FutureScot

FUTURESCOT An independent magazine published by Futurescot.com | Distributed with The Times Scotland | Winter 2018

6 CO-CREATING CUTTING-EDGE TECH

26 GLOBAL APPLICATION SECURITY HUB LAUNCH

28 IT’S TIME TO EMBRACE BREXIT

32 SCOTLAND’S BUSINESS INNOVATORS

The Exascale A billion billion reasons why the global supercomputing ‘arms race’ is heating up

Digital Learning Your own Ones to From without blockchain Watch Skyscanner Minister to the NHS Kate Forbes lessons ID 2019

PASSIONATE ABOUT MAKING SCOTLAND A CYBER RESILIENT COUNTRY.

We would urge businesses to engage with the Cyber Essentials scheme, developed by Government and industry. The scheme comprises of a questionnaire that describes the minimum level of cyber security controls that must be in place to secure your business.

These questions are about preventing random attacks and would stop most ransomware and opportunistic cyber-attacks. The Scottish Government are assisting businesses significantly by offering up to ÂŁ1000 to achieve the Cyber Essentials accreditation. ID Cyber Solutions is a Cyber Essentials Certification Body in Scotland.

www.idcybersolutions.com

0141 411 0101 futurescot@idcybersolutions.com @idcyberuk

contents 5 FOREWORD 6 BRIEFING 8 INTERVIEW Kate Forbes 10 HEALTH & CARE From Skycanner to the NHS Dr AI will see you now Meeting in four dimensions 14 INFRASTRUCTURE Creating an Airbnb for electricity Switching on to green cars 16 LEGAL Making ownership one click away Driving innovation in Scotland’s law sector 18 COVER STORY Keeping the UK in the supercomputing ‘arms race’ 20 ONES TO WATCH Person. Company.

Technology. The 2019 List 24 CYBERSECURITY A digital sovereign identity for every Scottish citizen Accenture launches global application security hub National Progression Awards (NPAs) 28 PEOPLE It’s time to embrace Brexit Tax planning for start-ups Skills – the four ‘Cs’ 31 INNOVATION The future of digital local government 10 Scottish companies embracing digital innovation

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The 10 Scottish companies pushing the envelope on digital innovation.

The Interview: Kate Forbes, Digital Economy Minister.

Commercial

FutureScot’s young and inspirational readership of 69,000 business leaders and innovators (The Times Scotland) is supplemented by direct distribution to politicians, civil servants, academia, and the wider technology sectors. If you would like to see your organisation or client featured in FutureScot magazine, or on Futurescot.com please contact us now.

events

For more information on attending or exhibiting at our FutureScot Conferences please refer to futurescotevents.com, our Spring listing on Page 35 or contact Vincenzo Veglia on 0131 357 4475 or email vincenzo@canongate.org futurescot | winter 2018 | 3

foreword

Welcome to the launch edition of FutureScot magazine For the past four years, futurescot.com has been reporting on the digital technologies sector in Scotland and how it is changing lives here and around the world. Thousands of industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and public sector specialists engage daily with the website and our regular newsletters. Our associated conferences feature inspirational speakers, insightful case-studies, hands-on workshops, and healthy debate – drawing hundreds of delegates to each.

Now, the magazine brings our coverage to the 70,000 readers of The Times Scotland. It also has an additional distribution through businesses, incubators, academia, local and central government. In this fast-moving world, print affords a way to pause and reflect on the implications of digital in our lives and to engage in a more enduring way.

This edition features the first interview with the Scottish

Government’s minister for digital (who was born at the same time as the World Wide Web), the former chief technology officer of Skyscanner, who is building Scotland’s digital health platform, and the director of the UK’s national supercomputing centre. We also have ‘the Ones to Watch’ for 2019; the people, companies, and technologies that our expert panel has picked out as potentially transformative.

Plus, thought-provoking views on why every Scottish citizen should have a digital ID that they control, why business should embrace Brexit, and why the traditional notion of education should be challenged.

If you enjoy what you find in this edition, head over to futurescot.com for more and sign-up to our twiceweekly newsletter. And keep a note in your diary for the 2019 editions of this quarterly magazine with The Times Scotland; 30 March, 29 June, 28 September, and 20 December. l

Spring BIM Cyber HealthTech Digital Cities

Autumn FinTech Blockchain PropTech

Summer EduTech Digital Scotland Investment

Winter Ones to Watch Justice FE & HE

EDITORial team Kevin O’Sullivan 0131 357 4472 kevin@futurescot.com William Peakin 0141 465 7652 will@futurescot.com

COMMERCIAL TEAM Katrina Merrilees 0141 465 7652 Katrina.merrilees@canongate.org Julie Neill 0141 465 7650 julie.neill@canongate.org Harry Dickinson 0131 357 4473 harry@canongate.org

HEAD OF EVENTS Vincenzo Veglia 0131 357 4475 vincenzo@canongate.org

PUBLISHER Hamish Miller 0131 357 4470 Hamish@canongate.org

FUTURESCOT Edinburgh 42 St Mary’s Street, Edinburgh EH1 1SX 0131 357 4470 Glasgow Tontine, 20 Trongate, Glasgow G1 5NA 0141 465 7652 www.canongate.org

DESIGN & PRODUCTION Palmer Watson www.palmerwatson.com

TYPOGRAPHY Acta by Dino Dos Santos DSType Foundry www.dstype.com Flama by Mario Feliciano www.felicianotypefoundry.com

cover image Michael Hiraeth / Pixabay.com

FutureScot is an independent publication by Canongate Communications distributed in The Times Scotland. All rights reserved. Neither this publication or part of it may be stored, reproduced or transmitted, electronically, photocopied or recorded without prior permission of the Publisher. FutureScot is published and exclusively distributed in The Times Scotland.

We verify information to the best of our ability but do not accept responsibility for any loss for reliance on any content published. If you wish to contact us, please include your full name and address with a contact telephone number.

futurescot | winter 2018 | 5

BRIEFING EY brings wavespace to the capital Infusing digital innovation and technology into business is key in enabling Scotland’s future economic growth ambitions. As organisations get to grips with the continuous disruption, at an increasingly fast pace, EY is committed to supporting businesses across Scotland capitalise on the opportunities available. It is helping them explore and develop, in an agile manner, the solutions that will help them thrive in the transformative age and achieve their local and global ambitions.

To support that commitment, EY has over 100 technology specialists in Scotland, with plans to grow and has opened their new technology and innovation centre, wavespace, in Edinburgh. EY wavespace Edinburgh is part of a global network of growth and innovation centers that brings together EY’s multi-disciplinary business talents, unique capabilities and IP in a new state of the art, collaborative and interactive working environment.

EY teams are supporting a diverse range of clients through digital transformation projects across sectors and technologies, delivering fast paced impressive results for efficiency, service design, quality and improved customer experience. Including supporting Public Sector and Oil & Gas clients develop accelerated digital strategies, helping a shipping business transform its port efficiency, implementing Intelligent Automation to deliver business outcomes more effectively and providing insight through data driven innovation.

“Technology is changing how we live,” said a spokesperson.

“At EY, we are embracing and adapting to change as we strive to build a better working world.” www.uk.ey.com

Video games and robots take centre stage

Videogames, robots, and the future of design will be the focus of the V&A Dundee’s 2019 international exhibition programme.

There are an estimated 2.2 billion people who play video games worldwide, from commuters on mobile phones to eSports professionals watched by tens of thousands of spectators. The V&A will celebrate the design and culture of contemporary videogames in Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, which will

6 | FUTURESCOT | WINTER 2018

run from 20 April to 8 September.

It will be the first exhibition to fully consider the complexity of videogames as one of the most important design fields of our time, said the organisers.

From multi-million-dollar blockbuster titles to smaller independent games and the work of DIY artists from a hacker/maker culture, the exhibition explores current international debates as well as the creative contributions made to game culture by the players themselves.

The V&A’s 2019 programme will go on to examine the current boom in robotics with the exhibition Hello, Robot. Design between Human and Machine which will run from 2 November 2019 to 23 February 2020. It will investigate the “science and fiction of robots” and looks at how they are changing the world we live in.

“Posing a series of provocative questions, it explores how popular culture has shaped our perception of robots and artificial

Digital academy expands to the Highlands CodeClan, Scotland’s only accredited academy for software and web development, is expanding into the Highlands.

Fifteen students will get the opportunity to learn to code software in an intensive 12-week course when CodeClan Highland Academy begins in the spring of next year.

It will provide industry-led training for a new generation

of software and web developers and will help attract and retain young people in the Highlands, create high-value jobs, and ensure businesses have access to skilled people to help innovate and improve their competitiveness.

The academy will be managed

by Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) as part of the Northern Innovation Hub on behalf

of the Inverness and Highland City-Region Deal Partnership.

“CodeClan has seen success in central Scotland and it is time to engage with other parts of Scotland,” said its chief executive Melinda Matthews-Clarkson.

“We are also launching our new partner programme to better service the needs of the tech industry, helping address the digital skills gap across Scotland.”

Flourishing in the data-driven economy

humans, the impact this technology has had on industry and the increasing blurring of the boundaries between human and machine,” said a spokesperson.

The exhibition shows the impact robots have already had on our world from fashion to architecture and even social care.

Hello, Robot. Design between Human and Machine gives a comprehensive look at the current state of robotics and provides a vision of the future.

A major initiative has been launched by the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University that includes plans to improve digital skills across south east Scotland. The new venture is set to transform Edinburgh and its surrounding area into the data capital of Europe.

The £661m Data-Driven Innovation Initiative (DDI) is a key part of the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal, announced earlier this year. It aims to train 100,000 people in data skills over the next decade, from computer science specialists to traditional jobs that will increasingly use data. The City Region Deal aims to drive growth for everyone across the area and includes investment

in transport, housing, culture and skills and employability.

Edinburgh University’s Senior Vice-Principal Charlie Jeffrey said: “Our strengths in data science have been driving innovation in the public and private sectors for the past decade and more, through our research and the skills our graduates bring into the regional economy.

“The City Region Deal gives us the capacity to do much more across a wider range of sectors, including healthcare, robotics and fintech. But perhaps the most important part of the Deal is our commitment to ensure people in the region can build the skills to flourish in the data-driven economy.”

Since the Deal was signed in August, the DDI has supported

a number of collaborations with regional partners. In September, an internet of things workshop was delivered for staff and pupils at Newbattle High School in Midlothian and a graduate apprenticeship in data science was launched in conjunction with accounting and business services firm PwC. More recently, Royal Bank of Scotland opened a data innovation research unit in the University’s new Bayes Centre, to work with analytics experts and improve customer experience.

The region’s supercomputing capabilities will also be strengthened with investment in a data analysis facility, which will help 1,000 organisations use data to innovate within their sectors.

futurescot | winter 2018 | 7

INTERVIEW / KATE FORBES

Born to be digital When you are as old as the Web it affords a certain perspective on technology’s impact

By William Peakin The arrival into the world of Scotland’s Minister for Public Finance and the Digital Economy came at momentous moment in the era of the information age.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, published his seminal paper Information management: A proposal. Two years later, he published the world’s first website.

Sandwiched between these two events was the birth, on 6 April 1990, of Kate Elizabeth Forbes.

“People have only ever pointed out that I was born at the start of the tax year,” she says laughing.

Did she think that not having grown up in an analogue world was an advantage in her role?

“Well, I would suggest that I grew up as the internet was growing up.

