t work we need to learn lessons.

“Elsewhere, we’re exploring the greater use of IoT solutions and the potential for wearable technology for patients,” he adds. “Patient wristbands for medication means tracking important interventions with the scan of a barcode. We use GS1 standards, meaning that each time the data set captured is meaningful and can be used to federate information within our EPR and Shared Care – right patient, right care, right time. The same is particularly

important for administering drugs. These developments, and the use of technologies like Fysicon for remote monitoring signs of arrhythmia have considerable benefits for addressing health inequalities, which is a key focus for the NHS.”

Raynes also explains that the team are working on initiatives to contribute to the hospital’s sustainability objectives set out in its 2022-24 Green Plan. “In our strategic ambition to move the dial on patient choice and sustainability we have implemented hybrid mail with DrDoctor,” he explains. “This enables patients to access patient letters online, while giving choice to those who would still like a paper copy. The rollout was a great success delivered on time, to quality, and cost, and the project has been successful in reducing the environmental impact of printed correspondence in the

department, with print rates of appointment letters reduced from 100% of letters being printed to 39% (saving 108,000g of carbon emissions so far.

“This supports our vision to eliminate printed outpatient appointment letters, other than for exceptional circumstances, as highlighted in our Green Plan,” says Raynes. “By reducing the number of paper letters, savings are unlocked through the reduction of printing and posting. The Outpatients team has saved time and resources as they no longer manually prepare

patient letters; 74 hours of admin time has been saved so far through the reduction of manual processes, or the equivalent of 10 working days. In addition, patients’ appointments can be booked later into the day, improving productivity, and our staff experience in departments sending digital letters has also improved as a result of the process being more streamlined. Following the successful project rollout in March this year, 75% of patients who were sent correspondence digitally have been viewing their letters online, showcasing higher uptake and engagement.”

“BY USING STANDARDS WE CAN MAKE SURE THAT EVERYTIME WE CAPTURE A DATA ITEM WE CAN GUARANTEE THE ONGOING INTEGRITY”

COLLABORATION AND CONTINUED SUCCESS

Any transformation of this scale is complex and challenging. Raynes explains that close collaboration with key strategic technology partners has underpinned much of the work, citing the British Computer Society (BCS) and Dedalus as good examples of the contribution these kinds of relationships can have. “Our partnership with BCS helps recognise and endorse professionalism and

practice, recognise skills and knowledge, and helps us to strive for professionalism and credibility. Organisational membership has created a sense of collaboration, partnership while also recognising experience as well as delivering training opportunities.

“Our work with Dedalus over the years has encouraged collaboration not only on a contractual basis, but at a true

“THE PATIENT/CLINICIAN RELATIONSHIP IS BASED ON TRUST, MEANING THAT HOW WE HOLD, OBTAIN, RECORD, USE AND SHARE INFORMATION CAN HELP BUILD OR BREAK RELATIONSHIPS”

partnership level including sharing office space and understanding mutual goals that are aligned for the benefit of our patients and the organisation,” he continues. “In many ways a partnership can be more effective when it’s based on shared risk and helps develop relationships and trust. This way of working has had a tremendous impact through which we have seen rapid acceleration of adoption, digital maturity and benefits realisation.”

To continue the work achieved to date, the Trust set out a new digital strategy and roadmap in 2020 for the years 2021-25. Its core mission moving forwards is to provide excellent, specialist care to patients suffering from heart and lung

disease, and the strategy will support this through alignment to several core objectives: delivering clinical excellence, growing pathways with partners, offering positive staff experiences, research and innovation, continuing education and sharing, and achieving sustainability.

“There are three areas of focus for me and the team,” Raynes states. “We must assess and address problems that limit our people in providing the best services to our patients and staff, this includes skills, access and approach to engagement and championing. We will ensure processes are streamlined, sustainable, accessible, and have effective governance to help our decision making, priorities and expenditure, and allow people access to the technology they need. Technology must be easy to use, performant, resilient, safe and secure, and we must commit to resolving problems

“Our main priorities revolve around making life easier for staff and exploring ways of joining up care,” continues Raynes. “We will do so by connecting to a new shared care record across the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough ICS, that will make it easier for staff and patients to access information on a need-to-know basis, in order to provide the right care to the right patient at the right time. We’re also developing a cloud strategy. Our work in partnership with AWS has and continues to develop flexibility and accessibility, providing improved availability, resilience, security and

system performance. We’ve also rolled out a new app called Laudit which helps us to thank staff and ‘celebrate the everyday extraordinary’. We’re working with AWS to participate in a new launchpad innovation, providing new startups and innovations with a platform to the world of health and care tech, including solutions for Royal Papworth Hospital and the wider system.

“In addition, our Scan4safety initiative is ongoing,” he explains. “We are seeing great value from the GS1 standard such as interop, bar coding all rooms, patient

wristbands, and identification of drugs, while using our RFID infrastructure to maximise efficiency and safety through traceability of assets, blood, and cardiac implantable devices.Through this initiative we have reduced ward audits from 0.5 days to within two minutes, reduced our blood wastage from <5% to <1%, saved staff time while helping develop interoperability with our neighbouring Trust for real-time lab reporting, and improved medicine safety for patients enabling replenishment, safety, sustainability and big data through standardised data capture.”

“OUR ROLE IS TO TRY AND PLAN ACTIVITIES TO IMPLEMENT DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY WITH CAREFUL INSIGHT, PLANNING AND COMMUNICATION”

Alongside these ongoing projects, the team continues to innovate in other areas too. For example, in April 2023 it introduced the UK’s first Thoracic surgical robot in partnership with CMR medical. With well over 200 procedures already underway, the robot augments the hospital’s surgery team, is less invasive, says Raynes, and encourages quicker recovery for patients. “I recently met with CMR medical and they have an innovative roadmap and 3D training room,” he reports. “I’m excited about the potential it has, as part of the next phase, to enable video to record the surgery and help broadcasting, including learning and teaching opportunities.”

Raynes and his team at the Trust will continue to mobilise staff and, by harnessing high-quality information, continue to improve services for patients. Looking ahead, he explains: “As a cardiothoracic centre of excellence our aim is to bring tomorrow’s treatments to today’s patients, and our mission is to provide excellent, specialist care to patients suffering from heart and lung disease. Underpinning this must be the vision and appropriate digital technologies to support this approach.

