Arup CIO Stephen Potter on digital collaboration, virtual-reality CAD, drones and the Internet of Things

When Stephen Potter became CIO at Arup, it already boasted a highly collaborative working culture. His challenge was to take it to the next level

When Stephen Potter arrived at global engineering and design consultancy Arup to become the company's group CIO, its IT department, in many respects, was stuck in neutral: Waterfall was the predominant implementation methodology and Potter's first task was to devise a plan to help turn the organisation's "digital" aspirations into a reality.

Yet in many respects, there are few more high-tech companies than the private, £1bn company founded by the famed architectural structural engineer Ove Arup, which is also, today, effectively owned by its employees.

For example, when a luxury car-maker wants to make the doors on its luxury cars sound that bit better, it goes to Arup. "That requires very high-tech acoustics and material science, which needs huge amounts of compute power," says Potter.

Arup was also involved in the structural design of such buildings as Canary Wharf CrossRail station, designed by Fosters+Partners, the London Olympics' Aquatics Centre, the Shard skyscraper at London Bridge and the London Eye - among many other high-profile architectural and structural engineering projects.

Yet at the same time, with the information revolution still in its infancy, knowledge-based company Arup sits in an awkward position: much of its work involves working with architects, on the one hand, helping them to make their artistic designs play nicely with the laws of physics; while on the other hand, helping the construction companies contracted to build those intricate designs understand exactly what they need to do.

"Digital transformation is going to be a game-changer for us," says Potter. "It's an opportunity for us, but there is a certain amount of threat, as well.

"The more digital tools that become available to us, also become available to our competitors. And they're also becoming available to companies that we traditionally collaborate with. We operate in the 'middle' a lot of the time, between architects and construction contractors, and we're able to operate in that space because of our rich subject-matter expertise.

"But increasingly, tools and digital tools in general can enable those people to come up from the bottom, while others can come down from the top, so to speak, and we could find ourselves squeezed in the middle," says Potter.

A little knowledge

Arup therefore needs to stay at least one step ahead, not just of rivals, but its partners as well. In the past, Arup was a pioneer of knowledge management, and the organisation that Potter walked into therefore had quite an advanced knowledge-sharing culture. Indeed, it even employed knowledge management specialists, back in the day, and enthusiastically contributed to the knowledge management movement.

But, today, the task of knowledge management is led by the staff, and it's the CIO and the IT team that are expected to provide the enabling tools.

"I've spent a lot of time outside of Arup, thinking about collaboration and knowledge management and how you make organisations and enterprises more collaborative. Arup already had all that. The underlying technology platform, though, was old fashioned and out-of-date.

"We had a very collaborative environment; we already had great knowledge management; and, we already had a culture of sharing and collaboration. My challenge was to take that and replace the legacy technology with new technology," says Potter.

That wasn't necessarily as straightforward as it sounds. Because of the individual nature of the company, the new tools still need to "grab" staff and win their adoption - they need to feel that the new tools will be better, and provide them with more, than the tools that they replace.

"There was an existing programme, branded 'the digital workspace', built on the Microsoft stack. So, Office 365, SharePoint and Yammer were intended to deliver those things," he says, adding that the first stage rolled out this summer. "The first phase of the roll-out has been really well received," he says.

In many respects, Arup already had tools to support precisely the kind of environment that such software supports, but the Microsoft stack ought to be easier and cheaper for the company to maintain, freeing-up IT staff to do more.

Yammer, for example, which has just been rolled out, is intended to replace Arup's "skills networks", which enabled staff to post their problems to an internal message board and, hopefully, a like-minded (but more knowledgeable) soul could respond with, if not an answer, at least some pointers in the right direction.

"Yammer's really good for that. We need, then, to keep that as a repository of knowledge. And to a certain extent start curating it. We already have 'skills leaders' who can make sure that all the right stuff gets 'surfaced'," says Potter.

Staff could also use such networks to find other Arup people with experience in particular regions, projects and processes in order to seek out their advice directly. Delve - a newly created tool in Office 365 - takes this one step further by (supposedly) intelligently providing the user with information they need for projects they are currently working on, such as pulling out emails and other documents.

Those collaborative tools are not just intended for Arup staff, but also to help them work better with clients and other partners, large and small. And on the high-end projects that Arup typically specialises in, that means supporting "building information management" systems that are designed to embody complex information about buildings, and their design and management, in a standard electronic format.

Tools such as Autodesk Revit and Bentley Systems' ProjectWise are in widespread use within Arup, as well as with its clients and across the architecture and design industries. "We are not looking to replace them but to augment their capabilities for internal and external collaboration," says Potter.

The next stage of the digital workspace involves moving into the process of "winning work". Arup already uses uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM, says Potter. "We'll be building on Digital Workspace and our existing CRM platform to provide new capabilities to manage turning opportunities into bids and bids into client projects."

