Precision engineering: an interview with BuroHappold IT director Shaun Mundy

BuroHappold's Shaun Mundy tells Graeme Burton how he grapples with Windows, ultrabooks and BYOD policies

Not so long ago, an engineering consultancy like BuroHappold would have had studios filled with drawing boards and engineers rushing to complete technical drawings for clients - who would no doubt want a small change "here" and a modest amendment "there", necessitating the engineers to start afresh.

Computer-aided design (CAD), of course, has been a huge productivity boost for engineering consultancies, and has also enabled them to expand, for staff to collaborate across the world - with each other and with clients - and to serve customers that straddle the globe.

Group IT director Shaun Mundy is focused on ensuring that the company's systems can keep up with the needs of such demanding customers, starting with BuroHappold's desktop environment.

Like many companies, it stuck with Windows XP on the desktop throughout the 2000s, wisely eschewing a large-scale move to Windows Vista when it finally emerged, but perhaps being a bit slow to consider a move to Windows 7.

Part of the reason for that, says Mundy, was because when he joined, the company had many disparate operating systems - including 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows - with local flavours adding to the complexity.

"It's [now] a very centralised environment and very standardised," he says. "We have done a lot of work over the past few years and are now at about 85 per cent Windows 7, 64-bit. One of the things that made it easy for us to move to Windows 7 was the performance improvement we got at 64-bit over XP, which was as much as 30 per cent," he says. As a result, staff were very willing to make the move.

The benefits of migrating to Windows 8 - which will be formally launched next month - are less clear cut.

The change in interface, for example, needs to be examined closely, given the importance of "power users" in an engineering consultancy, and in particular how the split between the traditional desktop interface and the "Modern UI" of Windows 8 impacts usability.

However, there are many functional benefits in terms of business flexibility, believes Mundy, especially with the development of Windows 8-based ultrabooks.

"Windows 8 is all about the tablet for us," he says. "We are going to watch and try Windows 8 to see what it does for tablets. We are not going to jump just because it's Windows 8."

Surprisingly, there are not too many iPad-toting staff at BuroHappold - perhaps because the work the company undertakes requires far more powerful devices and specialised software.

This has enabled Mundy to approach the issue of bring your own device (BYOD) at a more leisurely pace than many organisations.

"We have been conducting a ‘consumerisation' study with HR, which I think is the right way to do it because there's the people aspect of it as well as the internal IT consideration," says Mundy.

It is, he adds, not just about security, but manageability, covering such simple and mundane things as the interface, if staff wish to connect their iPad or iPhone directly to their PC. The recent change to the connection interface to Apple's products, for example, could prove expensive and wreak havoc in many organisations. Staff sporting new Nokia Lumias, meanwhile, might want Qi-compatible wireless chargers and connection devices instead.

"We are trying to work out how we can do it, rather than why we can't," adds Mundy.

Security, though, remains a major hurdle to BYOD. "We can't allow anything to just connect to our environment when we don't know how well protected it is," says Mundy.

That does not just mean whether the device is protected from malware that it might import from outside the corporate environment - which is a particular problem with Android-based devices - but also the security of data that staff might want to download to their iPad or other tablet computers.

"It's about knowing end-to-end that the machine is secure and has got the right software, the right package and the right version," he says, because even just managing different file formats in the various different complex CAD and engineering packages - even between different versions - can be a challenge. After all, CAD file formats are not as simple as, say, word processor file formats. Indeed, says Mundy, the BIN file extensions environment is a fast-changing target and can be a headache in its own right.

Precision engineering: an interview with BuroHappold IT director Shaun Mundy

BuroHappold's Shaun Mundy tells Graeme Burton how he grapples with Windows, ultrabooks and BYOD policies

Then, of course, there is the issue of software licensing, which Mundy says is “absolutely vital” before even considering BYOD. Although BuroHappold has enterprise-wide licences for its Autodesk and Microsoft software, the company needs to be clear whether the appropriate software can be loaded onto a staff laptop before embarking on BYOD.

“Typically, software licences stipulate that it has got to be in your own environment. That’s one of the areas we are looking at to make sure whether our agreements with such companies, and others, won’t affect us in any way because we need to stay on the right side of the law,” says Mundy.

Encouraging collaboration

Far more important to BuroHappold than tablet computers is the potential for online collaboration with staff located around the world and partners. So the company has implemented Microsoft Lync Server (previously OCS).

“The ability to share desktops with Lync and talk things through without having to set up a conference is all there. And the tools that we have got to set up model replication [in Autodesk Revit Server] really helps as well,” says Mundy.

He adds: “We have deployed that along with Polycom HD Telepresence and Video, which serves voice and video to desktops around the globe. It has been a big bonus.”

While standardising the company’s IT environment around largely Microsoft technologies, it has rejected Microsoft Office 365 as it is too expensive on a per-user basis. “But we are using Office 365 to enable some of our partners to work with us, to ‘federate’ with us and to be able to see when some of our people are available,” says Mundy.

However, that is done on an “as needed” basis, paying the utility rate for Office 365 for partners when they work with BuroHappold on a project.

“What it has done is enable us to tap into utility for the first time and, for particular customers, nobody needs to concern themselves with what they have deployed on their desktop because it can be run in the cloud,” says Mundy.

It’s also interesting, he adds, to observe how heavyweight CAD applications have started to embrace the cloud, with such services as Autodesk 360. These enable users to store design files in the cloud for access anytime, anywhere, and to share the files, too.

It can also provide access to extra computing power to help with complex 3D rendering, design optimisation, energy analysis and structural analysis, for example, thereby speeding up a process that can see even the most powerful of workstations grind to a halt for an hour or more.

Next up on Mundy’s agenda is Windows Server 2012 and, more importantly, Microsoft SQL Server 2012 – both released this summer.

“It’s early days at the moment,” he says. “We are just trying to work out what we should do. If anything, Windows Server is less interesting to us than SQL Server because of its business intelligence capabilities.”

BuroHappold also has a keen interest in the next version of SharePoint Server, Microsoft’s enterprise collaboration software, due to the collaborative and social features that Microsoft is expected to build in following its acquisition of Yammer.

In many respects, the fast development of BuroHappold in recent years mirrors the way in which IT will increasingly support collaboration and drive business – perhaps at the expense of airlines as people work together using internet-based tools instead of rushing to clients whenever the phone rings.