2. 1. @Aurecon and our disruption
challenges
2. Aurecon IS – our #modernIT
response
3. “… precious commodity”?
3. “The question for us is, what needs to be true
for us to stay relevant in the business?”
Fillippo Passerini
Confessions of a Successful CIO – Dan Roberts/Brian Watson
6. Economic disruption….
• Resources boom is over
• Government austerity measures
• Wealth moving west to east and
north to south leads to
increased global competition
• Pressure on margins creates a
change in engineering design
practices… and market
consolidation
• Sustainability – affordability of
ongoing infrastructure
maintenance
8. “”
The Internet of Things
“The network of physical
objects that contain embedded
technology to communicate
and interact with their internal
states or the external environment”
Source: Gartner
13. What is ‘digital’?
(Of signals or data) expressed as series of the digits 0 and 1,
typically represented by values ….
Examples:
1. Relating to using, or storing data or information in the form of
digital signals: digital TV eg. a digital recording
2. Involving or relating to the use of computer technology eg.
the digital revolution
Source: Oxford Dictionary
14.
15. Growing the ‘skills’ of a #modernIT team
• Implemented SFIA for all roles
• Restructured for focus on
‘customer segment’
• Focus on ‘soft skills’
• Clear, honest discussions on
#modernIT
16. Old WAN, regionally based and fragmented
Asian offices
NZ offices
Australian offices
African offices
18. Enabling global engineering outcomes
• 150 staff
• Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Thailand,
USA, South Africa, UAE
• 45,500 published documents
• 1088 published models
• 70 MB average model size
“..this complex, one of a kind, project can be delivered across
Aurecon’s Global Network - across multiple ANZ offices, Middle
East, South Africa, Vietnam, Thailand and even in Los Angeles…”
20. #modernIT - questions
“If the rate of change externally
is greater than
the rate of change internally
then the end is near.”
Jack Welsh
Editor's Notes
Does the Aurecon IS team believe that we meet #modernIT expectations, no we don’t.
With regard to Digital Disruption Deloittes University Press asks if CIOs are ready to rumble, we believe we are!
This presentation aims to provide an overview of Aurecons challenges and our approach to getting ready to rumble.
I have assumed that there doesn’t need to be a debate with this audience that the digital revolution is real. There is obviously a lot of detail to get through in 25 minutes but we will discuss the digital disruption threat for Aurecon, what my leadership team and I are doing about it and wrap with some personal observations about what it means for us as information professionals.
The excellent ‘Confessions of a Successful CIO’ book is a series of case studies of US based CIOs. Some of the case studies will resonate more than others depending on your viewpoint. For my leadership team and I the chapter on Fillippo Passerini contained some wonderful insight including this compelling quote. We have posed the question to our teams, What is relevant to the business, and to create a burning platform; ‘What happens to us if we are irrelevant”.
With over a billion dollars in revenue and headquarted in Melbourne Aurecon provides engineering design, project management and specialist technical services globally focusing on the building of infrastructure (roads, rail, port, dams, buildings), we have 78 offices across 26 countries employing over 6500 people.
We have operations in established first world locations like Melbourne but also have operations in more difficult locations such as Angola, Nigeria and Namibia. Further we have been involved in projects in over 80 countries. We work in various markets including Energy, transport, oil & gas, government and resources.
There are some economic trends which are worth highlighting so the broader environment is understood. Whilst these don’t represent digital disruption for Aurecon they are worth highlighting so our broader business context is understood.
The resources boom is obviously over which means capex investment in mines and associated infrastructure has dropped significantly. The resources market had been our biggest market for quite sometime.
The GFC has stifled investment from the public sector, another significant market for us
The rise of Asia and Africa creates opportunities but there is increased competition for those opportunities
These forces have created margin pressure driving the need to improve efficiency. For example traditionally design work would be completed close to the client. That is for a Melbourne client the work would have been completed in Melbourne. Now the advent of ‘low cost’ centres and centres of excellence mean that design work for a Melbourne based client will be done in a number of locations, for example Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, Cape Town.
And finally benefits such as reduced emissions and other environment or sustainability considerations are driving changes in approaches to management of infrastructure and assets.
These economic drivers are creating significant change within the engineering professional services industry.
Building Information Mgt is a misnomer as it applies to any infrastructure design. Having been around since the 1970’s BIM is not a new concept but it is hotting up.
BIM is a process involving the generation and management of digital representations of physical characteristics of places or things. BIM are files containing proprietary data which can be exchanged or networked to support decision-making about a place or thing.
BIM is modernising the industry with the key objective of: reducing capital cost and the carbon burden from the construction and operation of the built environment. BIM will drive the adoption of information rich technologies, as well as the introduction of new processes and collaborative behaviours that will unlock new more efficient ways of working at all stages of the project life-cycle.
The Internet of Things is a difficult trend to define precisely. There is no standard definition for the Internet of Things.
Gartner defines IoT as “The network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and interact with their internal states or the external environment.”
Conceptually, IoT involves common principles:
Physical “things” such as devices and sensors
Connectivity to the internet
The aggregation and analysis of data or information
The use of this information to provide a new or improved service
One of the key benefits that has been identified about IoT is the ability to reduce downtime of an asset and lower the cost of maintaining it.
This is not just about the consumer, Deloittes predict that 60% of benefit from IoT will be at the enterprise level.
These ‘things’ are part of wider assets or infrastructure and achieving this vision requires adding intelligence from the beginning of design phase, the part where Aurecon normally gets involved, through to the end of the building's useful life .
INCREASINGLY AURECON IS SEEING A DEMAND FOR THE DELIVERY OF NOT JUST THE PHYSICAL ASSET BUT ALSO THE ‘INFORMATION Asset’ . THE IMPACT OF BIM AND IOT ON ASSET DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT IS GOING TO BE SIGNIFICANT, DARE I SAY DISRUPTIVE! There are new digital conversations happening with our traditional clients and they’re happening with new competitors to the market.