"But the big thing is what we're calling 'ProjectHub', which is the project-management phase of digital workspace. That's where we're going to surface all of our project data and provide a suite of applications, some of which will be third-party, and some of which we'll build ourselves. This should drive a step-change in the way that we deliver our projects," says Potter.

"The key to the success of ProjectHub will be liberating all of our project data. We currently have terabytes of project information buried in silos. We want to make all of it accessible, searchable and to get actionable insight. Ultimately it's all about helping Arup people stay at the leading edge of design and engineering," he adds.

[Turn to page two to read about 'Sensors and drones']

Arup CIO Stephen Potter on digital collaboration, virtual-reality CAD, drones and the Internet of Things

When Stephen Potter became CIO at Arup, it already boasted a highly collaborative working culture. His challenge was to take it to the next level

Sensors and drones

Arup also provides plenty of examples for how relatively new technology, such as the so-called internet of things (IoT) and even drones, will become embedded within many companies. "We have people working on geo-technic slope stability, such as rail embankments. We have worked for a long time with large rail operators in the UK to advise them how to construct embankments.

"Increasingly, they are now IoT-enabled, so they have sensors embedded in the embankments, sending back huge amounts of data in real time. It's a classic big-data challenge, but you need Arup's expertise to make sense of that.

"A sensor gives a particular reading, but does that mean that a pigeon landed there or is the slope about to slide and we need to send a drone out to look at or even stop the trains? Do I need nine sensors, twenty or just one sensor? They are not pure data-science challenges; they are not pure subject-matter expertise challenges and they're not pure IT challenges - you've got to put everything together," says Potter.

Drones can also help improve building maintenance and cut costs, he adds, although they may put many a "professional abseiler" out of work. "A lot of what we do is inspect the façades of buildings, or bridges for damage. There's lots of places in hard to reach environments. We have a lot of people that abseil down the side of buildings, and they don't need to do that any more. We can use drones with a high-definition camera and other sensors instead."

In many cases, these new technologies require much more back-end compute power than ever, whether provided directly in-house or via a third-party in the cloud, available for the company to use.

While Arup has largely standardised on the Microsoft stack - Office 365 and SharePoint are, after all, hosted in the Microsoft cloud - it's hedging its bets in terms of cloud-based services by also supporting Amazon Web Services. "We are doing a lot of our geo-spatial work in the cloud, and we have a number of point solutions in the HR and finance space that are cloud-based, too," says Potter.

And the use of drones is not an after-thought at Arup, either. "One of the interesting things about Arup's culture is that people don't have to ask for permission.... Colleagues in Shinzhen in China has been trained up and certified to use high-performance drones. They have been doing three-dimensional mapping of city sites [with drones] and converting that data into 3D models, which people can walk through.

"Then, they're pulling those models into Oculus Rift so that people can walk through the model and interact with the particular design challenges they have," says Potter.

That's not the only project involving drones and/or virtual reality. "We have about five or six different drone projects ongoing in different areas at Arup at the moment," he adds, while colleague in the US have also been trialling Autodesk's latest modelling applications, which provide three-dimensional models of designs, enabling people to view and interact with them using Microsoft HoloLens devices.

In practical terms, adds Potter, virtual reality in Arup's workplace will be about much more than just visualisation of 3D designs and walkthroughs of buildings in order to wow clients. "My team developed a tool called 'Mass Motion' - pedestrian simulation software. We build a tube station with a building on top: but how will people walk through it? What will happen if there's a fire? It simulates all of that, and virtual reality can give you a direct visualisation of the experience, of walking up to the turnstile, examining the congestion at different points and so on," says Potter.

Open Windows

Perhaps not surprisingly for a company that has much of its IT infrastructure running on the Microsoft stack, Potter is taking a keen interest in Windows 10. In particular, the promise of a seamless experience, from PC to tablet to smartphone appeals most, says Potter.

"We are very reliant on multiple devices, so having a platform that seamlessly goes from one to the other could be of great benefit to us," he says. In particular, he adds, the ability for a device, like Microsoft Surface, to transition from one mode (the desktop) to another (the tablet computer) could be beneficial.

Cortana could also be useful as a tool for helping staff to find and navigate information - notwithstanding some of the question marks over how Cortana processes its instructions. And, potentially, a roll-out could start as early as the new year.

Those question marks over Cortana, however, leads back to the central challenge that Arup faces every day - having to compete with the same organisations that it must also partner with, and providing a vital link in the chain that could just as easily be squeezed and disintermediated if it does not stay at least one step ahead of those partners in terms of the expertise it can offer.

"We have a principle at Arup of openness in general, which makes life challenging from a security standpoint as well. We have this culture of openness across the business, and we have a culture in the wider engineering community and academia of sharing as much as possible.

"Clearly, there's limits to that [sharing information] around things like client confidentiality, and we're as protective about that as anyone. But we tend to be a bit more sanguine about the risks and more alive to the benefits than, perhaps, many other organisations might be," he says.