“This will involve multi-channel interactions in the best way to suit our patients in hospital and remotely, and technologies that are mindful of our busy staff to ensure efficiency and safety, improved diagnostic capability to enable prevention, and shared care so that our patients benefit from the continuity of care accessible anywhere anytime,” Raynes notes. “We will be continuously learning and developing our staff to ensure the necessary skills exist to help innovate and, wherever possible, support accessibility to the latest technologies and information for evidence-based care, and continuous improvement through R&D.”

royalpapworth.nhs.uk

Through the adoption of standards, the right infrastructure, skills and innovation

GUIDING THE DATA

DATA JOURNEY

BIZANALYTICA’S MARK SHIRMAN AND ANDY NORMAN DISCUSS DATA MODERNISATION AND OPTIMISATION, AND HOW THEY TAKE CUSTOMERS THROUGH THE COMPLEX TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY

They say it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. Well, sometimes they can be wrong. Of course, our journey in this instance – complex technology transformation and effective data modernisation in order to move away from being a legacy organisation – is crucial, certainly in today’s enterprise environment. But consider the destination: a data strategy built on close collaboration that best supports the objectives and goals of the business, modernised and optimised data that’s democratised for end users, cost savings and greater speed to market – who wouldn’t want to get there?

Even better, of course, when you don’t have to go it alone. BizAnalytica takes every step of the journey with its clients. The business is an industry-leading provider of data modernisation solutions and managed services including architectural design, systems integration, data migration, automation, management, and analytics. Its team of consultants, who have deep expertise and decades of experience working with Fortune 500 enterprises to define smart data modernisation strategies, specialise in helping companies achieve exceptional business outcomes by transforming, simplifying, integrating, and optimising their data management strategy and infrastructure.

They do so across several core areas: data analytics and modernisation strategies that can help break down legacy data silos, ensure clean and consistent data across the enterprise, and reduce operational risk and empower decision makers; developing a comprehensive and customised modern data lakehouse in collaboration with key technology partners; developing data governance strategies; driving innovation through effective analytics and optimised data science; and providing support and managed services.

For most organisations, the increasingly complex and rapidly evolving enterprise data and technology environment makes this kind of change essential in order to remain competitive. We speak with BizAnalytica CEO Mark Shirman and SVP Delivery and Consulting Andy Norman to find out why, and discuss how they and their colleagues can help clients transform.

“For many of the kinds of companies we work with there’s a confluence of a few different things driving change,” says Shirman, expanding on the current environment. “The obvious one is organisations moving to the cloud in order to get rid of on-prem solutions – a shift to more of an OpEx model as opposed to CapEx. That’s being accelerated by the exponential growth in all things data, whether that’s our phones, personal devices, work equipment or anything else. Gartner revealed that 80% of the world’s data was created in the last two years and, if you think about that pace of change, as well as all of the tech that’s now redundant, obsolete or trivial then you can understand the cost benefit solution in migrating to the cloud.

“Of course, the long pole in the tent in that context is that all the data within the organisation that needs to be moved to the cloud sits in a wide variety of disparate and legacy environments,” continues Shirman. “You get no advantage from the cloud if you’re moving a thousand pounds of bad data from point A to point B – you haven’t saved any money and your business isn’t any more efficient. It’s also worth noting that, for all the noise around the cloud, a lot of enterprises are pretty far behind for a variety of reasons. That’s where we come in. We bring the ability to create a new, unified data model against all the disparate things existing on-prem by taking advantage of the latest and

most innovative tools out there, like Snowflake, Databricks, and others, as well as the compliance and governance models to move data in a way that understands risk, privacy, and quality, and also allows companies to significantly evolve their data environment.”

“Mark’s right,” says Norman, “there’s a convergence of volumes of data and the ability to use cloud technologies to both organise and get far more value out of the data that’s available. This enables organisations to take siloed data warehouses, put them in the cloud and create more value, both in terms of increasing performance by creating dashboards and more accurate and informative reporting more quickly, but also by democratising data right across the business rather than just the information that was previously siloed for them and their role. That’s our main area of focus – taking source data warehouses, pipelining them into a unified data platform, and transforming how the customer uses data in a more strategic way.”

DATA MODERNISATION

For most organisations that BizAnalytica works with, this more strategic use of data and the ability to use intelligence to inform decision making and enable predictive capabilities, as well as the ability to vastly improve business efficiency and accuracy, are the main drivers for change. However, implementing and designing a successful roadmap to data modernisation isn’t always easy or scalable and

there are several challenges that make working with a data modernisation consultant like BizAnalytica essential.

These can include integrating legacy systems with modern technologies; ensuring data quality and mitigating the risk of data loss or corruption – particularly challenging when dealing with large volumes of data or data that is highly complex; effectively balancing cost and time with the benefits of the data modernisation strategy due to the resource-intensive nature of such work;

overcoming potential organisational resistance to change and engaging stakeholders in an effective manner; and navigating organisational security and compliance risks.

Working with an experienced technology consultancy like BizAnalytica can be crucial for overcoming these challenges, and designing and implementing a successful roadmap to data modernisation. The business works in close collaboration with customers, its consultants joining them on their data modernisation

“OUR APPROACH IS VERY DIFFERENT, IN THAT IT BRINGS IN ALL THE USERS, CHANGES THE WAY THEY ENGAGE WITH DATA AND CREATES AN ENVIRONMENT THAT’S ALMOST SELF-SERVICE”

MARK SHIRMAN, CEO, BIZANALYTICA

journey and bringing the right expertise and knowledge to inform decision making and recommend the best solutions.

“Most of the work we do is helping enterprises formulate, optimise and implement data modernisation strategies, whether that’s as an auditor, the project manager, or an end-to-end managed service provider,” says Norman, expanding on the typical programmes of work the company undertakes. “It’s centered around moving existing data onto a unified data platform like Snowflake or Databricks, and it’s a complicated process due to the number of technologies and processes involved. We begin with structured data/data warehouses and those source databases, then create pipelines that feed that data into a data platform.

“You’re typically moving that into a RAW layer, which you might then use for AI and ML in the future, and obviously you have to manage the orchestration of when and how you’re bringing the data into the platform – on how many intervals, handling errors, handling restartability and so on,” he continues. “Once we have the data in the platform, it has to be transformed because it’s typically coming out of transaction processing databases and needs organising so it is suitable for high performance analytics. During this part of the process we consider the data model, typically we use what’s called a dimensional data model; there’s a transformation layer and

“ALL THE DATA WITHIN THE ORGANISATION THAT NEEDS TO BE MOVED TO THE CLOUD SITS IN A WIDE VARIETY OF DISPARATE AND LEGACY ENVIRONMENTS”

MARK SHIRMAN, CEO, BIZANALYTICA

CASE STUDY

E n a b l i n g g r e a t e r b u s i n e s s a g i l i t y t h r o u g h c l o u d b a s e d d a t a w a r e h o u s e m o d e r n i z a t i o n

OBJECTIVES

C o m p a n y b u s i n e s s u n i t s w a n t e d g r e a t e r a g i l i t y f r o m t h e i r d a t a e n v i r o n m e n t t o s u p p o r t f u t u r e g r o w t h i n i t i a t i v e s . I T t e a m s o u g h t t o a d o p t a c l o u d b a s e d u n i f i e d d a t a p l a t f o r m t o g e t a w a y f r o m o n - p r e m d a t a b a s e s i l o s a n d u t i l i z e l e a d i n g e d g e t e c h n o l o g i e s t o b u i l d d a t a p i p e l i n e s a n d e x e c u t e d a t a t r a n s f o r m a t i o n s t o s u p p o r t b u s i n e s s u s e r s n e e d s f o r a n a l y t i c s a n d r e p o r t i n g .