I recall, in my early teens, the huge frustrations with dial-up when you were trying to get on MSN

“Our job is to make sure we have the environment where invention, creation, and development happens”

Messenger. Facebook launched just before I went to university.

Spotify came along when I was at university. So, in a sense you don’t question; you just adopt.”

When Forbes was appointed in June, the announcement was notable for being the first time that the word digital had appeared in a ministerial title. For more than a decade, members of Scotland’s digital technologies sector had bemoaned the absence of a ‘digital champion’ within government or, at least, with the ear of government. In the manner that Martha Lane Fox, the founder of lastminute.com, who was influential in bringing the operations of the UK Government into the digital age.

The moment for such a standard bearer in Scotland has passed, now that the iPhone has been in the world for as long. Still, from the outset Forbes made a point of meeting key organisations, companies, and people. Not just in the tech sector, but also in sectors where technology is increasingly important. She has been omnipresent at events and conferences.

“It’s been a priority for me, being visible as a government,” she said. “We are doing a lot of exciting things within government, such as CivTech (see panel), which I think we need to tell more people about. But, importantly, we are understanding what the digital technologies sector needs and how government can best support it.

“There is a lot of ambition and a lot of confidence; it’s a vibrant sec-

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tor. We have the leaders, we have the aspirations. But there’s also a realism in acknowledging the challenges that we need to overcome to be at the forefront of digital.

It’s not about cities competing with cities, or Scotland competing with England – it’s about Scotland competing on a global stage. The number one challenge is around skills, recruitment and retention.

“Our strengths lie in areas such as data, fintech, digital health and social care. Where government can add value is to try and create an environment that people want to invest in, where there’s more international investment, that people want to move to Scotland to live and work in the tech sector.

Where there is need for collaboration, say for example between academia and business, and public sector that we support that.”

Forbes cited the recent announcement of £1.5m Scottish Government funding to support the establishment of the UNICEF Data for Children Hub in Scotland in partnership with the international charity, The Data Lab and Edinburgh University. It will develop “data-driven collaborative solutions” to improve children’s wellbeing. “UNICEF is locating here because they recognise the talent that exists here and the work that is ongoing around data,” she said.

Earlier this year, Forbes also announced the launch of a £6m Internet of Things (IoT) network that will “enable companies to innovate, providing low-cost access to next-generation connectivity, helping organisations develop new solutions and devices with global export potential.”

Digital Scotland 2019

“The network supports full commercial use of IoT in Scotland and will help transform the potential for businesses and the public sector to explore sensor and imaging applications, to pilot their ideas and then launch proven, sustainable products and services into the global market. If we want every area to benefit from technologies

such as IoT - any business, any public or third sector organisation, any community - then it needs to be publicly supported.”

For someone born on the cusp of a technological revolution, does she regard predicting the future part of government? “Our job, in part, is to predict what the next big technology is, to make sure we are ready to

At a time when the trust we place in digital is being undermined, when our wellbeing is challenged by technology’s pervasiveness, and questions arise over who is benefitting from the wealth it creates, Digital Scotland 2019 will be the national forum in which to explore the impact of digital on peoples’ lives now and in the future.

The event will also showcase examples of digital innovation in health, education, justice, the built environment, professional services, and Scotland’s key economic sectors.

It will be the platform for central and local government to pinpoint progress in their digital transformation journeys and to map out the road ahead.

In 2018, FutureScot welcomed more than 450 delegates, 50 speakers and 15 sponsors to the leading digital transformation conference in Scotland. In 2019, it will challenge government, business, and the digital technologies sector to evidence the positive outcomes of their work across public services and the economy.

maximise how we can benefit.

“But our principal job is to make sure that we have the environment where invention, creation, and development happens – here in Scotland. Where academia is working with business, which is working with the public sector – to be a location of invention.”l

Driving daring and innovation in the public sector Across the country there are problems public sector organisations would like solved. With budgets under pressure and increasing demand, the need for smart, efficient and effective products is ever greater.

The public sector is increasingly aware that innovation is a good way to create them.

CivTech brings together public sector expertise and private sector creativity to solve real problems, develop new products,

and deliver better, faster and easier services for everyone. Central to the approach is co-production with the citizen.

Part of the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate, CivTech’s approach is already

helping transform public sector engagement with technology and innovation, delivering significant benefits to public services, and producing genuine uplifts for the Scottish economy. https://bit.ly/2DXEs3h

Join FutureScot for its annual conference - on 30 May 2019 - in Glasgow at Strathclyde University’s Technology and Innovation Centre. www.digitalscotland19.com

futurescot | winter 2018 | 9

HEALTH & CARE / PATIENT DATA

The online search for better health

As Chief Technology Officer at Skyscanner Alistair Hann helped build Scotland’s first ‘unicorn’ - but with a doctorate in monitoring patient care, he’s now developing a digital platform for the NHS. Kevin O’Sullivan asks him about the challenge.

What drew you to your new role and how are you enjoying it?

From a tech ‘unicorn’ to the NHS is quite an unexpected move!

I have long been interested in how technology can improve care. The subject of my doctorate was patient monitoring in high dependency care in hospitals we were using machine learning to produce alarms that gave earlier warning of when patients were deteriorating and had fewer ‘false alarms’ than existing systems.

After leaving Skyscanner, I was looking for an opportunity to get back into developing products in healthcare and I looked at whether there were start-ups in Scotland I could help, or whether to found something.

Then, somewhat out of the blue, I heard about the Digital Health and Care Strategy and the opportunity to build a National Digital Platform for Scotland.

That ticked my boxes in terms of health care, Scotland, and a challenge!

What expertise and experience are you bringing to the challenge?

Skyscanner taught me a lot about how to grow teams, design big software systems, and deliver valuable products that consumers love. While online travel seems miles away from healthcare, there are some similar challenges such as data locked into proprietary silos. Of course, healthcare is a much more complicated domain with a broader group of stakeholders, and I got a chance to work in that environment during my doctorate. Having founded my own company, worked in a healthcare start-up, and advised other start-ups I am familiar with having to build something from nothing and we are recruiting a new team from scratch to deliver this.

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Can you describe the size and scope of the project for the National Digital Platform and the implementation timescales?

The scope of the platform is all of health and social care in Scotland - so that’s GP practices, hospitals, social care and, critically, citizens being able to control their own data. There’s also the mandate to provide data for research and to improve health and social care services. A traditional approach would have been to spend years and millions of pounds capturing requirements for that, and then more years building the system.

That approach is outdated, as the telephone book of requirements is rarely what is needed at the time the product arrives. Our timescales are very different, we are delivering a series of products powered by the platform, the first of which will be ready early next year. With each product release we will learn more about user needs

and can quickly respond to feedback. It will be years until we are able to entirely replace the whole system – for example, there are fourteen territorial health boards with hundreds of systems each – but we will be delivering value and improving care from the start.

Why can’t we access our medical records online already when virtually every facet of life has been digitised, from online banking to travel and retail? How far away are we realistically from being able to do that?

Technically, this is a relatively straightforward problem to solve – in other parts of life, such as online banking, we have determined how to use technology to share records and notifications securely online. The bigger challenges arise when it comes to getting a health benefit from sharing medical records – how do you get people do take action that will

Alistair Hann, former CTO of Skyscanner, pictured at the University of Edinburgh’s Bayes Centre, where the NHS’s ‘National Digital Service’ will be based

Smile please, Dr AI will see you now A pill-sized camera combined with artificial intelligence could provide a breakthrough in cancer diagnosis

By William Peakin

improve their health or quality of care as a result of getting access to the information? The way the information is captured needs to change as well – writing things in a way that can be understood by everyone, for example, describing a condition as ‘persisting for a long time’ rather than ‘chronic’ (which might trigger panic!).

There can be some resistance to sharing patient notes and concerns about it causing additional work and unnecessary worry, but trials of doing this elsewhere have consistently shown these concerns not to be warranted.

What would the benefits be, to individual patient health, to the NHS, and to society in general?

By getting the right information available to clinicians and care workers at the point of care, we can help them make better decisions and provide better care. We can also free up time

for those workers so that they can spend more of their time caring – and less time entering data or wrestling with IT. Citizen access to records enables people to get more involved in their care from big things such as self-management of long-term conditions to smaller things like finding out sooner about a test result. The big value to society comes from using the platform to better understand how the system works and how specific disease pathways work. Producing consistent, high quality data – anonymised and protected – that the NHS can use to improve services, and scientists can use for work such us understanding which medications work for which people and identifying new cures. All of those things feedback into better care and outcomes. l Visit www.futurescot.com

A trial is underway in the Highlands and Islands of a potentially transformative procedure that will use artificial intelligence to detect bowel cancer.

A capsule containing a tiny camera is swallowed by a patient and passes through their gastrointestinal tract, capturing up to 400,000 images which are then transmitted for analysis.

The procedure is accurate, cost effective, and significantly less disruptive to patients than existing methods. The new funding will support the development of artificial intelligence in analysing the images.

Bowel cancer is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in both men and women in Scotland, and the second most deadly with around 1,600 dying from the disease every year. Currently, invasive, time-consuming and expensive optical endoscopies are used to investigate bowel cancers and gastrointestinal diseases; 30 million in the world, 1m in the UK and 100,000 in Scotland.

In using the minimally invasive colon capsule endoscopy (CCE), a gastrointestinal investigation can be initiated by a GP, undertaken in the patient’s home, and overseen by a consultant remotely.

The pioneering programme involves a partnership comprising NHS Highland, the Digital Health and Care Institute (DHI), the webservices provider OpenBrolly, and Danish firm CorporateHealth International (CHI), which has established a base in Inverness.

Feasibility studies have already been conducted at primary care sites in Skye and

Nurse Lesley Patience with the endoscope pill Ullapool. Now, from their base in Aurora House on Inverness Campus, CHI and its partners are developing a new ‘patient pathway’ that is locally-based and delivers fast results in a cost-effective way.

“By enabling what are currently complex hospital investigations to be done easily at home,” explained Hagen Wenzek, CorporateHealth’s chief innovation officer, “and by allowing a patient’s medical team to quickly see very accurate results, we’re delivering benefits for clinicians, for public spending and, importantly, for patients. The potential is huge.”

CHI’s founders, Hamburgbased Dr Cornelius Glismann and New York-based Dr Wenzek had been looking around the world for the right partners to develop their diagnostic pathway.

An existing collaboration between the University of Southern Denmark and Scotland’s Digital Health and Care Institute led to Wenzek and Glismann sharing their proposals with DHI’s chief executive George Crooks.

Professor Crooks introduced them to Professor Angus Watson at NHS Highland and James Cameron, Head of Life Sciences at Highlands Continued on page 13

futurescot | winter 2018 | 11

HEALTH & CARE VIRTUAL REALITY Continued from page 11 and Islands Enterprise (HIE). Professor Watson was already exploring this type of approach but lacked the resources to scale it up, which is CHI’s speciality.

Watson had also been working with Elgin-based IT specialists OpenBrolly on projects such as MyCancerPortal. OpenBrolly were experienced in pulling information across NHS firewalls and had learnt effective ways to anonymise patient information and then re-attach it to individual patient records.

Facilitated by DHI and HIE, the partners discovered that they shared the same commitment and confidence in the benefits the project promises. “I didn’t think a government agency could be so flexible and proactive,” added Wenzek. “The collaborative support we’ve had from HIE has been outstanding.”

CHI was one of the first companies to open a base at Inverness Campus, a 215-acre enterprise park with a particular focus on Life Sciences which is becoming a significant economic driver for the Highlands and Islands.