My leadership team and I have recognised that not only is IT changing but the business we serve is also going to experience rapid disruption. We are in a perfect storm of change.
Passerini’s question of relevance as been the constant stimulant to our thinking and strategy.
We recognised that we needed to ensure the basics were relevant to the business and that we needed to develop the right skills sets before we could have the higher value discussions with our ‘client’. I am going to share two elements of our multi-faceted strategy
What is digital? Quite an interesting definition from the Oxford Dictionary isnt it? For a real back to the future experience reflect that digital was the term for IT in the 1970’s.
Harvard Business Review Analytic Services state that “57 percent of the business and technology leaders surveyed view IT as an investment that drives innovation and growth.”1 But according to a Gartner report 51% of CIOs see digital opportunities as a threat to their credibility.
So why do we see the increased importance of technology and bits and bytes as a threat? Are we too inward focused. Are we too focused on running the technology and not on delivering meaningful information solutions and services. Do we just see road blocks rather than opportunities. Do we use the excuse of our legacy as a reason not to move forward? Are we concerned that we don’t have the skills or aptitude?
If you see the lady turning clockwise you are using your right brain
If you see the lady turning anti-clockwise you are using left brain
Some people do see both ways, but most people see it only one way.
IT people have traditionally been left brained. Nuts, bolts, bits, bytes, boxes, servers, architecture. But the demands on IT today are about user experience, think about the Canterbury bus driver. That is right brained thinking. Technology is as always the enabler, the experience is the disrupter.
A 2014 Forrester report found that 73 percent of executives believe their company has a digital strategy in place, just 19 percent think they have the right technology to execute it – an even smaller number (15 percent) believe they have the skills and capabilities to accomplish it.
So one of the key challenges we have is how do I re-wire my team?
Of course with all these changes people have felt threatened about ‘traditional IT’ roles disappearing. In Dan Robert’s ‘Unleashing the Power of IT’ book 12 core competencies of #modernIT are discussed, only 1 is technology.
To help define what future IT roles will look like we introduced the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). SFIA has allowed us to
Globally clarify staff roles and responsibilities
Set the agenda for future skills of #modernIT
We have made copies of Unleashing the Power of IT available to our team leads to help their understanding and had a workshop with Lou Markstrom the co-author of the 2nd edition of Unleashing the Power of IT. We have met with Dan a couple of times and one of the key focuses we now have is how do we improve our consulting skills.
Importantly we have constantly be building the understanding of the changing demands on skills of #modernIT. Our team now understand that developing and maintaining relevance is an individual responsibility as well as a responsibility of the leadership team. In fact our expectation is that leaders, thought leaders do not have to sit in positions of authority.
We are providing a framework to ensure relevance, development and success. We expect our team to seize that opportunity to ensure their relevance.
In response to the ‘more from less’ driver Aurecon has transformed from doing regional based engineering design work to true global resourcing where ‘low cost’ centres are utilised. Because we used to work regionally our network whilst enabling global connectivity was essentially 5 networks linked together. This meant that working on projects in NZ, Asia and Africa involved multiple hops. This was introducing significant reliability & performance issues for us. Essentially the demands of our network changed and we needed to satisfy that demand.
In January 2014 we signed a 5 year outcome orientated Managed Services agreement with Orange Business Services to migrate our WAN services to them. We believe this is a key strategic decision. In partnership with Orange we are transforming our network from a regionally fragmented network to Orange’s hybrid network, a true global network. We have completed our initial migration to the Orange network and whilst we have some teething problems we are very pleased with the result. In particular I am enjoying the discussions about continued service improvement as well as the increased relevancy of the network and the ongoing discussions between the two organisations. We have commenced transformational conversations and are very collaborative between IS, the business and Orange. Key business stakeholders as well as ourselves are excited about the potential of this program of work
Our progress means we are having many more high value discussions with the business about how to solve complex project demands. For example we established a ‘pilot’ environment 12 months ago for a significant global project. I just love this quote from one of the senior engineers on the project. The results have been very successful from a project perspective however from a technology perspective we are concerned about the scalability of the environment.
Just prior to Xmas we ran a workshop with key stakeholders to address the longer term concerns. These stakeholders included senior resources from key business areas, Orange Business Services, Microsoft and Riverbed as key IS partners and of course IS resources. We are confident that all of these partners working together will come up with a solution that will significantly assist Aurecon win and deliver global projects. THESE DISCUSSIONS ARE REQUIREING AURECON IS TO DEVOLOP AND DEMONSTRATE DIFFERENT SKILLS AND ATTITUDES. WE RECOGNISE THAT WE CAN IMPROVE OUR VALUE PROPOSITION TO OUR INTERNAL CLIENTS BY BEING MORE COLLABORATIVE WITH ALL STAKEHOLDERS
So as a profession, in the timeless words of Derek Zoolander will we become a ‘… a precious commodity’ or will we be just a commodity? And we know what has happened to the commodity price!
In my opinion as IT professionals we have always lived in a digital world; digital disruption or information revolution, take your pick. I believe as information professionals whether we are a IT vendor and a corporate IT geek this is our time. Our role is to ensure our organisation realises value out of its data or information. Being candid we have a choice of being ‘IT Managers’ or a CIO’s in the true sense, the choice is ours to take. But given the reality of digital disruption its important that we make that choice otherwise our organisations will be the disrupted rather than the disrupter.
At Aurecon we continue to facilitate discussions that will enable Aurecon to adapt. Those discussions can be about day to day services, driving mobility and collaboration or challenging strategic partners such as Orange to step up on IoT. We will continue to ‘have a crack’.