C h a l l e n g e s W h y B i z B e n e f i t s

L a c k o f e x p e r i e n c e w i t h c l o u d b a s e d t e c h n o l o g i e s D e s i r e t o m o v e m o r e q u i c k l y w i t h e x t e r n a l c o n s u l t a n t s v s . a n i n - h o u s e t e a m t o s a t i s f y b u s i n e s s u s e r s d e m a n d s .

D e m o n s t r a t e d e x p e r t i s e t h r o u g h B a s e c a m p w h i t e b o a r d i n g s e s s i o n s I n - d e p t h k n o w l e d g e o f I n f o r m a t i c a , d b t , A W S a n d S n o w f l a k e T i m e t o d e p l o y m e n t

N e w c l o u d b a s e d a r c h i t e c t u r e i n p l a c e a n d i n p r o d u c t i o n w i t h i n 6 m o n t h s t i m e P e r f o r m a n c e - 1 0 x i m p r o v e m e n t o f p e r f o r m a n c e A d d e d a g i l i t y - a b i l i t y t o s u p p o r t d a t a g r o w t h a n d b u s i n e s s r e q u i r e m e n t s v s . t i m e t o s t a n d u p o n - p r e m i n f r a s t r u c t u r e R e p o r t s r u n i n m i n u t e s n o t h o u r s , f a s t e r q u e r y t i m e s , e a s i e r t o m a s k P I I d a t a

a consumption layer that allows BI tools like PowerBI, MicroStrategy or Tableau to consume the data and create business reporting and dashboards.

“Alongside this there’s a DevOps process, too,” Shirman notes. “Quite often these are new technologies for customers, so it’s necessary to implement new DevOps processes including new CI/CD processes, get them thinking about automation and the deployment of those technologies into the various environments needed to build, and take things to production. Put that all together, it’s a significant scope of work that, for us, is about taking the customer on the journey through the process of building out with the new technologies, picking a use case

or two to create dashboards and reports that let us understand the source tables needed to feed them, then ultimately setting them up so they’ve a production foundation by which they can scale.”

COLLABORATE AND ENGAGE

Throughout this process, BizAnalytica is committed to working as a trusted business partner – one of several differentiators between it and its competitors, with others including its experienced team in database cloud migrations, a deep bench of qualified data architects and data scientists, strong experience in data warehousing and handling large-scale data and data-intensive applications, and its proven methodology that’s simple, fast to deploy and cost effective.

ANDY

NORMAN, SVP DELIVERY AND CONSULTING, BIZANALYTICA

Central to its proposition is its customer engagement model, a comprehensive and collaborative journey that begins with hands-on workshop sessions to understand existing data infrastructure and set out potential paths for modernisation, before moving through strategy and roadmap selection, proof of concept work and design and development, before launching into full production including recommendations to ensure the new, modernised data environment remains a competitive advantage.

“We’re an integrated team with our clients,” says Norman. “It’s not like app dev, where you take the work from a client and hand them back a product to test. For us, it’s about education, training, ensuring necessary steps are taken in a timely fashion and that the customer knows how and when to do them - it’s a lot of handholding and involves a close relationship along the way. Really, it’s not challenging in terms of the technology, but more in the sense that everyone has to be engaged and on the same page about what needs to be done, how and why.”

“The whole process begins with what we call ‘basecamp’,” Shirman explains, expanding on the engagement model process. “This is essentially a whiteboard session that brings all the stakeholders together, lets us demonstrate our expertise and capabilities, then work on laying out the roadmap that allows the customer to understand the journey they’re about to undertake. Following the basecamp we use an MVP approach, essentially a use case, building dashboards and reports all the way from development through to production. After that, you scale up.”

Norman elaborates on the basecamp process: “For us, it’s about really understanding what each customer is trying to achieve and why, what their current setup and architecture is, and what use cases make the most sense to explore to reach the desired business outcomes. It could be the need to create reports and dashboards more efficiently to reduce processing time, it could be cost-reduction, or even the need to get off on-prem infrastructure and into the cloud in the

“THERE’S A CONVERGENCE OF VOLUMES OF DATA AND THE ABILITY TO USE CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES TO BOTH ORGANISE AND GET FAR MORE VALUE OUT OF THE DATA THAT’S AVAILABLE”

CASE STUDY

M i g r a t i n g a n a l y t i c s w o r k l o a d f r o m N e t e z z a t o c l o u d

OBJECTIVES

C o m p a n y u s e d N e t e z z a t o r u n b u s i n e s s - c r i t i c a l q u a n t i t a t i v e w o r k l o a d s f o r m a r k e t p r i c i n g o f f u n d s . W i t h N e t e z z a r e a c h i n g i t s e n d o f l i f e , t h e f i r m w o u l d h a v e t o r e t h i n k i t s s t r a t e g i c d a t a p l a n . T h e f i r m w a n t e d t o m o v e t o a c l o u d b a s e d - s o l u t i o n . S h o u l d t h e y t r a n s i t i o n t o n e w I B M s o l u t i o n s , m i g r a t e t h e i r p r o p r i e t a r y l i b r a r y t o s p a r k i n t h e c l o u d o f u s e a n a l t e r n a t e p l a t f o r m t h a t c o u l d b e d e p l o y e d i n a h y b r i d - c l o u d e n v i r o n m e n t ?

C h a l l e n g e s W h y B i z B e n e f i t s

O r g a n i z a t i o n a l d a t a n e e d s w e r e d e p e n d e n t o n l e g a c y N e t e z z a S y s t e m s

M i g r a t e R e p o r t i n g a n d P r i c i n g m o d e l s f r o m N e t e z z a t o a S c a l a b l e p l a t f o r m

M i g r a t i o n r e q u i r e d a d v a n c e d p r o g r a m m i n g s k i l l s i n R , P y t h o n a n d S p a r k

P r o v e n e x p e r t i s e a n d d e e p k n o w l e d g e i n m i g r a t i n g f r o m N e t e z z a t o R e d s h i f t a n d l i b r a r y p r o g r a m m i n g l a n g u a g e s ( R , P y t h o n , e t c . ) P r o o f o f c o n c e p t t o e s t a b l i s h t h e r i g h t a r c h i t e c t u r e a n d e n v i r o n m e n t

R e d u c e d o p e r a t i o n a l a n d i n f r a s t r u c t u r e c o s t b y o v e r 4 4 % ( $ 2 M p e r y e a r ) A g i l e a n d s c a l a b l e m o d e l t h a t c a n b e a p p l i e d o r g a n i z a t i o n w i d e N o u p f r o n t i n v e s t m e n t i n h a r d w a r e I m p l e m e n t e d a r e u s a b l e f r a m e w o r k a n d s e l f - s e r v i c e u t i l i t y w i t h o p e n - s o u r c e t o o l s

best possible way. I’ll give you an example: one client had an inventory problem and a goal of reducing inventory from 34 million down to 25 million, and our role was to provide the data, insight and information necessary to achieve that. It’s a relatively simple project that started with a whiteboard session, built the case around inventory management and saw us take source data, create three dashboards and present them with the appropriate strategy.”

