Q&A: Brian Jones, CIO, Smiths Group

Jones : "Bananas and chocolate have similar densities to the explosives our airport security scanners are trying to detect, so differentiating between those is tricky."

Mergers and acquisitions can create big problems for multi-national corporations. How IT services are merged across companies is a prime example. But removing duplication of effort by different business arms can lead to the potential for large cost savings through consolidation of services.

Smiths Group CIO Brian Jones has seen how that can act as a spur to business, having just been through such an exercise at Smiths Group, where rejigging the whole business to connect with its IT has seen claimed annualised cost savings of £50 million.

Smiths Group is in the busines of threat & contraband detection, medical devices, energy, communications and engineered components has over 140 businesses grouped in five divisions, with a presence in 50 countries, and has over 21,000 employees in 400 locations.

Companies the group has acquired recently include Orion Corporation, a US-based designer and manufacturer of hydrodynamic bearings for energy and general industrial markets; Dowin Lightning Technologies, a Chinese producer of surge protection devices; and ZDMI, a Chinese medical instruments manufacturer.

Computing asked him his views on deploying IT across a plethora of different business arms, and what advantages future technologies can bring for global conglomerates like the Smiths Group.

Computing: Who are 'Smiths Group's' main competitors?
Brian Jones: Due to the variety and locations of our different business arms, you'd be looking at a mass of them, dependent on which of our business arms you looked at.

For example, we're making communications kit for the Eurofighter project, and we make seals for the oil and gas industry. Some of those seals cost 50p a piece, but some cost $50,000 and are engineered to micron accuracy.

You're carry-on luggage when you fly has probably been checked by one of our airport security scanners. Bananas and chocolate have similar densities to the explosives we're trying to detect, so differentiating between those is tricky - we try to reduce false positives as much as possible.

We manufacture chemical weapons detection devices for the US military, and those need to detect at concentrations measured in parts per billion. Our Smiths Medical division also makes equipment to keep blood at the right temperature during transfusions.

What is your view on comms technologies like IP telephony and unified communications?

We're currently looking at these systems, and we'll be deploying a group-wide IP telephony rollout. That single architecture will allow us to do site-to-site internal dialing which will save us millions.

It'll also be a cornerstone in our unified communications strategy, so that we can link that in with desktop video and instant messaging.

To underpin unified communications though, firms need to have a very good comms infrastructure. I don't think the unified communications model is quite mature yet, but we're continually looking at it.

What about Cloud Computing – although it's early days for this technology, have you 'kicked the tyres' yet?

We have done some pilot work on Cloud systems. We've looked at Google Apps, but our conclusion was that it wasn't quite ready for our needs yet. We're also keeping tabs on what Microsoft is doing with its Azure Services offering.

For me the model makes sense, especially for conglomerates like us. We've got to be as agile as the smaller businesses, and the less I've got the works gummed up by stuff I have to manage, the better.

What about information compliance problems with cloud systems? Will that stop cloud rollouts for you?

We don't feel that the cloud providers could address our concerns at the minute. The main issue tends to be focused around the military parts of our businesses. For example in the US, that information has to be resident in the US, stored there and managed by US nationals.

Likewise in the UK, there's some things in the UK which the government requires [to be in the UK].

So you have to make sure that the provider obeys the protocols that are in place. We always take guidance from our legal counsels and it's another wrinkle that a lot of CIOs don't have to deal with – that's to make sure we put all our architectural decisions through the information security stream.

How are you doing with server consolidation using virtualisation technology?

We've virtualised and consolidated loads of servers, and we're continuing to do that. We've closed down a lot of the 'broom cupboard'-type datacentres. Ultimately I've made it pretty clear that we don't want to be in the datacentre business and we should be getting out of that. But currently there's lots of opportunity for us to consolidate and get cost savings and efficiencies before we even talk to providers.

With new application rollouts, we're typically going straight for hosted services – but with those legacy applications we're just consolidating them on to less servers. We're using a lot of VMware – and it works great.

After that we'll be looking at desktop virtualisation. It's a given really - the cost of support goes down, reliability and durability goes up, as well as your ability to profile applications based on what individuals are doing.

Do you think it's a good time to be in the UK IT industry?

I think it's a fantastic time, especially if you're the sort of person who likes a challenge! What I mean by that is there is so much value that IT can bring to any enterprise, particularly today.

If you look at what businesses are trying to do, most of them are trying to protect margins by taking out cost. Some of them that have done that a bit better than others are trying to address the topline now.

The beauty of that is, if you've taken down your fixed cost of operation and you've increased your sales, then that cash flows straight through to your bottom line.

There's the whole opportunity in a recession where innovation through IT, c an provide a step change for your business. Where is there another department in businesses which has the opportunity to change the rules as much as IT can?