Thirty jobs, including AI and data specialists, are to be created at Inverness campus over three years and, as demand rises, medical analysts based in Hamburg will be augmented by additional analysts in Inverness who will be reviewing images submitted from capsules across the UK. Inverness will be CHI’s global research and development centre and, through its collaboration with HIE, the company has already won a contract with Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge to research ways that the analytical process can be undertaken by artificial intelligence.

“This exciting initiative is leading the way toward scalable, community-based bowel cancer screening in a way that can address the substantive backlogs we currently face,” commented Adrian Smith, head of digital transformation at NHS Arden & GEM CSU. “This is an exceptional and highly creative programme driven by a passionately committed and knowledgeable set of partners that will underpin significant patient, clinician and system-wide benefits.” l www.invernesscampus.co.uk

We don’t meet to talk about work; we meet to do work

Meeting in four dimensions An NHS project is transforming the way we work to get things done

BY TAMMY WATCHORN The National Health Service is cash strapped, time poor, and needs to innovate for longer term sustainability. Over the last 4 years I have focused on looking at how we can be innovative in how we work (both as an employee of NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) and working independently with NHS Boards).

One of the big successes has been using a 4D virtual immersive workspace to transform how we work, so that we can be more productive, collaborative and innovative.

QUBE is a virtual workspace that comes with a range of performance enhancement tools to support speed, creativity, alignment, and collaboration across organisational boundaries and geography. It is not 2D voice/ video conferencing, a database, or software.

It’s not a consultancy, a talking shop, or run using traditional hierarchies. But it does challenge current ways of working - meetings, papers, reporting, and…hierarchies.

On QUBE we don’t meet to talk about work; we meet to do, at regular ‘drumbeats’ within a neutral and safe environment. Everyone has an equal voice, using ‘spincasting’ to ensure alignment. It challenges our normal thinking to help create, and deliver, innovative solutions at speed while saving time and money and removing the need to travel. It is the future of work.

QUBE use has increased across NHS Scotland (from a team of 6 to around 1000) supporting staff training (innovation, leadership and agile methods), project delivery (including

ideation, prototype development, user design) and collaboration with other organisations.

This has ultimately improved patient health and care, processes and systems, staff culture, and reduced costs and carbon footprint. QUBE is now the norm for many teams.

Examples of impact include 30 senior nurses across Scotland developed in new world leadership methods and now working virtually on service challenges, development of a multimillion pound business case in just 6 weekly drumbeats, development of a multi-disciplinary decision-making tool for liver cancer in three weeks and running virtual haqathons.

The next step is to spread the learning wider, allowing more staff to remove valueless tasks, to look at problems in new and creative ways, and embed new (and better) ways of working. The NHS has some great visions for innovation and transformation, but still works in the same way it always has and working differently is really needed to enable large scale change. Changing how we work from within will enable more innovative and transformative activities across all levels.

We have created a virtual global ‘collaboration for health team’ stretching far beyond our typical networks, resulting in better and more creative ideas and insight. Personally, it has transformed my life; 70% of my activity is QUBE-based. I have near zero administration, 80% less email, and delivering twice as much.

It’s also a lot of fun!

Try QUBE; it could transform your life. l www.QUBE.cc www.tammywatchorn.com Dr Tammy Watchorn is Head of Innovation at NHS National Services Scotland and works independently supporting innovation in healthcare using QUBE.

FUTURESCOT | WINTER 2018 | 13

INFRASTRUCTURE / ENERGY Company is the first network operator to map the impact electric vehicle up take will have on Scotland’s commuter towns

Creating an ‘Airbnb for electricity’ SP Energy Networks is helping consumers become ‘prosumers’

BY SCOTT MATHIESON IT was Franklin D Roosevelt who said: “There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still.” His words may have been delivered over 80 years ago, but right now they couldn’t be more apt in summing up the challenges facing the energy sector.

At SP Energy Networks, innovation is at the heart of what we do to make sure we keep your lights on. We know that standing still is not an option, and we need to explore a myriad of ways of delivering a cleaner, greener, better future, quicker for us all.

More of our electricity comes from renewable sources as we look to tackle climate change and air pollution. But that change has only been possible because of the innovation in the industry; not only in the harnessing of renewable energies, but how they can be connected to the electricity grid, and how that electricity can then be used to power a new future of cheaper, cleaner electric transport and electric heating.

SP Energy Networks is at the forefront of the industry in facilitating people’s ambitions to transition to a low carbon economy.

Using smart digital technology we

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are actively managing our networks of wires and cables across central and southern Scotland, which deliver electricity from our sub-stations to people’s homes; making our assets work harder to keep customer costs down.

But we are doing much more.

We have won funding from the regulator Ofgem to create a whole new system of future energy delivery; which will turn people from consumers to prosumers.

Our Fusion project in East Fife will create an online trading platform – like Airbnb but for electricity – where people will trade their energy flexibility, using the stored energy they may have in their roof solar panels or their electric vehicle batteries to come off the grid at peak times, allowing us to manage electricity supply more efficiently.

“Our Fusion project in East Fife will create an online trading platform where people will trade their energy flexibility”

Switching on to green cars

Special number plates could denote privileged access for vehicles to bus lanes

By Alyson Shaw Electric vehicles (EVs) are alternative fuel cars designed, and introduced, in an effort to substantially reduce the percentage of greenhouse gas emissions attributable to road transport.

Categorised as a type of ultra-low emission vehicle (ULEV), EVs can range from plug-in hybrids, which combine a small battery, internal combustion engine and electric motor, to all-electric vehicles, which are powered solely by mains electricity.

In recent years, both the Scottish and UK Governments have increased their focus on EVs, stating their intention to promote air quality initiatives, the uptake of fuel-efficient motoring and, ultimately, build upon the UK’s charging infrastructure.

We are also the first electricity network operator to map out the impact electric vehicle uptake will have on Scotland’s commuter towns; we have won Network Innovation Competition funding to map transport and electricity networks to predict where electric vehicle chargers will need installed, and we are also a partner in a ground-breaking project to ensure the security of electricity supply through renewables, should the worst happen, and the whole grid need to be kick-started.

Green electricity is the energy of the future. SP Energy Networks is the utility of the future. We are certainly not standing still. l Scott Mathieson is Director, Network Regulation and Planning, at SP Energy Networks.

l September 2017: Scottish government announces intention to phase out petrol and diesel vehicles by 2032, with Nicola Sturgeon pledging to expand the number of electric charging points in rural, urban and domestic settings, and convert the A9 into Scotland’s first fully electric-enabled highway. l 27 November 2017: UK government publishes Industrial Strategy and vows to “support electric vehicles through £400m charging infrastructure investment and an extra £100m to extend the plug-in car grant”; l February 2018: UK government makes a further £30 million investment in ‘Vehicle 2 Grid’, a technology enabling consumers to feed the energy stored in their electric vehicles back into the national grid at times of peak demand. l 6 July 2018: HMRC releases

a policy paper designed to encourage employers to provide charging facilities for ‘plug-in’ vehicles at or near the workplace by proposing the removal of Income Tax and National Insurance liability for workplace charging. l 9 July 2018: UK Department for Transport publishes ‘Road to Zero Strategy’, outlining their plan to end the sale of conventional petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2040. l 19 July 2018: The Automated and Electric Vehicles Act receives Royal Assent As indicated by the Government, the transition to EV technology will be market led and will throw up an array of new legal issues for sector participants, including EV installers, car manufacturers, local authorities, commercial and residential developers, electricity providers, supply chains and consumers.

Mass uptake of electric vehicles will see both EV installers and network operators negotiate lease arrangements with Scottish landowners, in order to regulate their rights of access in, through and across private land for the purposes of installing and maintaining charge points, and securing a connection to the grid. Third party consents may also be required where, for example, title to the land is subject to a secured interest.

New electric licensing schemes could mean that corporate entities seeking to offer charging services to consumers will require to enter into contractual arrangements with existing electricity suppliers or, alternatively, take steps to become licensed providers themselves.

The 2018 Act has also extended the traditional motor insurance settlement framework to recognise claims for damages caused by the fault of an automated vehicle itself, as opposed to its driver. It follows that, where an accident is caused by a vehicle in self-drive mode, insurers will find themselves liable for damages stemming from that accident, with their only prospect of recovery being a claim against the vehicle manufacturer or other third party.

The passing of the 2018 Act is a welcome development for the UK automotive industry and looks to create an exciting and lucrative market opportunity for solicitors, particularly those operating in the renewable energy, property and planning sectors.

Ahead of September’s zeroemission vehicle summit, and in an effort to boost public awareness of clean vehicle technology, Theresa May announced the Government’s proposals to fit special, green number plates on low emission vehicles. If implemented, the proposals will see drivers of ULEVs receive special privileges, including access to special bus lanes, charging bays and low emission zones.

Whether the promise of these badges of honour will see a surge in zero-emission vehicle sales does, of course, remain to be seen. What is clear, however, is that initiatives like these will be critical in accelerating the UK’s transition away from petrol and diesel, towards the electric vehicle revolution.

Alyson Shaw is a trainee solicitor at Wright, Johnston & Mackenzie LLP

futurescot | winter 2018 | 15

legal / PROPTECH

“Our ultimate goal is to make everything digital, submitted at the press of a button” Jennifer Henderson

Making ownership one click away The Registers of Scotland is leading the digital transformation of property transactions

By William Peakin Five a.m., on a Summer day earlier this year, and Jennifer Henderson is in the post room at Meadowbank House in Edinburgh. A physicist, Henderson was transformation director at the Defence Sci-

ence and Technology Laboratory.

More recently she worked on the UK’s building safety programme, in response to the Grenfell Tower fire, as deputy director at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Why then, here at this time,

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opening and helping sort the approximately 2,000 envelopes and parcels - containing plans, estate records, and bundles of legal documents - received daily at the headquarters of the Registers of Scotland?

The opportunity to run an organisation, and one which is undergoing digital transformation, made the job advertisement attractive. Family connections with Scotland sealed the deal.

Since being appointed ‘Keeper’ and chief executive – last April, Henderson has made a point of spending time getting to know each department.

“Where they were confident enough that I wouldn’t mess it up, they generously let me help,” she laughs. From opening the post, Henderson then followed property transactions through each stage of the process of them being registered. Without the Registers of Scotland (RoS), homes and buildings could not be bought or sold securely. The ground on which we stand would be up for grabs. It forms part of the foundations of the nation’s economy.

Scotland has the oldest inventory of property in the world, dating back to 13th century when the first national land register was housed at Edinburgh Castle;

a claim to fame, certainly. But, with the World Bank using the efficiency of a country’s register as a key economic measure, the transition from a paper-based to digital system is vital.

RoS has undergone its own, internal, digital transformation over recent years; a journey symbolised by its new office in Glasgow, at St. Vincent Plaza overlooking the Kingston Bridge. It is on one floor, as opposed to RoS’s previous Glasgow home which was spread across seven. The same number of people share a space half the size, but on a recent visit it felt busy, not crowded. The impression is of a San Francisco start-up that has suddenly become successful.

There are some rows of desks and monitors, but also many break-out areas, cubicles, meeting rooms, and ‘social’ spaces of varying sizes and hues. At regular intervals, ‘living walls’ add to the naturalness of the environment.

Lunch at your desk is not allowed (“is discouraged”, perhaps), enabling employees from different departments to mix in the social areas. In fact, there is no such thing as ‘my desk’; people are free to login wherever; again, to encourage the circulation of people and ideas (there is an ‘innovation

lab’ where employee suggestions for better ways of working are prototyped).