A central focus of any project in terms of customer outcomes is consumption and optimisation, says Shirman: “Consumption is really about completeness. If you’ve some of your data on-prem and some in the cloud, your ability to have a comprehensive view of what you do is problematic. So, having the velocity and efficiency to get the information where you need it, and quickly, is critical. It’s more than just an ROI, too. It’s about reaching a point where you have the foundations in place and a broad set of users across the organisation who, by using the data, are also changing the way they operate.”

PARTNERS AND THE FUTURE

A modern data lakehouse is the ultimate goal of any smart data transformation initiative, with cloud computing solutions essential to support customers’ new infrastructure. To develop and customise data lakehouse solutions, migrate data to the cloud, and ensure optimisation of data

“WE BRING THE ABILITY TO CREATE A NEW, UNIFIED DATA MODEL AGAINST ALL THE DISPARATE THINGS EXISTING ON-PREM BY TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE LATEST AND MOST INNOVATIVE TOOLS OUT THERE”

MARK SHIRMAN, CEO, BIZANALYTICA”

BizAnalytica works with several leading technology providers in Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, and Microsoft.

“The value of partners like Databricks or Snowflake is that they’re cloud agnostic,” Shirman explains. “It gives you the capability to move your database around to various clouds depending on what you’re looking to achieve. Snowflake in particular is growing rapidly in the space, already working with some of the major companies across several industries including financial services and healthcare. Underneath these database products we also work with partners that manage and move data pipelines,

including Fivetran and Matillion, they’re all part and parcel of our projects to make sure the value is there for the customer. We try to stay agnostic when it comes to recommending the right solution for customers but typically in a partnership we look for the right technical fit as well as the right go-to-market velocity for us. The real differentiating factor always has to be customer experience and how we deliver it against a variety of technologies.”

Managing data can always bring risk and, as part of the data modernisation journey it’s critical to have a data governance strategy supported by tight processes

and procedures. BizAnalytica helps develop a comprehensive data strategy, guides customers on best practices and provides the tools and understanding of where and how data is being moved and how it should be managed. “With the new platforms we work with, you can establish role-based security and access controls and masking that allows control over who has access to what data, and what they can ultimately see,” Norman explains. “It’s essentially dealing with security, governance and privacy through controls and very much right at

the data level rather than being actively involved in helping customers set up data governance boards or similar.”

A journey of this nature continues to evolve and grow with the business, meaning that a roadmap or strategy sees constant refining and fine-tuning as the project progresses. BizAnalytica has a managed services component to its offering says Shirman, explaining how the company works alongside customers often for the long term: “We’ll continue to manage the environment for them, and there’s

“MOST OF THE WORK WE DO IS HELPING ENTERPRISES FORMULATE, OPTIMISE AND IMPLEMENT DATA MODERNISATION STRATEGIES”

many things that continue to drive change such as the business itself evolving, ever-increasing amounts of systems that continue to become obsolete and move to the cloud and, certainly in the large enterprise, mergers, acquisitions and divestitures. It means that it’s an everchanging process. For that reason, we also train and educate so customers can manage this evolution themselves to some degree.

“The key thing businesses have to remember is that, while almost everyone is adopting a cloud-first strategy, it’s not a case of lift and shift,” he continues. “All that does is give you the same problems in a new environment. Instead, you have to take advantage of all the technologies out there, which may cost more but will ultimately save money downstream and make you more robust. There’s always been the illusion that business talks to IT and then IT does what the business wants. It’s baloney. Our approach is very different, in that it brings in all the users, changes the way they engage with data and creates an environment that’s almost self-service. Get that right and your people drive the business while IT can be a real innovation partner.”

“Think about the approach that we outline, which is a whiteboard session to an MVP and then post-MVP,” says Norman, concluding. “As you go along and as you add and create more data marks, you’re going to be refining the model, tuning the pipelines and the data platform,

and also bringing in more automation, sophistication, and maturity to the whole environment. It ends up being a couple of years’ journey for a lot of organisations.

“Looking ahead, as companies think about application transformation, they should be thinking about data transformation at the same time,” he adds. “One trend that I think will influence all this is finding ways to do more with data to drive next-best-actions, anticipate what people are going to do, understand customers better to inform what you’re offering and more. That all depends on data, and having access to that data. So, I think companies can refine and improve their consumer experiences through better use of data as well, and that’s a big driving force for making this change and, ultimately, modernising and making better use of data.”

bizanalytica.com

ANDY NORMAN MARK SHIRMAN

DARREN PERIES

AISCOUT

When Darren Peries’ son was released from the Tottenham Hotspur Football Academy in 2018, he was approached by several scouts looking for information and insight. It was, in entrepreneurial parlance, the epiphany moment: there was no way for scouts to collect reliable data, no existing technology or science to identify amateur football talent and, as a result, scouts were heading to games blind.

aiSCOUT is the answer. Peries spent the next few years assembling a team of data, talent ID and AI experts and, with the assistance of professional football clubs, gained insight into the development of young players to enable his vision: to develop a platform that enables sports organisations to analyse athletes and detect and develop talent.

Today, aiSCOUT is a fully automated Talent Analysis & Development Platform that uses AI to engage, analyse, score, rate and assist the development of any player in the world using just a mobile phone. For clubs, it’s a way to analyse and connect with emerging talent and evaluate them against benchmarked data and academy players’ scores. For players, it helps them get their talent analysed, develop their game and have a better chance of making it, thus democratising elite-level sport. www.ai.io

AiSCOUT is an official academy research partner of Chelsea Football Club

“AISCOUT INCREASES A SCOUT’S ACCESS TO PLAYERS THAT THEY MAY NEVER HAVE HAD THE CHANCE TO SEE, AND PROVIDES THOUSANDS OF ACTIONABLE DATA POINTS THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN IMPOSSIBLE FOR THEM TO COLLECT THEMSELVES”

DARREN PERRIES

Martin Leedham on his lifelong passion for technology, IT transformation at marcus evans, and how to approach successful leadership

where passion meets purpose

MARTIN LEEDHAM

The humble BBC Micro? The starting point for a story of fast-paced enterprise technology, digital innovation and complex transformations? Absolutely. If you’re Martin Leedham, that is. His lifelong passion for technology – which has seen him journey through various roles and organisations, latterly CIO at marcus evans Group – began when the 8-bit microcomputer [for you non-purists out there] was wheeled into 10-year-old Leedham’s classroom. During the course of our interview Leedham recalls countless other ‘moments’: unwrapping an early Amstrad computer for Christmas, reading PC Pro Magazine religiously front to back in the 90s, gaining the nickname ‘Encarta’ at secondary school because of his love of Microsoft’s famous digital encyclopaedia… you get the idea.

