9 minute read
Frank Børre Pedersen
from VEFF Magazine 1 2021
by Veff
From May 1st, Frank Børre Pedersen is the new programme director in Group Research and Development with responsibility for ”Shaping the future of Digital Assurance”. We met him to learn more about his new role.
After 25 years in the company, five different CEOs and many different strategies, Frank Børre is back to basics, working with research and development. He can look back at 18 years in the business area as a consultant, key account manager and head of department before he moved to research in 2014. With the new DNV strategy we also have a new research strategy. In this new research strategy “Shaping the future of Digital Assurance” is at the core and a new research program has been created to deliver on the goal. In his new role, Frank Børre is heading the new programme. We asked him to tell more about the new research strategy and share more about his time with DNV.
How has the new strategy been received as you see it?
I have experienced many launches of new strategies and they always create a lot of excitement. However, this time I think it is more than just excitement. The new strategy focusing on “Shaping the future of assurance” has hit a nerve in whole of DNV – not just in research. First of all, I think the “Shaping the future” creates a very forward-leaning aspiration that many people appreciate and want to be part of. It is much more exiting to “shape” than to “follow”. And also, the clear focus on “assurance” as a common description of what we do and how we create value has been very welcomed. Now we see a clear red thread across the entire company, covering services, industries, competence, and technologies. When I started in 1996, we were 3500 people, focusing on only maritime and oil&gas and with a very Norway centric business. Now that we are truly global, operating in more industries with more services, this common description of what we do is extremely important to cater for collaborations and joint delivery to customers. And since DNV is a knowledge-based company, a common understanding of what we do and how we deliver value is needed.
Spending time with the family is good quality to life..
We cannot really scale unless we understand these commonalities across the company. So, I think the new strategy will be a competitive advantage for DNV going forward as it will help us operate as one company.
How do you see your new role contribute to the new DNV strategy?
In Group Research and Development, we are very excited about the new strategy. A lot of what we have been working with over the last years related to the digital transformation and decarbonization has found its place into the new strategy. In this is how it should be: Research should keep a longer focus looking out for future trends and opportunities for DNV. In research we have defined a strategic goal to “Shape the future of digital assurance”. As the programme director I am responsible for this goal. I am very excited about this, because I believe that digitalization will have huge impacts and change the way we think about assurance today. To succeed, we must shape both the digital transformation of assurance and also shape the assurance of digital assets First, the assets themselves become more cyber-physical or even purely digital, like a digital twin. Second, the way that we collect information about the asset (inspection, surveys, etc) will also change due to digitalization, as we will increasingly collect sensor data, use remote inspections, drone surveys, etc. And finally, the way that we process the information in our assurance process itself will also change. We will be able to use models, data, artificial intelligence (AI), etc to improve it, automate it, make it realtime, and so on. And with all of these changes driven by digital technologies we will also see new business models emerge. And to make that a success for DNV we must fundamentally understand how we create value with our assurance services. Then we are in a good position to move to new business models that creates more value for customers, more value to stakeholders and society, and also to DNV. This is a large ambition that goes beyond my programme. So, we will collaborate closely with both other programs in Group R&D and also with the business areas and customers.
What kind of professional competence and work experience do you have?
Being a physicist, I have a passion for trying to understand how things work. Whether it is an asset, a project, investment, or an organization. And having worked for DNV 25 years I have now an equal passion for trying to understand how things fail. And I think you have to combine these two perspectives to make sure there is a proper balance between value creation and risk. I joined DNV right after I earned my PhD in 1996. I knew the company a bit from before having grown up in the vicinity of DNV and read about it in the local press. I started in the Space and Defence section working with reliability of satellites and project risks for large procurement projects in the Norwegian Navy. In 1998 I became part of a new large JIP called “Integrated Uncertainty Management”. In this JIP we developed the RP-A203 Technology Qualification which has become a de-facto standard in the industry ever since. Interestingly, in 2020 I had a small part in developing the RP-A204 Qualification and assurance of digital twins. Some of the same ideas were re-used, but also many new ideas had to be applied since digital twins are purely virtual replicas of physical assets. So, they perform and fail in different ways then their physical counterparts.
Børre hiking with his daughter and her friend.
Sometimes managers get most of the attention, but Frank is aware of his team with exceptional peeople.
Another unique project was started overnight in August 2001 when suddenly all minibanks in Norway failed to operate. DNV was hired in to investigate what had happened and why. It turned out that the service provider hosting all the hard drives storing the bank transactions had erroneously formatted the operating hard drives and not the backup hard drives as intended. How could this have happened without any warnings? Well, the problem was that there were too many warnings. The day before, a civil construction company had cut a fiber optical cable in Oslo used also by the service provider. So, the warning signals were massive to begin with. The additional ones warning about the formatting were simply lost in the crowd. Such complex system failures are often the case when we have larger accidents.
In addition to quite technical projects, I have also had the pleasure of working more broadly with project risk and enterprise risk, where we go beyond pure technical performance. I find this very exciting as we then often work directly for the management in the customer organization. An example of this was our SCORE project – an acrynom for Statoil COst of REbranding. At the time Statoil and Hydro had merged and there we public discussions about how much it would cost to rename and rebrand all Statoil and Hydro assets – from offshore units, to onshore terminals, to gas stations, to coffee mugs and paper envelopes. Statoil trusted us to use our in depth understanding of their technical assets to prepare a rebranding plan with associated costs. We did and the public discussions ended.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I am originally from Oslo and grow up not so far from the head office at Høvik. My family also spent three years in Montreal in Canada, so I had the chance to study at college there. After that I moved to Trondheim in Norway to study physics at NTH, where I took my MSc and PhD. After that I met my wife Heidi and we now have two children, a 17 year old boy and 19 year old girl. When we got married, we decided to buy a large house together with her parents. While we have separate parts of the house, we live of course quite close together. When the kids were small that was truly helpful for Heidi and I as we were both in full jobs. Now, 15 years later we can return the favor as now it is Heidi and I looking after her parents. For us this “generation house” has worked well – even if it does require some rules-of-the-game to protect privacy and family life. Interestingly my brother has also ended up living in a house with his in-laws. So, our friends joke that he and I miss the normal mother-in-law gene that would prevent this from happening.
Finally, tell us about some issues that your burn for
I mentioned previously that I was appreciating the combination of “knowing how things work and knowing how things fail”. And I believe such dualities exist in many of our professional areas. For instance, with the new data revolution, we have the chance to combine our traditional technology insight with the insight provided by data. It is not a matter of either-or but combining the two. Physics-based models combined with data-driven models outperforms each of them individually. In a knowledge-based company like DNV people and our competence is a core asset. So, I am very glad to see that the focus on “exceptional people” is so central in the new strategy. And I am proud to work in a company that keeps investing in people, research and innovation and know that this will help us stay relevant and competitive for the future.
Finally, I think recognition is important. And sometimes managers get most of the attention. A recent example from my own unit is the NASA Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) Challenge. A team from my unit entered the competition against 18 other teams from leading institutions around the world. DNV was one of only five teams to submit a solution that qualified, before being confirmed by the NASA organizer as the ‘best of the best’. Sometimes you are just lucky to be manager for such exceptional people. •