Henderson has been, and still is, on an ‘A to Z’ (Ayr to Zetland) tour of Scotland, engaging with those who depend on the organisation. She is leading a team with an enormous challenge. Not all land or property in Scotland is registered and RoS has been mandated by the Scottish Government to fix that by 2024. Until then, property owners can volunteer to register and the sale or remortgaging of a property acts as a trigger for registration on the Land Register. Ultimately, the Keeper has the power to transfer property titles - from the old General Register of Sasines onto the Land Register of Scotland - without an application from the owner.

Because the centuries-old Sasines is based on descriptions, not drawings - ‘Ma barn neist tae the auld bridge aat the lowse i’ the road’, sort of thing - the other big headache is moving everything to a map-based system. Fixing that requires modern technologies, and real skill. Once achieved, however, Henderson hopes RoS will be a truly paperless organisation.

It is also developing digital tools, for solicitors and lenders principally, that could revolutionise the way property is transacted in Scotland. A secure online service for confirming that a mortgage has been repaid – the DDS (digital discharge service) was introduced last year.

The next step will be the ability to digitally confirm that a mortgage has been taken out on a property; a digital securities service. There are some technical, and potentially legislative, hoops to jump through before this is possible. What will definitely stop the flood of post into Meadowbank House is making registration of ownership digital.

“Our ultimate goal is to make everything digital, submitted at the press of a button,” said Henderson. Until then, the Keeper will be back in the post room this winter helping with the preChristmas flurry of post.

www.ros.gov.uk

Driving innovation in Scotland’s law sector Identifying, enhancing and designing solutions which will deliver practical benefits

By Paul Mosson As a nation, Scotland rightly is proud of its history of innovation.

As a profession however, lawyers around the globe have been slower to harness the advantages technology can bring. That’s something we want - and need to change with Scottish solicitors.

The globally respected FinTech Scotland community has been enormously successful in bringing together the financial services sector with technology and academia. We want to emulate its success within the legal sector.

We’ve seen a significant number of English law firms invest heavily in legaltech in recent years and, while many of these firms are cross-border and operate in Scotland, we are yet to see independent Scottish firms do this to the same level.

It’s our ambition to enable an environment which supports innovative thinking and provides a mechanism to support the development of tech-based solutions which will benefit Scottish solicitors and their clients.

Many activities involved in providing legal services – as in other industries - are likely to be automated during the next 20 years. However, the rising use of technology is also likely to lead to increased output. Legaltech is set to speed up processes, support lawyers in delivering better service, lower risk and potentially help lawyers re-balance their work and personal lives.

AI technology, such as automated document analysis, can already process documents far faster than a human being ever could and means reduced costs and lower error rates. However this should not be seen as a

threat to law firms or the role of solicitors - it is liberating lawyers to allow them to do what they do best and devote their energy to applying their legal reasoning to difficult dilemmas or to argue the points that will help win their client cases. There will always be the need for a lawyer’s personal experience, knowledge and insight in providing the reassurance clients need.

All change brings risks, but the biggest risk from legaltech would be the failure of lawyers to engage in and shape its development to ensure solutions which meet the needs of the profession and of their clients. This is why we launched LawscotTech ahead of AI Day at the International Bar Association (IBA) Conference in Rome in October.

LawscotTech will provide a means of influencing the development of legaltech in Scotland.

It is a collaborative model which encourages solicitors and their employees, whether they work at a large commercial firm, a high street firm serving a rural community or in-house, to articulate the challenges they face and, by collaborating with technology firms, the academic community and others, help identify, enhance and design solutions which will deliver practical benefits. There is technology already out there that is not being fully used, technology intended for other sectors that can be adopted by solicitors as well as new entrants to the market. We plan to draw all this to the surface and help solicitors navigate their options and facilitate dialogue to shape the future.

We’ve had a great response to LawscotTech so far, both at home and further afield. We’ve

already held the first in our series of events across Scotland to bring together solicitors and tech experts, with others to follow over the next few weeks. At our first overseas trade mission in Zurich in November we joined four Scottish companies, Amiqus Resolution, Juralio, SnapDragon and Miso Legal, as part of a UKwide contingent, resulting in very positive feedback – Nearly a third of the UK tech companies who joined this UK Department of International Trade (DiT) funded mission were Scottish companies. It was an impressive line up that clearly marked how far advanced the UK already is, with pitches to the Swiss law firm audience that educated us on the options out there. These types of events allow us to share insight that leads to collaboration which ignites further innovation. We hope to support the DiT and Scottish Enterprise, who were more than instrumental in making the event a success, on further missions.

We can’t - and nor do we want to - stop the tides of technological advance, but it’s essential that we take action to shape and harness its power. New technologies could make a huge difference in opening up access to justice but we are always going to need the trusted advisor, the compassionate human, the lawyer, who will ultimately be relied upon to help people. And that is why most lawyers chose this great profession.

Find out more and get involved at www.lawscot.org.uk/lawscottech Paul Mosson, Executive Director of Member Services and Engagement at the Law Society of Scotland.

futurescot | winter 2018 | 17

COVER STORY

How Prof Mark Parsons aims to keep the UK in the global supercomputing arms race The Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre director explains the strategy he hopes will help Archer join the US and China in the world’s supercomputer top 20

BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN Mark Parsons sounds remarkably alert for a man who is just back from an exhausting tour of some of the world’s biggest supercomputing functions and facilities.

In the past fornight he’s been in the US, at Supercomputing 2018

– the industry’s mega-conference, attracting some 14,000 delegates – and in Japan as a guest at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe. “It was certainly a big trip, but incredibly interesting,” says Parsons, Executive Director of the UK’s own National Supercomputer, ‘ARCHER’, which sits in a

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rather dour industrial facility on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

I ask Parsons what the ‘big reveal’ was at this year’s event in Dallas, Texas, and he references the relatively new US supercomputer, appropriately named ‘Summit’; at 200 petaflops, it is a “massive” system, he says, capable of performing an unfathomable 200 million billion calculations per second. Professor Parsons runs the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), which has oversight of ARCHER; at 2.5 petaflops the system is now five years old and has unfortunately fallen way down the global supercomputing charts. It is a fact that depresses Prof. Parsons and why he freely admits he doesn’t check since he last discovered ARCHER languishing at a lowly 131st.

“It’s never been this low before,

in terms of the big national system,” he says. “In the major European economies we are signficantly lagging behind at the moment. The government, because of austerity, has simply not been investing.”

Fortunately for Parsons and his 110-strong staff, a fresh round of procurement for ARCHER II is underway, thanks to a £115m programme of investment, which looks set to propel the EPCC back into the global Top 20; the cash injection will come from the UK and Scottish government-funded City Region Deal for Edinburgh and South East Scotland, of which just shy of £50m will go towards upgrading ARCHER II to 30 petaflops in computing power.

Arguably there has never been a better time to secure that investment. Forbes reported this

impressive in terms of creating this supercomputing industry.”

What exactly is the prize on offer, though, is perhaps the most inviting question. In a fast-approaching age of automation, global megacorporations are precipitiously close to being able to use data in such a way that machines will soon be able to perform far above and beyond the skill level of humans; in the US, there are already algorithms that have outperformed cancer doctors in being able to detect tumours and Google can now predict what you are going to write in search queries with terrifying accuracy (even if it struggles with gender pronouns).

Health, insurance, law, professional services generally, not to mention precision manufacturing and genomics, are all human fields that stand to be aided (replaced, even) by the rapidity of technological development, the likes of which exascale computing will only serve to enhance.

year that the world is currently producing 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, and the US and China are driving a supercomputing “arms race” to try and make sense of it all. Both countries are expected to reach the 1,000-petaflop ‘exascale’ within the next couple of years – in what will be considered a ‘new age’ of computing performance (the exascale is a billion-billion calculations per second, for those keeping count). For Parson’s money, the US has the upper hand with its Oak Ridge, Tennessee, facility; although the Chinese surprised the world by developing the first 100 petaflop system, he says it has proved “very difficult” to programme. “The Americans are certainly better at producing useable systems,” he explains. “But the Chinese have been extremely

Demand for the exascale is also coming from industry partners who use ARCHER, with Rolls Royce and the Met Office among existing users who would benefit from even faster processing time, says Parsons. Rolls Royce is moving more of its extremely expensive engine certification tests to the ‘virtual’ space; instead of testing physical engines to the point of destruction (blades that shear off in the process have to be contained within engine casings in order for an engine to be ‘certified’), the aerospace company will instead rely on supercomputergenerated modelling techniques to replace disaster testing methods.

Steel pouring in foundries can be made more efficient by supercomputer simulations, and sails on a ship can be improved by modelling wind flow. When people talk about moving data into the cloud, Parsons could quite legitimitely raise the prospect of moving the ‘cloud into the data’; such is the advance in weather forecasting in the next few years that his supercomputer is expected to be able to model the behaviour of individual clouds.

Government data, too, is likely to be pushed more and more into the supercomputer’s telescopic

“The computer just works nowadays; it’s always data that causes the headaches” Mark Parsons gaze. Much of the City Region Deal’s focus is around the creation of a ‘World Class Data Infrastructure’ (WCDI) for the region, and Scotland more widely. In fact Parsons stresses computing power alone is not the only story of the government-backed funding programme; the ability to store and move around large data sets, for their use by the likes of the five data institutes that will benefit from the Deal; the Edinburgh Futures Institute, the new Bayes Centre, the Usher Institute, Robotarium and Easter Bush campus – are all University of Edinburgh affiliates which will be supported by the wraparound WCDI facility.

Data Driven Innovation (DDI) actually makes up £600m of the total spend of the £1.3bn programme, and is therefore a huge investment by government in the transformative power of data to stimulate the creation of new knowledge and future industries.

Parsons has a role to play in

education, too. The intention is that his facility will be accessible by “every child that goes to state school” and it will play its part in the training of 100,000 data scientists over the next 10 years.

“We’re going to go out and work with hundreds, if not thousands, of companies to help adopt data driven innovation in their business,” says Parsons.

“I think some of those projects will use my computers and some won’t but the important thing is everything will be driven by the data that we hold; I think the biggest challenge we have in the world right now is dealing with data deluge. One of the things that ARCHER has struggled with is moving large amounts of data around. And the next ARCHER and all the modern supercomputers will be much better at moving data around. It has to become better at that. All of my problems as a supercomputing centre director relates to the data that we store, not the computer. The computer just works nowadays; it’s always data that causes the headaches.”

And asked whether the DDI revolution is going to phase out all our jobs, Parsons refers back to the prescience of economists like JK Galbraith. “As the world became richer, things would become automated and we would work less [he predicted],” he says. “This is the challenge to policy-makers, which is if we get into the position with AI and robotics that we need to work less because we’ve got machines doing more for us then we need to ensure that we have a fair society. I think it’s a very interesting discussion that society needs to have with itself.” l

Prof. Mark Parsons will speak at Digital Cities & Regions, a FutureScot policy and technology conference, at Edinburgh City Chambers on Thursday, March 7, 2019 - Visit www. futurescotevents.com

futurescot | winter 2018 | 19

the digital list

Ones to watch 2019 Scotland’s ambition to become a leading digital nation burns fiercely as we prepare to enter 2019. With a vibrant technology eco-system that includes a top five global computing school and some of the best startup schemes in the UK, the future looks bright.