“I still read PC Pro,” he adds, “with many of our IT purchasing decisions still being influenced by items that make the A-list – I also make it a daily ritual to read IT news sites. I also try to keep my technical skills contemporary where I can and recently passed an exam in NFTs; I’ve a really keen interest in blockchain and Web 3, from which I think we’ll see massive benefits, and the pace of evolution in AI and more recently Chat GPT just blows me away. On a serious note, I have to keep up to speed with tech and digital evolution otherwise it’s so easy to find yourself quickly on the backfoot. It also helps me maintain credibility within our team.”

Leedham has worked in enterprise IT for 25 years, a career journey that began in 1998 when, at the age of 17, he took on a junior role for an outsourcing company based onsite at a German investment bank. “I was very nearly fired from this role over perceived bad attitude following restructuring,” he recalls. “I was 19 with two years’ experience but with much to learn, and was incredibly fortunate that my then manager and now friend, Matthew Gevaux took the time to listen to my version of events. He obviously felt I had potential and made a very strong case for me to be given a second chance. It was a sliding doors moment because I would very unlikely be in a position to speak with you today if it would have worked out differently. I’m very grateful to him for that and it has instilled a patience in me with younger employees.

“Over the span of these two and half decades, we’ve witnessed profound change in the enterprise technology landscape,” Leedham says, reflecting on his work to date. “When I started the world was in the early days of the internet revolution and dial up connections were being replaced by broadband which, in my opinion, was the biggest driver for everything that followed – how we architect today’s IT, with IAAS, PAAS, SAAS are all possible because of that move away from dial up internet. That for me was the game changer. At the same time, the transition to smart phones and the rise of the ‘always-on’ workplace with 4G and 5G cemented the modern nature of business.

“Today, we’re in an era dominated by AI, blockchain technology, and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions,” Leedham adds.

“It’s a period for the enterprise that’s seen the rise of cloud computing, cybersecurity, data science, machine learning and more, all of which have propelled the pace of evolution and removed the historically time- and labour-intensive elements of provisioning infrastructure: I remember reading that, historically, IT admins had the key to the car but that today, with the likes of Azure, AWS and Google Cloud, they’re holding the keys to a rocket ship. We’ve just seen a huge evolution in enterprise technology.”

Understandably, this pace of change has also brought a very different environment for those working in IT and technology roles. Leedham has first-hand experience across a broad spectrum of first, second and third line roles and, as such, has a good understanding of what it takes to be successful while also nurturing others starting out in their respective career journeys. “I’m fortunate to have the perspective of looking up, and now the privilege of focusing down and I really enjoy mentoring the younger members of our team and helping them grow – our Head of Server Infrastructure, for example, joined us as an 18-year-old apprentice.

“In leadership, you need a good mix of humility, empathy, communication, and some diplomacy,” he continues. “It takes balance to see things from both your team’s perspective and the objectives or needs of the wider organisation but, for me, one of the biggest surprises in

leadership is how much you see of peoples’ personal lives. When you’re in a pure technical role, you’re filtered from that aspect of the team you’re in, but now you get insight into the challenges people face outside of work, and this is where good leadership kicks in. You can’t manage everyone the same way, but within some guiding principles you have to adapt to people’s individual situations and try to accommodate them. It’s not always possible of course, but I’ve increasingly realised the importance of this. Most importantly, people need to feel

valued – as much as I have a passion for technology, I have an even bigger passion for seeing people realise their potential.”

CHANGE AT MARCUS EVANS

Leedham is fortunate to do this at marcus evans Group, a global, multifaceted media, corporate marketing and business intelligence company that employs around 1,500 people in 46 locations worldwide. Its activities are wide-ranging, providing up to the minute information across clients in all sectors to enhance their performance and drive growth.

“In leadership, you need a good mix of humility, empathy, communication, and some diplomacy”

Many companies operate under the marcus evans umbrella with IT serving as a shared service resource across its B2B services of marcus evans Summits, marcus evans Conferences, ME Curation, and language training professionals Linguarama. The organisation also has The Partnership Group which includes agencies and production businesses in film and television, and ProcureSecure.com, its professional procurement marketplace. The group celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2023 and over those four decades has delivered over 30,000 B2B events, organised one million 1-to-1 meetings via its Summits, and in excess of one million hours of business insights. It has also provided a platform to over 500,000 speakers.

Leedham joined the business in 2010 to work in the Infrastructure Team, having previously been responsible for the IT function at Fiske Plc, a stockbrokers in the City of London. “In some ways, the role was a step back, but I was sold on the long-term potential for professional growth given the size of the group,” he recalls. “I was also excited by the challenge of exposure to new technologies.

I was interviewed by Peter Meehan, who I had the pleasure of working with, making it bittersweet that within six months he moved to VMWARE and an opportunity arose to succeed him as Head of Infrastructure which I gladly accepted.

I reported to the then CIO Jonathan Symonds, whom I succeeded from in late 2017 and with whom I struck up a great

working relationship learning much from his mentorship.”

As CIO, Leedham is responsible across all of the group companies for strategic planning, IT governance, budgeting and cost management, end user computing, telephony, server and network infrastructure, and stakeholder communication. This is across 46 offices globally and he is supported by a team of 12 support professionals, as well as the group’s in-house development. Upon taking the role in 2017, his key objectives revolved around managing and leveraging the technology portfolio to support and advance marcus evans’ strategic goals. This, he says, was underpinned by four key goals: align IT with business strategy, IT operations and service delivery, IT talent management, and IT budgeting and cost optimisation.

“It was critical to understand the various group companies’ strategic objectives (an ongoing process) and ensure that the IT strategy aligned with and supported those goals,” he says, discussing the importance of properly aligning IT and innovation with the overarching vision and strategy for the business. “I set out to meet as many stakeholders as possible and understand their pain points, starting in the US and Canada and working my way through Europe and APAC. These meetings with my c-suite peers, divisional directors, helped to define our IT roadmap.”

In terms of IT operations and service delivery, Leedham explains that the organisation’s end user support service consisted of a functional but basic legacy trouble ticketing system that needed updating. Similarly, the company’s desktop estate was ageing, making updating to faster hardware important. “The Service Desk is the window to the department and can define how IT is perceived by the business,” he says of the programme of work. “It’s also a key source of data on how our hardware and software is performing and it was crucial that we used that data to help deliver improvement.

“We evaluated several service desk packages and decided upon SysAid, which provides both a ticketing system and asset management,” continues Leedham. “We configured it by company and department, and set up a series of categories aligned to ITIL, incidents, requests, and so on. It’s AD integrated and tickets can be raised either via email or a self-service portal. There are dashboards and reporting tools that help provide a more granular breakdown of what’s working

and what’s not, and we are in the process of implementing internal SLAs to help us establish performance metrics, which in turn help to determine where to focus our resources and investment.”

Leedham adds that, with regards to budgeting and cost optimisation he sought to re-rationalise everything the IT department did, including a review of IT budget in order to ensure the effective allocation of resources to support business priorities. This process identified several opportunities for cost optimisation, particularly around areas of voice and data circuits, and services – a series of vendor negotiations enabled costs to be driven down with the savings being reintroduced into end-user computing hardware and other infrastructure projects.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given Leedham’s approach to leadership and setting the right culture, building the team to deliver on these goals and objectives was a core part of his activity. He explains: “Managing people is a world away from managing technology. There’s a natural attrition rate

“As much as I have a passion for technology, I have an even bigger passion for seeing people realise their potential”

in junior roles and, as much as we would love to provide a pathway for everyone internally, there are only so many roles to fill. We can’t always find roles to match people’s ambitions, but we do try and our preference is always to look inwards. We strive to develop and retain top talent – our senior tech staff have been with us

between five and 20 years. One of the biggest attractions to working in our IT team is that if you demonstrate capability then your job title is not limiting your exposure to systems; marcus evans promotes continuous learning and recent investment into a new Learning Management System is testament to this.”

“As CIO it’s important to take off your IT hat and look more broadly at the business perspective to deliver the desired outcomes”

PEOPLE AND TECHNOLOGY

Delivering any kind of transformational change of this nature is always challenging. In this instance, and drawing on personal experience, Leedham advocates for the importance of peopl. To deliver effectively, he says, it’s essential to win the hearts and minds of stakeholders and decision makers. “It’s also fundamental to clearly define the outcomes so you ensure there’s a metric for judging success,” he adds. “You can’t start change and be blinkered. You have to be receptive to what works and what doesn’t and, within that, understanding the reasons for change is critical. As CIO it’s important to take off your IT hat and look more broadly at the business perspective to deliver the desired outcomes; stakeholder engagement and good planning transcend different sectors of the business.

“In this instance, defining and delivering on the strategic vision of a group involves setting a clear direction and goals for the organisation and executing plans to achieve those long-term objectives. IT and technology play a crucial role in enabling this strategic approach,” Leedham continues. “People’s perception of enterprise technology is often influenced by their experiences with personal or home technology setups. One of the challenges IT departments face is how to help business stakeholders understand the approach and logistics of delivering enterprise technology. Scale and complexity, security and compliance,

reliability and availability, performance, governance, management, support and maintenance, integration and operability and user training – all are at the heart of the decision-making process that goes into delivering new technology solutions. As a department IT can drive business transformation by introducing innovative solutions and automating processes. AI tools are taking this to the next level, and we’re exploring ways in which we can leverage these, particularly with regards to marketing technology.”

Six years is a long time in technology terms. Since Leedham took on the role of CIO, the change and transformation in marcus evans’ IT infrastructure has been significant. The organisation has transitioned from a traditional on-premise setup with local file servers, web servers, and Exchange email servers to leveraging the power of cloud computing through Azure and Microsoft 365, he says, a shift that has brought numerous benefits and fundamentally changed the way it operates. Throughout this, its use of Total Uptime Technologies has remained constant. Close work with the founder and CEO Jonathan Hoppe on some bespoke VPN and DDOS mitigations solutions has also served the organisation well.

“A core part of the change programme was the adoption of Azure as our cloud computing platform,” Leedham says, expanding on the work. “By moving our infrastructure to Azure, we’ve gained

scalability, flexibility, and improved resource utilisation. For example, we no longer need to invest in and maintain physical servers, which has reduced our capital expenditure and allowed us to quickly scale our resources based on demand. Azure has also provided us with a wide range of services and solutions, such as virtual machines, storage, databases, and networking, enabling us to build a highly scalable and resilient IT environment. Another significant change was migrating to Microsoft 365 for our productivity and collaboration needs, which has empowered our employees to work more efficiently, collaborate seamlessly, and access their work from anywhere, using any device. It has also eliminated the need for maintaining our own on-premise email servers and simplified the management of user accounts and licences.

“The adoption of Azure and Microsoft 365 has also brought improvements in security and data protection,” he adds. “Both platforms offer robust security measures, including advanced threat detection, data encryption, and compliance features. With Azure’s built-in security controls and Microsoft 365’s advanced security capabilities, we’ve enhanced our ability to safeguard data. Furthermore, the change program involved a transition from a capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model. By leveraging Azure and Microsoft 365, we have shifted from upfront hardware and software investments to a pay-as-you-go model, where we only pay for the resources and services we actually use. This has given us cost predictability, scalability, and the ability to allocate resources more effectively.”

Looking ahead, Leedham explains that the pace of change will continue, the goal of the technology team being to support the wider business’ delivery of strategic insights and commercial opportunities. The company’s in-house development team, headed by Shradda H. Shetty, writes and maintains its line of business applications to give competitive advantage with new ones having been built and re-architected from the ground up leveraging DevOps methodology – a new IOS and Android App that will initially serve clients and providing them with their personalised 1-to-1 meeting schedules, speaker profiles, agendas and real-time chat capability is planned for launch soon, for example.

“I remember John Hand, a now retired former CIO at HSBC, once telling me there are two parts to IT: ‘run the business and change the business’,” says Leedham. “Our primary operational goal is in keeping the lights on, making sure that systems

are up and running at least 99.999% of the time. Our wider strategic vision is to drive efficiencies by embracing and adopting new technologies, particularly in CRM, AI and machine learning, and we are adopting DevOps methodology and the technologies we are using to do so. This will position us well for adapting quickly to change, increasing the speed of our internal development cycles, improving uptime, and supporting our portfolio of products. Our technology team helps ensure that marcus evans Group can continue to help our clients to deliver strategic insights and commercial opportunities. It enables marcus evans Group to help assist businesses in optimising human capital and performance, and achieve growth.”

www.marcusevans.com

“Historically, IT admins had the key to the car but that today, with the likes of Azure, AWS and Google Cloud, they’re holding the keys to a rocket ship”

TRANSFORMING SECURITY

MARTYN BOOTH DISCUSSES THE EVOLVING ENTERPRISE SECURITY

THREAT LANDSCAPE, AND HOW HE’S DRIVING TRANSFORMATION AT DUNNHUMBY

MARTYN BOOTH

We all have that moment. A spark of inspiration, the discovery of an interest or passion that will likely remain with us for the rest of our lives, or a subject or educational path that starts us on a particular journey. For Martyn Booth, you can take your pick: experimenting with computers and tech from an early age, getting interested in emerging security-focused subjects while at university after it perfectly encapsulated his interest both for IT and complex problem solving, 15 years’ security consulting for some of the most respected firms and, more latterly, a host of security leadership roles for data-based organisations.

Booth’s journey has one overarching theme: information security. He is an experienced leader in the field, working at board level to define information security strategies, enact cultural change in organisations with regards to security, and building and leading the large-scale security teams necessary to deliver on strategic security objectives. Since April 2022, he has done so at dunnhumby, a member of the Tesco Group and the world’s leading customer data analytics company.