In the fast-evolving digital industries, it is always hard to predict talent, new technologies and ideas that might produce the next tech ‘unicorn’; as we look forward to another hopefully prosperous new year, FutureScot has teamed up with some of the country’s foremost tech leaders to give us their nominations for Person, Company and Technology that will become the ‘Ones to Watch’ for 2019.

By Kevin O’Sullivan Real, practical applications for the immense capability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will become the ‘breakthrough’ technology of 2019, according to FutureScot’s panel of experts.

Estate agents – who often poll among the least trusted of occupations – are ripe for the picking as computer algorithms continue to disrupt service industries on an industrial scale.

Paralegal work may also be

disrupted in ever more significant ways in the year ahead, and even triage and preliminary medical diagnostics look set be increasingly delegated to automation.

At the physical end of the scale, experimentation with AI-based robotics and transportation will see more tangible, real-world disruption of our built and natural environment. The rise in autonomous drones and precision manufacturing techiques – based on analysis of large data sets – will continue to refine process-driven

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industries, again automating much human activity.

But as FutureScot panelist Donald McLaughlin, Chair of Skills Development Scotland, points out: “However, there will still be many things that humans continue to find easy and computers find difficult, so it’s important to keep things in perspective. The key thing to recognise is that we will need to have the right skills to exploit the huge opportunities this evolution will bring.”

The University of Edinburgh’s Bayes Centre will be at the forefront of some of the pioneering AI technologies – a ‘One to Watch’ for 2019.

Picture by Keith Hunter

PERSON Oliver Lemon & Verena Rieser When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, Professors Oliver Lemon and Verena Rieser are internationally accredited for their breakthrough insights and developments in AI, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing applied to intelligent and adaptive interfaces. Their interests in multimodal technologies has led to Heriot-Watt’s Interaction Lab become a global centre of excellence in advanced Conversational Artificial Intelligence. This excellence has led Heriot-Watt to become a top three finalist in Amazon’s global Alexa Prize for two years in row (2017 and 2018).

environmental data. This is set to revolutionise the way large property estates - such as those owned by the NHS - are managed.

TECHNOLOGY Blockchain Women’s Coin Foundation is a technology platform delivering new payment solutions (including a women’s coin cryptocurrency) using Blockchain and pre-payment cards with profits supporting humanitarian work globally and establishing women’s empowerment through women-owned businesses, according to Lynne Cadenhead, Chair, Women’s Enterprise Scotland.

PERSON Professor Bill Buchanan

COMPANY TravelNest This impressive Edinburgh team (former COO if IPoS, sold to iZettle, and advisory board including former Skyscanner CTO and COO), led by 24-year-old Doug Stephenson. It is funded

by Scottish private equity group Pentech, Mangrove, and Frontline Ventures.

TECHNOLOGY Serverless ‘Deployment and operation of code will be simplified for software teams, while bringing efficiencies for cloud hosts through greater utilisation of computing resources,’ according to former CTO of Skyscanner Alistair Hann, who has recently been installed as the CTO of the NHS’s NDS.

COMPANY Beringar Ltd A Scottish SME that designs and manufactures in Scotland, Beringar’s technology helps buildings ‘talk’. Beringar’s sensor technology collects 15 data points in real-time including occupancy, temperature, air quality, sound and light.

Data gathered is used to uncover patterns in building use and

Edinburgh Napier University’s Professor Bill Buchanan has been pushing the boundaries of research and innovation in cybersecurity for a number of years and has been involved in several highly successful Scottish spin outs. His work is held in very high regard and he has helped enhance Scotland’s reputation as an emerging global leader in cybersecurity.

TECHNOLOGY Quantum computing ‘Quantum computing - and the near-limitless computational possibilities it could open up - has been a dream of computer scientists since Alan Turing’s theoretical work in the 1930s. Now that dream is becoming a reality: the likes of Google, Microsoft and IBM are investing heavily in the space. Essentially, quantum computers are capable of moving many times beyond the calculation limits if conventional computers which, among many other things, could enable the design all sorts of miracle materials, like more efficient solar cells, better clean fuels, and far more effective drugs,’ says Brian Corcoran, CEO Turing Fest and Scottish Tech Startup Awards founder.

futurescot | winter 2018 | 21

the digital list ones to watch 2019 TECHNOLOGY Dematerialisation/ decentralisation

PERSON Alexander Holt

‘The world will continue to move towards a system of access over ownership, and the key to this is a greater percentage of people choosing to live in cities. Dematerialisation and decentralisation will continue to shape how we live in the coming years. It may not be the sexiest area for development but technology that facilitates new forms of sharing/on-demand access to goods and services will continue to transform human life,’ says Calum Forsyth, CEO, Seedhaus.

Alexander Holt leads the Scottish Government’s CivTech programme, which is supporting digital transformation in the public sector that will “deliver better value services and bring both economic and social benefit to Scotland”.

COMPANY Topolytics

PERSON Ashley Baxter

Topolytics is a smart grid for the $500bn global waste industry, generating insights from the most accurate dataset on the complex system of waste movements globally, capturing the $2trn of value lost in waste sent to landfill.

Edinburgh-based Topolytics is a global leader in the ‘smart-waste’ sector and is enabling the circular economy at scale.

Ashley has bootstrapped Glasgow-based WithJack as a single founder and has grown the company to have thousands of customers in a slow-moving, traditional industry - insurance. She is “very talented and driven and a gem in the Scottish ecosystem”, according to a FutureScot panelist.

TECHNOLOGY Quantum (powering intelligent machines) ‘Every so often the collaboration of research is aggregated towards the development of new technologies which challenges the value of existing systems, culminating in the development of breakthrough innovations. The emergence of Quantum Computing is set to make its presence within our world of computing, resulting in significantly changing our approach to designing services, products and applications. The development of Quantum Computing can be traced back to the theories which Scottish Scientist James Clerk Maxwell discovered, which created the foundations for quantum mechanics.

Through the design of Quantum Computing, which introduces us to the Quantum Bit - also known as ‘Qubits’, this technology offers an

exponential increase in the number of dimensions it can process. Today, companies are now learning by doing through experimenting with real Quantum Computer Simulators offering the path to help us to solve many of today’s unsolvable problems,” says Alisdair Gunn, Director, Framewire

PERSON Kate Forbes MSP Scotland has a huge challenge ahead to adapt to the fastapproaching era of AI/ML and automation. As the Scotland’s inaugural Minister for Digital Economy, Kate Forbes is tasked with shifting thinking and policy towards creating a society and economy equipped for the technological chal-

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lenges and opportunities ahead.

Kate is an excellent appointment: at 28, she is a “tech native”, not to mention being smart, dynamic and ambitious for Scotland.

TECHNOLOGY Deep learning ‘With the advancements of ‘deep learning’, we are making significant progress on a number of complex problems that will help us understand the world we live in better.

Deep learning has been around since the beginning of AI research, but with technology becoming more open-source, an abundance of freely available data, and a collaborative approach to the field, we are able to do faster, more flexible deep learning on complex data

sets than ever before. Large neural networks and processing inspired by the human brain (with all it’s unpredictable connections), and the previously unforeseen computing power available means that data scientists, developers and researchers can truly change the world, one billion problems at a time,’ says FutureScot panelist Hilde Frydnes, Head of Product at Mallzee.

TECHNOLOGY Immersive Tech Immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have been around for a relatively long time now, yet innovative re-appropriation of their application continues to occur.

No longer confined to the gaming

and entertainment industries, VR and AI are taking massive strides in the health and well-being markets through initiatives like the Patient’s Virtual Guide, and AR app that guides children through the hospital environment prior to admittance to reduce anxiety. Viarama is using VR to bring the immersive sights of the world to dementia and Alzheimer’s patients.

COMPANY GET MARKET FIT Reducing demand for illicit goods through data analytics. Unlike brand protection solutions, who operate by identifying infringements and taking down sellers who then typically pop straight back up again, Get Market Fit flags up the potential risk directly to the consumer so they can make their own, informed decision on whether to proceed with the purchase. The technology will be delivered as enterprise Sofware-as-a-Service (SaaS).

PERSON RORY FITZPATRICK CTO, Orca Money. Previous roles have meant recognition internally rather than externally. His new role will allow others to see his capabilities and he will be involved in pushing forward all things FinTech.

COMPANY STREAMBA Streamba are working away in Glasgow on AI/ML products with global brands to improve their supply chain. Small team with their heads down producing world-class work and ‘really punching above their weight’.

TECHNOLOGY QUANTUM & AUTOMATION ‘Being cheeky, I have two. One is the big scale and relates to the Quantum centre the University is building in collaboration with our

partners. As an example of the next big thing at scale I think it’s a brilliant example of creating the environment for collaboration across disciplines and sectors. At a smaller scale, I think we will see an explosion in the use of automation – bots, AI and machine learning to speed up and simplify processes in organisations like Glasgow University to drive improvement in a different and hopefully faster way than the traditional process analysis, lean manufacturing approach,’ predicts Christopher Green, Chief Transformation Officer, University of Glasgow.

COMPANY AMIQUS A purpose-driven business, the team at Amiqus is focused on developing digital tools that makes civil justice accessible. Developing their digital platform around the recent Anti-Money Laundering regulation changes, they are supporting organisations across many professions – legal, accountancy, recruitment etc to transform their diligence processes, resulting in compliance with the latest regulations and legislation. But any business is only as successful as their team, and through their founder, Amiqus’s success can be traced directly to their team who are passionately focused on making a better society through the services they produce.

With thanks to FutureScot panelists: Alisdair Gunn, Director, Framewire; Evelyn McDonald, CEO, Scottish Edge; Ian Reid, CEO, CENSIS; Lynne Cadenhead, Chair, Women’s Enterprise Scotland; Alistair Hann, Chief Technology Officer, NES NDS; Eileen McLaren, COO, Cognitive Geology; Michael Hayes, Founder, RookieOven; Donald McLaughlin, Digital Skills Chairman, Skills Development Scotland; Calum Forsyth, CEO, Seedhaus; Christopher Green, Chief Transformation Officer, University of Glasgow; Rachel Jones, founder and CEO SnapDragon; Hilde Frydnes, Head of Product, Mallzee; Brian Corcoran, CEO Turing Fest.

Graph analytics techniques could supercharge next generation of high performance computers

BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN A researcher at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics is working with US tech giant Intel on a new kind of high performance computer that could revolutionise processing speeds.

Graph analytics techniques can be used to look for causal relationships between vast data sets to identify the potential ‘needle in a haystack’, says Boris Grot, an academic based based at the School, who is working as part of an Intel team as it bids to win a competition launched by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Bound by a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), Grot is unable to describe the methodology but can say that the race to design a prototype graph analytics based high performance computer (HPC) could lead to much faster processing speeds and help alleviate problems currently faced by chip manufacturers.

“When I look at the world I see two trends, two huge disruptive trends that are really on a collision course,” says Grot. “One of these trends is data volumes are growing really fast, it’s an exploding volume of data. The separate side of the story is technology.

The problem is that traditionally computers have been getting faster and faster but in the last decade things have really slowed down. Today’s computers are thousands of times more powerful than the earliest computers because we can cram so much processing capacity onto a chip. But now

Boris Grot is working with an Intel team to develop a specialised graph analytics computer transistors have gotten so small that it’s really hard to minituarise them further – so we’re really up against some really hard physical barriers.”