“We analyse consumer spending behaviours in order to help our retail or consumer packaged goods customers make more informed and effective decisions about how to engage with their customers,” Booth explains. “Within that, we’ve somewhere in the region of 900 million customer profiles. We’re a technology-driven company – we have around 500 data scientists and close to 1,000 developers who make our products and deliver the relevant insights to our customers. Within that, I head our 50-strong security team responsible for everything from first-line security operations, physical security, and areas including application security right through to second-line areas such as governance, risk and compliance, and identity and access management. At the same time, I have a separate programme team that’s delivering an ongoing transformation programme across the organisation focused on evolving the maturity of our security function.”

SECURITY EVOLUTION

This transformation programme is a reflection of the rapidly evolving information security landscape for the modern enterprise and, within that context, designed to future proof against potential threats in line with the overarching objectives of dunnhumby. With regards to the former, Booth explains that the field has changed significantly since his first involvement during university. “The first big change was after the dot com boom, bust and then boom,” he says, “when businesses that weren’t previously digital suddenly had to have significant digital footprints – security comes hand-in-hand with that digital growth.

“Since I’ve been in the industry there’s been a real shift from security being an adjunct to IT or technology, to being a function in its own right,” Booth continues. “Of course, there’s still a need to work very closely with IT, and security often still reports to IT, but security leaders and teams are taking a more independent approach in which they straddle the line between technology enablement and supporting the business in the broader sense. At the same time the demand from the business has increased significantly in terms of knowing and understanding how security is functioning from the board level down. That’s partly been influenced by evolving market conditions and needs, including supporting new standards such as Environment Social and Governance (ESG).

“Externally, the threat level has increased, too,” says Booth. “The level and sophistication of attacks, and their frequency, is incredible. At a previous company, when we deployed our application firewall, which protects your digital products and prevents both automated and manual attacks, we were seeing up to 34 million attempts a month across our environment. Only one or two of those have to slip through and you have a big problem.”

In some circumstances, the rapidly evolving technology landscape can exacerbate the security threat level for businesses, says Booth, pointing to the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) as an example. “It’s a multi-edged sword in many respects,” he explains. “It’s a threat in terms of cyber usage – people can use it as a vehicle to attack our business. The rise of AI-enabled malware, for example, presents new challenges for any company’s defences, but also opportunities to leverage AI and ML in cyber defences. I’m beginning to see a lot of ML-powered tooling that’s very effective in defending against some of the threats organisations face. There is also the threat of employees within the organisation adopting and using technologies like ChatGPT. These open technologies are important to offer to the business, but they are also really important to control.”

Within this landscape, says Booth, the role of the security leader has also changed significantly. He himself is an experienced

leader, having held director and CISO roles at several organisations including dunnhumby, and built and led successful security teams that have delivered in complex and challenging environments.

“There’s a shift in the role from pure technologist to more of a business-focused and strategic leadership position,” he says of the modern CISO. “I still think that the majority of CISOs come from a technical background rather than a business or risktype role, which brings massive benefit

when it comes to managing your team operationally, understanding what’s happening from a technology perspective, as well as having a good handle of what the threats are and an ability to challenge the team on solutions.

“But the business increasingly wants us to discuss security and risk from a wider perspective,” he adds. “Particularly for the CISO, it’s a move away from being the enforcer of security policy and the

“THERE’S A SHIFT IN THE CISO ROLE FROM PURE TECHNOLOGIST TO MORE OF A BUSINESS-FOCUSED AND STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP POSITION”

‘policeman’ in the organisation, to a business partner than can understand what the business is trying to achieve at a strategic level, can present the associated risks, and then advise how to meet those objectives. It’s one of the reasons why I took a remote Masters in Business Administration and Management (MBA); I saw real value in sharpening up my skills on the business and finance side of the role so I can have those higher-level conversations backed by an understanding of technology. It’s tough for leaders and challenging to be taken out of your comfort zone, but it’s necessary to deliver.”

FACING FUTURE THREATS

Booth joined dunnhumby in Spring 2022, taking responsibility for global security. At this time, he explains, he found a good baseline for security both in terms of component parts, and an effective team and security culture. The subsequent threeyear transformation programme he and his team are leading, which consists of some 70 projects and initiatives, is designed to build on these foundations, drive maturity across the organisation, and meet expected future threats while delivering on long-term objectives.

“Strategy is the first step,” says Booth, discussing the evolution of dunnhumby’s security in more detail. “It was the first thing I addressed when joining and essentially involves understanding what the business wants and where it’s going, then outlining in detail what needs to be

in place to deliver that. That’s particularly important in giving the team a singular vision that has been fixed by the business and provides an overarching vision and direction of travel. Central to the transformation is the potential threat landscape in the future and what our customers will be demanding from us. To determine what those threats may be, we’ve used models to carry out threat profiling, including what might target us, what kind of threat that may represent, and how tenacious it could be. We also review industry reports, including the Information Security Forum’s (ISF) Threat Horizon report which gives a three-year view into the future.

“Some of those are quite nebulous things at the moment, like quantum encryption, quantum computing and the risk they pose to a company’s cryptography,” he says, discussing potential threat areas. “There are several privacy concerns with AI, particularly around how data gets processed and how people are using the technology, as well as what decisions are made based on the information generated from AI systems. We’re also putting together guidance and controls for Generative AI. Then, of course, there are ongoing threats from hackers, including targeted attacks and threats by nation-state actors.

“It’s also important to remember the basics that many organisations still haven’t got right,” says Booth. “For example, how secure are you from phishing? Phishing is still the most likely way you are going to have a major breach. That’s linked to business email compromise, which is where one of the larger percentages of threats have materialised. Ransomware continues to be a major challenge and is evolving to become more complex. Beyond just mitigating it with backups, with triple-threat extortion ransomware, even if you can recover your data and not pay the ransom, attackers still have it and can use it to extort your customers or your supply chain. You must have clear metrics around all your vulnerabilities and get the basics right to be in a strong position moving forward.”

DELIVERING TRANSFORMATION

The transformation strategy is built on this potential threat landscape, says Booth. Areas of focus include transitioning from a security operations centre approach (something that has worked well until now, but that needs to evolve to counter emerging threats), to a managed detection response to enhance the speed and effectiveness with which potential threats are tackled. To support this move, the security team is developing a series of new playbooks that detail specific ways in which different types of attacks and incidents are dealt with by the organisation, and is training dunnhumby’s employees on a variety of security issues and programmes. This ‘risk-based awareness’

approach involves several initiatives, Booth explains, including role-based training, specific security exercises and awareness programmes, and creating security champions across the business.

“Other initiatives include implementing zero trust capabilities,” he continues. “We already have several elements of zero trust that we’re pulling together under a single strategy that feeds into the right tooling capabilities. We’re looking at increasing our data leakage tooling, capabilities and visibility – we already do a lot of work around making sure data doesn’t leave our network when we don’t want it to and will increase that focus. Finally, we’re looking at providing better assurance with less overhead on the development teams, making sure that we’re really developing secure products from the outset.