Grot – who was approached via the Alan Turing Institute for his expertise in graph analysis – is working with Intel as it competes with Qualcomm to secure the contract to develop the specialised computer. He said a graph analytics computer works differently to traditional “number crunch” supercomputers. “This is a problem we call data movement. We need to find the data and we need to link the data – it’s not really computing, it’s communicating between the data points,” he adds.

Grot said the potential for graph analytics to solve reallife problems is enormous; he said the techniques could help investigators analyse suspicious financial transaction, for example in terrorist networks, to spotting cybersecurity risk and improving human speech processing. “It can be applied to any problem which is naturally expressed as a graph,” he says.

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CYBERSECURITY / BLOCKCHAIN

“We really have to stop living in this untrusted world” Scotland’s leading cryptographer Bill Buchanan on why blockchain is the answer to cybercrime and the hegemony of the tech giants

By Kevin O’Sullivan “Sun Microsystems got it right many years ago when they said the network is the computer, and they were spot on,” says Bill Buchanan, Scotland’s pre-eminent crytopgrapher, as he tries to make himself heard against the backdrop of a string recital during the launch of the new Blockpass Identity Lab at Edinburgh Napier University.

“They knew what the future was.

We run too many things locally on our machines and really the network has the answer to every single piece of knowledge that’s ever been created. That’s knowledge, and we’ve cracked that, but now we need to put every single artefact onto the blockchain.”

When Buchanan OBE, Professor of Computing at Napier, speaks he is one of the technology industry’s loudest voices in Scotland, even if the violins are tempering his reach somewhat on this occasion.

Over the course of the last decade, spurred on by the ‘cyberpunks’

who created Bitcoin, a mass movement has begun to wrest control of the internet back from the tech behemoths, whose centralised servers control the world’s data.

It is not sustainable, according to Buchanan, who is happy to provide a home for Blockpass IDN, a commercial entity, at his computing school, which this evening has brought out the new digital economy minister, Kate Forbes MSP, to support a significant £600,000 foreign direct investment into the Merchiston campus; the lab will explore ways in which blockchain technology can protect personal data from online scammers and hackers.

When I ask a company executive why the Singaporean-based outfit has chosen to locate itself at Edinburgh Napier, he responds, matter of fact, “because Bill Buchanan is the best in the world.”

It is a huge compliment and Buchanan is undeniably an influential critical thinker and innovator, not only in Scotland,

24 | futurescot | winter 2018

but across the world; each time a high-profile hack targets a TalkTalk, a British Airways or an NHS, public trust erodes further and Buchanan is commonly the figure the media seeks out to highlight the cybersecurity flaws that led to the exposure. It helps, too, that he is also a fan of decentralised ledger technologies (DLTs) – of which the Bitcoin-based blockchain is the most widely known – and he firmly believes that they can offer the solution to rebuilding confidence in an internet that has been too heavily centralised.

For all the difficulties in grasping what blockchain actually is, Buchanan prefers to focus on the end goals. “I’d like every Scottish citizen to have a unique, sovereign identity which is owned by themselves,” he says. “So if there’s an interaction with a public service you will have one identity that will then connect into many different services.”

Blockchain is a ledger that holds the “complete history of everything”, he says, expanding on the concept. It is an inherently more secure way to communicate, as individuals keep ownership of their data – rather than depending on third party servers (the tech giants) to store it, instead communicating directly. And if you decimate the whole of the infrastructure, as long as there’s one little node that’s left on the

Professor Bill Buchanan, OBE, Professor of Computing at Napier

network, you can rebuild the whole architecture, unlike a centralised server-based version of the world (what we currently have), where if one bit is hacked, all data is jeopardised.

Creating an unique identity, which is stored on a local machine, will also mean there is no longer any need for multiple passwords to access multiple services online, some of which you might only ever use once. Passwords, as a concept, “will go”, says Buchanan; a single digital identifier, which provides complete anonymity, will instead deliver access to all internet-based services.

He adds: “That’s a scary world for some. For law enforcement, for banks and money laundering, that’s a really difficult world, because you can’t trace money anymore. But the opportunity

to make sure that you can make transactions without anybody tracing them back to you and finding out what they are is a world that doesn’t have hacks and banks. If we trusted our banks and our transactions that we make online then everything would be fine. But we’re giving away our CVV number and cybercriminals are picking that up.”

Buchanan says resilience must be built into data infrastructure, so that it is part of the “core design”. Critical national infrastructure is largely getting it right, he adds, but there are still too many fault lines that are being exposed, which can create havoc. He references a recent hack at Bristol Airport, which took down the arrivals and departures screens following a ransomware attack. “Just imagine if that had jumped over

into the air traffic control system and then affected all of the air traffic control systems,” he says.

There is a great deal of interest in blockchain in both the commercial world, and in the public sector; the Scottish Government is no exception, and it commissioned the blockchain company Wallet Services to produce a report, Distributed Ledger Technologies in Public Services, earlier this year.

Unsurprisingly, it concluded: “This research found an overwhelming international consensus that DLT will have a significant role in underpinning future digital government.”

Buchanan agrees, though: “Scotland needs to be more prorisk, and have far superior visions rather than short-term objectives of getting us past the next election; in 2025 every public sector contract

should be run on smart contracts.

I think we should have a grand vision for what the country should look like and so social change, because small countries can do this well.”

He adds: “I think we see Blockchain version one as the Bitcoin world; but storing data on a blockchain isn’t really building a new world. Blockchain of the future will be built on smart contracts and we will implement those. If you have a GP appointment then the smart contract that runs within an NHS network will automatically trigger when you are over 65 years old; you will be able to walk onto a bus in Edinburgh which will identify you and you automatically get free bus travel without filling in forms.

There’s a number of things that we do – we give our date of birth on forms, but why can’t we just

Join the CyberSecurity debate at DIGITALSCOTLAND, FUTURESCOT’S ANNUAL CONFERENCE on May 30th, 2019 – visit FUTURESCOTEVENTS.COM

store what our date of birth is once, and that will prove our identity?

The core of it is much better trust; when I sign a parcel from Amazon, I draw a little line across the screen and that is seen as my identity. I think what we have is old methods and what we’re finding in this information age is that we really have to stop living in this untrusted world.” l

futurescot | winter 2018 | 25

CYBER SECURITY APPLICATION SECURITY HUB

Accenture launches global application security hub in Edinburgh

BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN Accenture has chosen Scotland to locate a new global application security hub to combat the rising threat of cyber attacks on business and government.

The technology services and management consultancy has opened an application security hub in Edinburgh as part of its growing worldwide network of centres to safeguard clients from cyber risk.

Leveraging considerable local talent, and with a global reach, the new facility is a company ‘first’ and represents a corporate step change

in addressing data loss, hacking and breaches.

“This is a proud moment for Accenture in Scotland,” said Bill McDonald, the company’s MD in Scotland. “We have a long history of helping clients with the most challenging problems of the day and the opening of the application security hub very much represents that next step in that journey.”

He added: “Security is at the heart of what many of our clients do – be they in the private or public sector; maintaining the integrity of clients’ data in this day and age is paramount to us as a business, and also crucial to our success moving forward. It is especially pleasing

that Edinburgh will be the location for this work – where our critical mass of financial sector clients in the Central Belt, and deep talent pools at our local universities, make the city a natural choice for the venture.”

The centre will be headed up in Edinburgh by Marshal Luusa, Accenture’s Application Security Lead; based on a ‘hub and spoke’ concept, the dedicated unit will draw on skills and knowledge from Accenture’s own ‘hunt’ facilities around the world, including in Prague, Riga and Israel.

Crucially, it will also benefit from collaboration and co-innovation with ‘multilateral’ corporate partners, as well as leading Scottish universities, including Abertay and Edinburgh Napier, and the Scottish Business Resilience Centre (SBRC).

Industry partners Deep Secure, Palo Alto Networks, Thales, Tanium and Micro Focus - as well as leading enterprise software vendors such as SAP and Oracle – will all work with Accenture on developing new and innovative ways of protecting companies from cyber risk.

“When you look at what’s at the heart of what we’re trying to protect – it’s data,” says Luusa. “That’s the crown jewels and that data is driven by applications; without applications you can’t really create identities, and without applications there’s not very much to effectively defend against. We feel that applications are at the core of everything businesses do and we’ve got to find a way to co-innovate more

CYBER SECURITY SQA

Young people set their sights on Launched in 2015, a digital forensics and ‘ethical hacking’ course is proving a big hit with school pupils

BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN Demand for places on introductory level courses in cybersecurity is ‘growing rapidly’, according to the national qualifications body.

Scotland became the first country in Europe to offer a school-based vocational qualification in cybersecurity three years ago after a call from government to plug a growing skills gap.

And official figures now show that since the introduction of the National Progression Award (NPA)

in schools, the rate of new learners is virtually doubling each year.

Since 2015, around 1,400 learners have undertaken the NPAs at various levels, up to Higher, figures to July 2018 show.

There are currently 46 schools nationwide and six colleges which offer the course to 15 and 16-year-old learners, and those figures are expected to grow “significantly” this year.

In response to the level of interest, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) introduced a

26 | FUTURESCOT | WINTER 2018

Higher National Certificate in Cyber Security earlier this year, and is currently developing a Higher National Diploma Cyber Security which it hopes to have available in 2019.

The courses have been developed by employers and sector specialists in a bid to encourage more young people into cybersecurity careers, where industry surveys show starting wages for cybersecurity analysts fall between £25,000 to £35,000; in senior roles, cyber experts can be expected to earn up to and in excess of £70,000-a-year according to Prospects, the UK’s biggest graduate careers website.

Bobby Elliott, Qualifications Manager at SQA, said: “We really are seeing demand for cyber grow-

ing exponentially. At one college, they had run a HNC in Computing for years and had virtually no uptake; so they changed to an HNC in Cybersecurity and filled three classes in around a fortnight.

“Scotland genuinely was the first country in Europe to offer a cybersecurity qualification in schools and that is something we’re really proud of.”

Cybersecurity skills are the third most in demand digital skill in Scotland, according to the most recent Scottish Technology Industry survey.

It also estimates that there will be up to 2,120 unfilled cyber security-related job roles in Scotland by 2020.

Safe, Secure & Prosperous: A Cyber Resilience Strategy for

Accenture’s newly-launched application security hub in Edinburgh will take the global lead on co-innovating new products to protect business and government clients from cyber risk

secure applications, especially for the growing and changing threat landscape.”

The centre will experiment and innovate with emerging decentralised ledger technologies (DLTs), such as Blockchain, and Artificial Intelligence tools, which can automate and speed up cyber detection rates.

According to Accenture’s 2018 State of Cyber Resilience report, targeted attacks on companies have more than doubled in the space of a year with 232 on average experienced by

organisations this year compared with 106 in 2017. However, actual breaches are going down as more organisations embed cyber security within corporate heirarchies: according to the report, one in eight focused cyber attacks got through in 2018, compared with one in three the previous year. There is still much to be done, though, as the report showed that 7,000 clients worldwide reported, on average, experiencing 32 cyber attacks last year.

McDonald added: “The effects of this on

clients can vary from virtually shutting down operations to reputational damage, particularly in consumer-facing businesses where any data breach carries the risk of loss of confidence and negative publicity.

“Accenture believes it has a duty to protect clients from these risks and so I’m delighted to be launching this new facility in Edinburgh.” l Visit https://accntu.re/2Qmlae4 to read Accenture’s 2018 State of Cyber Resilience report

a career in cybersecurity Scotland, published in 2015, put a clear emphasis on ensuring there was a “skills pipeline” into the cybersecurity industry.

That was why the NPA was developed, says Elliott, and it was part of a bigger objective to ensure “every child, young person and adult must have the cyber resilience skills for learning, life and work.” It appears to be having an effect and while no formal analysis has taken place, Elliott says there are reliable anecdotal accounts from colleges and universities that the NPA is helping to boost takeup levels on Further Education and Higher Education courses.

The NPA – which teaches data security, digital forensics and ethical hacking - is available overwhelmingly in state schools, but

“Scotland genuinely was the first country in Europe to offer a cybersecurity qualification in schools and that is something we’re really proud of ”

there has also been strong interest from private schools, which is unusual for a vocational qualification, Elliott adds. Initially there was some opposition to the inclusion of ‘hacking’ as a formal education concept for young people, but that has swiftly been overcome with the wider realisation that hacking can be as much about defence as offensive capabilities.

Although the course is hugely popular, and Elliott expects to see around 4-5,000 learners progressing through the NPA within the next three years, there are still big national challenges to be solved.

The gender imbalance is particularly acute in computer science and cybersecurity especially, where Elliott says the current rate is around 90% boys to 10% girls.

One school in Ayrshire, however, is breaking the glass ceiling with reports that it has achieved a 50% equal split between female and male pupils. Elliott singled out Scott Hunter, a computing science teacher from Kyle Academy, for special praise and said that if his “outstanding” example can be replicated elsewhere then Scotland stands a good chance of not only achieving some degree of gender equality but in closing the skills gap, too. l Visit www.sqa.org.uk/ cybersecurity

FUTURESCOT | WINTER 2018 | 27

PEOPLE / RECRUITMENT

It’s time to embrace brexit Digital transformation of business and the public sector will remain key drivers of the economy

BY WILLIAM PEAKIN The UK is leaving the European Union; that much we know. The nature of our future relationship with member countries, and the economic implications, are still being debated.

For one Scottish company, however, the emphasis is on seizing the moment and positioning itself to take advantage of what it regards are some certainties post-Brexit.

And it is urging Scotland’s business community to do the same.

“Understanding the sectors that will remain robust during this time, and those that will grow, means that you can be wellpositioned to win new business”

“There may be some economic turmoil, there may be a slowdown, but our focus has been on how to ‘Brexit-proof’ our company,” said Gareth Biggerstaff, chief executive of Be-IT, Scotland’s largest privately-owned recruitment consultancy.

“There’s a lot of doom and gloom around, but over the past six months we have invested our energy in identifying where there is likely to be growth in the economy.”

Biggerstaff believes that it is not only his duty as the custodian of an SME he launched five years ago as a two-person office in Edinburgh, and which has now grown to a 35 -plus team with a new headquarters in Glasgow and a satellite office in Belfast – but also of other business leaders.

“Understanding the sectors that will remain robust during this time, and those that will grow, means that you can be well-positioned to win new business,” he said. “It is incumbent on employers to anticipate demand and be ready to meet it. When one company does well, it has a ripple effect across the wider economy.”

Digital transformation of business and the public sector will remain key drivers of the economy, said Biggerstaff. Be-IT specialises in recruiting professionals for IT,

28 | FUTURESCOT | WINTER 2018

Gareth Biggerstaff and Nikola Kelly

digital, project management, and leadership roles.

He cited examples of technologies – data, cyber security, and artificial intelligence – that will see exponential growth in demand for a skilled workforce as process of change plays out in the private sector and in the delivery of public services, such as health and social care.

As Scotland grows its reputation as a centre of excellence in those specialities, indigenous growth and inward investment will in turn generate demand in

the wider service economy.

Be-IT has also launched a new transformation division, dedicated to helping businesses manage digital disruption and regulatory change. The team, which will be based in Glasgow and Edinburgh, will focus primarily on providing expert staff to the financial services sector experienced in effective business change.

“These are turbulent times for business with disruption being caused by many different factors,” said Nikola Kelly, the company’s managing director. “Brexit will

Creating a team spirit Government-backed tax schemes can help young companies attract and retain talent

BY WILLIAM PEAKIN

have a huge impact, not least significant regulatory overhaul, while increasing digitisation is having a profound influence on everything we do.

“Our new division will be able to ensure businesses across the UK are able to find the best people to help them deal with these issues. We have experience building other teams operating in the same market and are confident this new focus will be of great value.”

Be-IT’s expansion comes after the firm’s latest financial results

saw gross profit up by 55% and turnover increase to £11.2m in its fourth full year of trading. It also follows the opening at the beginning of the year of the new headquarters in Glasgow, which forms part of the company’s UK and international expansion plans.

“It was a significant landmark in the journey of our business,” added Biggerstaff. “The new facility will allow us to cement our position in Scotland and aid our expansion plans into Ireland.” l www.be-it.co.uk

Technology start-ups and companies beginning to scale-up in Scotland are increasingly competing with large corporates by offering flexible remuneration packages, some including share options.

“For these younger, more entrepreneurial firms, finding talent and securing it can be difficult,” said Andrew Holloway, a Tax Director at Johnston Carmichael in Edinburgh.

“A lot of these companies don’t have the clout to pay the salaries that, in the tech space, the larger banks and insurance companies are paying. You see a lot of people taking very good salaries, with benefits and a straight-forward working pattern in a big team,” said Holloway.

“But the flipside is that there are some fantastic start-ups and scale-ups in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, indeed throughout Scotland, who are looking to grow quickly, raise external finance, can offer people the reward of being part of the company’s success story and to be able to share in the value it creates.”

The companies are looking at ‘cash runway’, and the most effective ways to grow their teams while maximising value from investment.

Holloway is Head of Entrepreneurial Taxes at Johnston Carmichael. His team’s work encompasses a number of different tax reliefs that are available to individual investors as well as share option schemes that can be implemented by

companies to incentivise, motivate and retain staff.

The UK Government-backed Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (‘SEIS’) and Enterprise Investment Scheme (‘EIS’) both help smaller, unquoted businesses obtain the funding they need to invest in their infrastructure, whilst also providing generous tax relief for individual investors.

“Structuring appropriately and being aware of potential pitfalls in relation to SEIS and EIS are really important in allowing businesses to get the capital they need to grow their businesses,” said Holloway, “it’s risk reduced capital for investors, given immediate tax repayments on offer, and the cash received can have fantastic benefits for the recipient companies.”

In addition, share option schemes can be used within owner managed businesses to provide employees and management with equity incentives.

Holloway is experienced in helping clients establish Enterprise Management Incentives (EMI) share option schemes which allow employees to acquire shares at a fixed price, with the employee accruing benefit through future growth in company value. EMI schemes are often utilised by business owners to retain and incentivise key staff.

“The team is integral to the success of any business and these schemes go a step further in creating a mutual understanding that everyone is working towards the same goal,” said Holloway. l www.jcca.co.uk / https://bit. ly/2QifrpC

FUTURESCOT | WINTER 2018 | 29

PEOPLE SKILLS

Celebrating human characteristics

Digital may be disrupting jobs but the key skills required are enduring

Cyber Live Lessons in action

BY WILLIAM PEAKIN Communication. Collaboration.

Curiosity. Creativity.

Donald McLaughlin, of Skills Development Scotland, lists the skills which he thinks will be essential for young people in the future of work. A future, he says, in which there are jobs that have yet to be invented.

It’s a point which some educators challenge, either on the grounds that there is no empirical evidence for the claim or that there is nothing new in the assertion; at various stages in history, industrial change has created roles that previously didn’t exist.

Nonetheless, it is a view that is shared by such august bodies as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and the World Economic Forum.

In the latter’s 2016 report The Future of Jobs, it is said that: “A focus on the state of the talent pipeline for traditional formal qualifications and hard skills… risks dramatically understating the scale of impending skill set disruption if a large part of the existing subject knowledge of the current workforce will be outdated in just a few years.”

McLaughlin’s point is that while new specialisms are increasingly in demand – data science, for example – and it is vital that a sufficient number of people with those talents are entering the jobs market, a single ‘hard’ skill in itself is not enough. The people who do well, particularly when industries are being disrupted, are those that possess those ‘softer’ skills.

Conveniently for fans of alliteration, they all begin with C: “The future of work can be a scary prospect,” said McLaughlin,

“particularly for parents wondering what rapid change will mean for their children; how do you plan for careers that don’t yet exist? My answer is to focus on meta-skills; communication, collaboration, curiosity, creativity.” He adds critical and conceptual thinking to the list.

“Everyone is capable of those; it’s a case of how we draw those out in people and make them relevant as they upskill. We should celebrate human characteristics. With the current focus on artificial intelligence and robotics, it is clear there are many things computers do better than humans. But there will always be things that people can do better than computers.”

As chair of the digital skills group at SDS, McLaughlin helps lead implementation of the Scottish Government’s digital skills investment plan. It’s a tough ask; annually, there are around 13,000 vacancies in the digital technolo-

30 | FUTURESCOT | WINTER 2018

gies sector, yet only around 5,000 are entering the jobs market from traditional routes of university and apprenticeships.

“We’re not going to solve the challenge by generating a few hundred more graduates or just increasing the number of apprentices - important though those are,” said McLaughlin. “We need to challenge thinking, particularly within different business sectors.

We need to look at how companies meet the skills gap they are facing.

And one answer may be that their next generation of employees is their existing workforce - through reskilling and upskilling.”

While McLaughlin does not underestimate this “here and now” challenge, he believes it is equally if not more important to address the future talent pipeline which is where support for digital skills activities in schools comes into play. “The team has been running some cybersecurity live online

sessions for schools, which have been incredibly successful.

“One example which, for me, really brought home their impact was a school in Granton-on-Spey which ran a ‘Cracking Cryptography’ session with Police Scotland and ATOS. After the session finished, the class insisted that their teacher schedule some extra-curricular activities around cyber and, in fact, it’s resulted in the whole class wanting to take NAT5 computing!

“I never thought I would use the term ‘Cyber in the Cairngorms’ and it’s great to see the kind of influence those initiatives can have. However, on a broader level, we need to recognise that meta skills and the ability to adapt will be key. The most successful workforces of the future will not be the strongest or the most intelligent, it will be those who are most adaptive to change.

Darwin was right about that.” l

INNOVATION / LOCAL GOVERNMENT Reimagining and redesigning the delivery of services

The art of the possible An event in February will explore the future of digital for local government in Scotland

BY WILLIAM PEAKIN Autonomous vehicles, the internet of things, virtual and augmented reality, big data, artificial intelligence, smart cities applications, 5G, and distributed ledger technology, of which blockchain is one example.

They all have something in common; they shift the focus of digital technology away from the desk environment, to the built environment. Whereas our digital and physical world were previously very separate, they are now increasingly integrated.

For any organisation this is significant. “For local government, it is seismic,” a recent post by the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government noted. The built environment means the towns, cities, villages, and rural areas in which local government provides services.

It requires a change in cultural mindset, from dwelling on process and transactions to embrac-

ing the role that technology can play in delivering better outcomes.

The technologies are not just buzzwords, they are a profound evolution that enable service providers to achieve those outcomes.

They can facilitate community empowerment, help reimagine and redesign the delivery of services, and improve the way local government stakeholders work together.

Early next year, Scotland Excel, in partnership with the Digital Office, is hosting Delivering On Digital. It is intended to be an innovative approach to demonstrating the ‘art of the possible’ through the application of new technologies in a local government context.

The aim is to accelerate the pace of change in areas that can have the most beneficial effect, such as information management, the use of biometrics, and supporting local government employees in the field.