“They’re the technical areas, but I think they all fall into a number of wider theme areas and objectives,” Booth explains. “That means improved governance around the function, making sure that we’re engaging with the right people, that we’re socialising things with the business in the correct manner, collaborating better with different teams, embedding my team into areas in the business, and creating formalised objectives for people that don’t sit in security, but who have security objectives to meet. Through all of this it’s essential to use data and analytics to forecast our maturity levels so that we have a good overview of when my team

will implement each level of maturity that we’re targeting over the next two years and, finally, to manage everything by metrics and database decision making. Every tool that we run, and we have probably 70 within the security function, provides data that we manage, manipulate, and analyse through business

intelligence tooling to make better, more consistent and effective decisions.”

To deliver on these objectives Booth and the team work with several key technology partners across a broad range of initiatives. Irrespective of which project or part of the programme this collaboration addresses,

“SECURITY LEADERS AND TEAMS ARE TAKING A MORE INDEPENDENT APPROACH IN WHICH THEY STRADDLE THE LINE BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY ENABLEMENT AND SUPPORTING THE BUSINESS IN THE BROADER SENSE”

he explains there are several fundamental aspects to forming such a relationship including a desire from the partner for joint ownership of the task at hand, the ability to integrate into the security team successfully, and a good understanding of the ultimate business objectives.

Booth cites collaboration with Bridewell, a cybersecurity and managed services consulting company as an example: “They have a breadth of delivery capabilities that really suit us. The transformation runs over three years and we wanted to work with a true partner that would be able to work across as many parts of that programme as they could. The objective was to choose a vendor that has a huge breadth, wants to be involved with us, wants to jointly work through these projects with us as an extended part of the team, and one that is also able to offer us the breadth that we can have a fair level of confidence in too. Bridewell has fulfilled that brief and delivered capability to support our work very well.”

A little over one year into the transformation, Booth and team have already achieved much success. In a constantly evolving landscape, he says that the key to continuing is maintaining strong underlying processes that enable decisions to be made quickly and effectively. “By that, I mean do we have the right governance mechanism in place, and do we have the right templates, processes and procedures in place that, with the exact information

we need, lets us very quickly determine risk and make recommendations? The security team needs to be flexible and agile in the way that it makes decisions so it’s able to flex with the business.

“Traditional security teams have been very slow at doing that, and their business has been slowed down as a result of that,” he states. “We need to go through the kind of agile transformation that enables us to be quicker at making decisions, and ensure we have such a rich, varied data pool available to us that enables that. We recommend putting these controls in place or saying, based on what we’ve seen, we don’t think this is very likely to materialise, and therefore, we’d recommend not slowing down, but going faster and continuing to monitor. Of course, you can’t do that unless you have wide enough datasets to make informed decisions. You don’t know what data you’re going to need to make a decision on, so you need to capture as much as you can, and then be able to quickly interrogate it.”

www.dunnhumby.com

B R I S T O L

There’s no denying that Bristol is a beacon of innovation and technology. This vibrant city is swiftly rising to become one of the UK’s prominent tech hubs, merging the modern ethos with a traditional sense of charm. It’s a city where opportunity meets comfort, where business meets pleasure, and where, amidst the hustle, you find a warm, inviting community waiting to welcome you.

Bristol isn’t just an incredible place to work, it’s a fabulous place to live and a city of real balance – a place where you can drive your career forward in a thriving tech scene while enjoying a fulfilling lifestyle. It’s a city that welcomes you with open arms, whether you’re looking to set up a business, find a new home, satisfy your gastronomic desires, or immerse yourself in leisure and culture. Bristol isn’t just a city – it’s a lifestyle.

WORDS JOSEPH TOMA

BUSINESS

Dive right into the bustling business scene of Bristol, where a thriving tech industry holds court. It’s easy to understand why tech giants, startups and ambitious entrepreneurs are attracted to this city. With a flourishing ecosystem of cutting-edge research institutions and a wealth of tech talent emerging from the universities, it’s an ideal incubator for digital innovation. A great place to immerse yourself in this scene is Engine Shed , an innovation hub

where businesses, entrepreneurs, academics, and corporates can run projects and collaborate.

But it’s not just tech that thrives here. Bristol also boasts a diverse economy with robust sectors in aerospace, defence, media, financial services, and more. The city’s infrastructure is designed to facilitate smooth business operations, fostering a friendly environment for both local and international corporations.

HOTEL DU VIN BRISTOL CITY ENGINE SHED

STAY

Beyond the business, Bristol caters to every type of resident with an impressive array of places to stay. Hotel du Vin is a terrific option if you’re seeking a great place. From upscale city-centre apartments with breathtaking harbourside views to charming, historic homes nestled in tranquil, leafy neighbourhoods, there’s a fit for everyone. Despite being a bustling city, Bristol is celebrated for its green spaces – you’re never too far from a park or a walking

trail. Lucknam Park Hotel & Spa , a Five Star country house just outside the city, is perfect if this is your thing. As for connectivity, the city is well linked by an efficient transport system and is a stone’s throw away from major cities like London, making it a convenient base for travel and business.

HOTEL DU VIN

LUCKNAM PARK HOTEL & SPA

Joseph is the CEO of Jugo, an immersive events and meetings platform. At Jugo, Joseph is transforming the way businesses engage with their teams, accelerating their progress with Metaverse technology. Before joining Jugo, Joseph was a founding member of a technology startup, and founder of a venture fund dedicated to scaling data, AI, automation, edge, and cybersecurity.

JOSEPH TOMA CEO, Jugo

EAT / DRINK

No city is complete without a bustling culinary scene, and Bristol doesn’t disappoint. The city is renowned for its vibrant food and drink culture, serving up everything from artisan coffees and locally brewed ciders to internationally inspired cuisine. The food landscape is diverse and adventurous, influenced by a mix of cultures and a strong emphasis on locally-sourced produce. Foodies will relish exploring the numerous pop-up food markets, trendy cafes, and gourmet restaurants such as Paco Tapas .

For after-work relaxation or celebrating a business milestone, there’s an array of wine bars, traditional pubs, and chic cocktail spots to choose from. Marmo , an owner-run restaurant and wine bar with a Michelin Bib Gourmand in the heart of the city has a great wine list full of European producers who farm their vineyards organically or biodynamically; its menu is also packed with seasonal and locally sourced ingredients.

MARMO

PACO TAPAS

HARBOURSIDE

TECH-EXEC

LEISURE

For all its business prowess, Bristol doesn’t skip a beat when it comes to leisure and culture. The city’s rich history is evident in its numerous museums, galleries, and iconic landmarks like the Clifton Suspension Bridge. For music and theatre enthusiasts, the city’s many live venues regularly host a variety of performances. Outdoor enthusiasts can enjoy cycling, sailing, or simply strolling along the picturesque Harbourside . And don’t forget the many festivals that add colour and vitality to the city throughout the year.

CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE

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