“There is always a need to manage expectations,” said Hugh Carr,

Head of Strategic Procurement at Scotland Excel, “but digital transformation is now fundamental to local government because of the advantages it will bring to citizens.

It’s not a ‘bolt on’, but something which is integral to how councils work across all service areas.”

Scotland Excel is the centre of procurement expertise for local government. Established in 2008, it is a leading non-profit shared service funded by Scotland’s 32 local authorities.

Its £1bn contract portfolio supports the delivery of social care, construction, roads, transport, environment, corporate, education and ICT services, and achieves annual savings of around £15m.

Contracts are designed to encourage innovation, facilitate policy, support local economies and generate social value for communities.

With the Digital Office acting as a catalyst for change, Scotland Excel provide strategic procurement advice on the digital agenda as it develops in local government.

“It includes areas such as councils moving to the cloud,” added Carr, “making better use of existing collaborative frameworks,

innovative routes to market councils can consider, and sharing knowledge among ICT teams in terms of the technologies in use across the 32 councils - to learn and benefit from each other and bridge gaps.”

Collaboration is key to Scotland Excel’s work, a factor illustrated by its work with SEEMiS, another local government shared service, to procure a robust and sustainable ICT solution to replace the country’s education management information system used by every council school in Scotland. The joint team was highly commended for the project in the recent Scottish GO Awards which recognise excellence in procurement.

Scotland Excel is currently working on the migration from analogue to digital systems in telecare and telehealth. “We’re also keen to look further into how the digital agenda can advance and influence other portfolio areas such as fleet and environment,” said Carr. l Delivering on Digital, 21 February 2019. www.scotland-excel.org.uk

FUTURESCOT | WINTER 2018 | 31

DIGITAL INNOVATION

SCOTTISH BUSINESSES EMBRACING DIGITAL INNOVATION IN 2019 AND BEYOND

THOMAS HAYWOOD AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY

ETALENT With companies now either having to spend hours reading through a plethora of CVs or significant sums relying on agencies to do most of the hard work, recruitment software can seem like the answer.

That’s where eTalent comes in; it’s intuitive, cuts through the noise and saves companies time and money in the recruitment process.

Unlike other recruitment software, it uses a simple red/amber/ green scoring algorithm based on psychometrics to identify the best candidates, and recruit based on personality and values.

Nik Plevan, director of eTalent, says: “Our plan is to continue to innovate and add more and more advanced features to our system such as video interviewing.” etalent.net

RIDDELL PM With their ever-increasing contract requirements and specifications, construction companies are under more pressure to deliver a complex litany of operation and maintenance documentation products for new buildings.

For almost 30 years, Riddell PM has specialised in producing these products. It prides itself on giving 100% accuracy, on time and errorfree delivery with quality to ISO 9001 standards. What’s more, Riddell PM’s solutions are cloudbased, allowing clients access to their documentation at the click of a button.

Dave Riddell, managing director, says: “We’re always develop-

In order to stand out in the digital age, innovation and forward thinking are vital for businesses. Embracing the new is essential to avoid stagnation.

We’ve taken a look at 10 Scottish companies from a broad range of industries who are pushing the envelope when it comes to digital innovation.

As a seasoned photographer, Thomas Haywood wanted to challenge himself to reach new heights in the fast-paced and ever-evolving world of drone photography.

Having been a qualified drone pilot for the past four years now, Thomas is able to give his clients detailed, birds-eye visualisations of buildings, construction sites and developments.

He adds value wherever possible by using innovative methods - such as converting photographs into 3D printable models through photogrammetry - and his services are both flexible and adaptive

to each unique job or scenario.

Thomas told us: “My business survives on digital innovation. If I were to sit around and do nothing, I know I’d get left behind.” thomashaywood.com

PHOENIX CONTENT SOLUTIONS

ing new digital products which bring value to our clients. Currently we’re procuring software which gives clients real-time reporting on the progress of projects.” riddellpm.co.uk

32 | FUTURESCOT | WINTER 2018

In an increasingly crowded digital marketplace, being seen by your ideal customers - whilst avoiding being lost in the sea of names in someone’s inbox - isn’t always easy.

Phoenix Content Solutions is a content marketing agency based in the heart of Edinburgh, and founder Bronwen Winter Phoenix specialises in connecting businesses with their best customers by using a combination of innovative software and clever content.

Bronwen, also an author and former journalist, says: “I’m always trying to utilise the latest software to get results for my

clients - but it’s also about providing the right information at the right time in the shape of helpful content. Combined with a good strategy, you’ll be unstoppable.” phoenixcontentsolutions.com

N-TRUST IT In the digital age, ensuring your business’s data - and that of your clients - is secure must always be of paramount importance to any company.

N-TrustIT - a Microsoft partner - provide pro-active and robust IT support to businesses, ensuring that system security, data security and backup take priority, to ensure their clients can have peace of mind.

Alan Moffat, founder of NTrustIT, says: “As more and more clients move to cloud-based solutions, we enable them to get the most out of these packages.

“In terms of innovation within our

THE MERCAT GRILL

sector, there are changes happening daily, so we ensure we’re always up on the latest technology and how this can benefit our clients.” n-trustit.co.uk

HATICEXINTERIOR Founded by experienced architect Dr Hatice Ozhisar, HaticeXInterior is a young, multi-disciplinary interior design and architecture services firm based in Edinburgh, offering a bespoke online design service for both national and international clients.

As part of the bespoke design process, HaticeXInterior uses various software to provide a strong platform for design advice, 3D room visualisations, furniture layout, shopping services and project management, combined with a very personalised service.

Hatice told us: “Technology is changing everything around us,

will allow customers to pay whilst sitting at the table.” mercatgrill.com

CELSIUS PLUMBING & HEATING

including the way we approach design. Innovative thinking and creative solutions are the key to achieving future success, along with following and adopting new technology and design tools.” haticexinterior.com

Michael Cairns is the director of Celsius Plumbing & Heating; a reactive and planned maintenance plumbing and heating contractor serving private customers, businesses and letting agents in Edinburgh.

He started to develop software back in 2012 that would allow customers to benefit from real-time tracking (to track when an engineer is on the way), photographic job reports and live updates.

Their software even allows for automatic servicing appointments, so customers never miss an annual service - vital if they want to keep their boiler warranty.

Michael says: “Communication is so important; it’s part of our values, along with consistency - which is why we have our software, and why we’re so successful.” celsiusplumbers.com

PURE IT REFURBISHED

TIME LAPSE SCOTLAND Construction or engineering companies looking to monitor the progress of a project and capture the build (or demolition) process over a matter of weeks or months can now do so with a long-term time lapse camera system.

Time Lapse Scotland have a fleet of cameras across the country that film in 4k resolution, whilst their online image viewing portal allows project managers and investors to log in and view their projects at any time.

Richard Patterson, director, says: “We’re constantly developing our long-term time lapse installation package. Our innovation comes from making ongoing

As owner of family-run pub the Mercat Grill, Graham Blaikie is always looking for ways to improve the experience for his customers which led to the Mercat being the first pub in Scotland to install bus tracking screens!

With the new screens, Graham has noticed his clientele seem more relaxed knowing they don’t have to rush out the door after a meal or hurry to finish their drinks; they can relax knowing exactly when their bus is due.

So, what’s next? Graham says: “We’re looking at things like hightech cookers and equipment for the kitchen - but also systems that

improvements to our bespoke software systems and hardware, which work alongside Canon’s range of professional cameras and lenses.” timelapsescotland.co.uk

Due to recent budget cuts, public sector organisations such as schools and NHS Trusts are becoming more cost-sensitive when it comes to investing in new tech.

Using innovative sourcing and refurbishment processes, Pure IT Refurbished has been helping public sector organisations save money on IT hardware for over eight years by providing tech that’s more reliable than new machines and at less than half the price.

Their mission is to help organisations throughout the UK increase their productivity by bringing advances in technology within reach of their budgets.

Bobby Mitchell, director, says: “Our aim is to become the number one supplier of refurbished IT hardware to organisations throughout the UK.” pureitrefurbished.co.uk

FUTURESCOT | WINTER 2018 | 33

COMMENT / EDUCATION

Learning without lessons

In our school the notion of a traditional ‘education’ is being challenged

BY IAN MUNRO At Kelvinside Academy in Glasgow, instead of becoming a member of the vast ranks who are quick to label the traditional UK education system as ‘antiquated’, ‘unfit of purpose’ or ‘broken’ - but do nothing about it - we united behind a common goal; to reimagine and transform education for the better.

We started off by looking beyond Scotland and the UK for alternate educational models.

Two years ago, we discovered the NuVu Innovation School in Boston, Massachusetts. NuVu is the brainchild of three pioneering MIT graduates, and their educational approach answers some of the big questions faced by the UK education system around content, teacher shortages, assessment and, crucially, relevance.

The NuVu curriculum is not based around arbitrary facts set by an education minister, but instead real-world challenges – the solutions to which of ten involve advanced digital skills. For example, pupils might design, 3D print and code a swarm of robots to conduct search and rescue work, or they might design and fabricate wearable pieces of technology.

Furthermore, pupils work collaboratively in two-week immersive interdisciplinary studios to solve challenges; there is no jumping between forty-minute Maths, Science and French lessons. The notion of a traditional ‘teacher’ is also challenged, as studios are led by coaches, who may be academics from Harvard or MIT, or designers or entrepreneurs from downtown Boston or further afield.

And crucially, there are no exams. Pupil solutions are critiqued by experts at the end of the two-week studio periods, whilst along the way pupils record their work in an online portfolio and develop many design and subject competencies.

A few Zoom video conferences calls later, and Kelvinside Academy and NuVu committed to running a summer school together in 2017 to see if their alternate education model would gain traction in the UK. The school, which saw young people from throughout Glasgow solve problems in the fields of swarm robotics, biofashion and augmented reality,

34 | FUTURESCOT | WINTER 2018

Pupils work collaboratively in two-week studios; there is no jumping between forty-minute Maths, Science and French lessons

was hailed a success by not only the participants and coaches, but also by industry giants such as Balfour Beatty and academics from Glasgow University.

One other outcome was that Kelvinside and NuVu formed an exclusive European partnership to launch Scotland’s School of Innovation in Glasgow. Building work is well underway, and the Innovation School will open in August 2019.

However, we were anxious to move our plans for curriculum development forward whilst the building is under construction. From August, our pupils have left the traditional timetable for two-week blocks to complete design studios under the guidance of NuVu Fellows. We’ve seen ‘super enabling devices’ been made to help local elderly residents regain limb function, and earlier this month our pupils explored the theme of hiding in plain sight, which deals with the growing population of urban animals and how we might create solutions to ensure these populations

can successfully cohabitate our built spaces with humans.

It is important to note at this point that I don’t think anyone at Kelvinside subscribes to the belief that the UK education system is fundamentally broken. Fantastic life defining things happen in our schools every day and our pupils go on to do great things across all spheres of life. However, given that the UK education system does not look too different to how it did 100 years ago, evolution is required.

We think our hybrid model in which traditional subjects sit alongside a design studio approach works well. And others seem to think so too. We have recently been asked to brief representatives of the Houses of Commons and Lords at the Westminster Education Forum, and last month we spoke at Ellen Macarthur’s Disruptive Innovation Festival. The firm shared intention of the KA-NuVu partnership is to establish a beacon project in the UK, which can demonstrate to others what education can look and feel like with an ambitious goal and a little creativity and imagination. l

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