When technology meets art: embracing a digital future at the Southbank Centre

London's Southbank Centre is on course to become the world's most technologically advanced arts complex

Rob Gethen Smith, the first ever CIO of London's Southbank Centre, is working to turn the 21-acre complex into "the most connected arts centre in the world".

"There are plans for everything: the Royal Festival Hall, the Hayward Gallery, Queen Elizabeth Hall, and the Purcell Room, and planning permission is going through in May for the rest of the area. We want to provide a digital campus for digital artists, like the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.

What that means, says Gethen Smith, is that the Southbank Centre will need to be "wired up to the hilt".

"We want it to be the most connected arts centre in the world," he adds. "At the moment there's 10km of copper cable and 1km fibre, but we're moving to 100km of copper and 15km of fibre. And at the moment we have a 100Mbit/s link into this site. We'll easily go to 1Gbit/s in the short term. If you're going to be a space akin to a digital city, you need to be connected."

As one of the most powerful IT leaders in the UK arts world, Gethen Smith is very much the driving force behind the changes.

"There aren't many arts organisations that have C-level technology roles," he says. "The only ones that I know of are the Opera House, which has a CTO, and the Tate, which has an IS director.

"On arriving in December 2012, I joined together public-facing digital and services web sites and third-party websites and digital displays, including the back-end and structure," says Gethen Smith.

"So that's all under one department now, the digital and technology department, rather than IT, which takes care of the plumbing, plus the business systems."

With all this technology in his grip, Gethen Smith has begun working with the centre's head of digital engagement to begin planning the next step.

The plan is to "capture everything" the Southbank does on digital video, from live theatre and music to festivals and exhibitions.

"[Content] will not be just stored on an SD card," he says. "There'll be a whole backend to immediately stream and archive it, producing the surrogate copies you'd need for various different platforms for, say, video on demand on YouTube. There's a lot to do to make it sustainable and affordable."

While the Southbank Centre is 45 per cent funded through Arts Council England grants, Gethen Smith explains that "just running the site" uses all this money up. Monetising so much captured data would help the centre to raise the extra 55 per cent and give it the freedom to "do the fun stuff".

With the site hosting about 2,000 events a year, Gethen Smith is looking at streaming, storing and repackaging an enormous amount of data.

The capacity needed to store everything that happens at the Southbank Centre in just one year is estimated to be 500TB, and even this depends on the video quality captured. Currently, the data centre in the basement of the Royal Festival Hall stores 20TB. Tapes are taken off-site by Recall every week, but it's clearly not enough.

Gethen Smith is implementing a virtualised storage area network from Nimble Storage to help make up the difference, but most of the centre's new storage requirements will be met by the cloud.

"We already use Amazon Web Services for our hosting," he reveals. "We just migrated to it from [Claranet Group company] Star. It's nothing Star couldn't erect themselves, but we're really interested in the cloud opportunity, and needed to modernise the web architecture, and it was just a lot easier to move to the Amazon infrastructure to do that."

When technology meets art: embracing a digital future at the Southbank Centre

London's Southbank Centre is on course to become the world's most technologically advanced arts complex

Gethen Smith says the centre needs a cloud partner that can ramp up its data flow during peak business periods.

"We have loads of people buying tickets at 10am. Amazon allows us to go from medium to extra-large servers, and spins them up in 15 minutes," he says. "We can also watch the dashboards on the website, and can put a waiting room in place if we see the servers really struggling - as opposed to it just falling over, where traditionally we've not done too well in the past."

Amazon's mettle is already being put to the test; after tickets for Yoko Ono's upcoming Meltdown festival went on sale, AWS successfully dealt with a peak of 1,000 customer transactions. "This is at least a ten-fold increase on previous years," says Gethen Smith.

Unboxing the box office

Gethen Smith is also revamping the Southbank's in-house box office software.

Currently, the centre uses the Artifax events planning system to process audience data and logistics. Audience data is also handled by Tessitura, a box office and fundraising application that is owned by its community of users.

"As a licence holder, you're a voting member in terms of decisions made with it," says Gethen Smith. "As with any, system there's loves and hates, but a great sense of community around it."

These two systems are likely to stay in place, but the future of open-source CMS system Drupal, which manages the Southbank's customer websites, is less certain. "It's not yet integrated with our other systems," explains Gethen Smith, adding that the current situation means the centre is missing out on some obvious upselling opportunities.

"When people buy a ticket, they should be able to buy their drinks. It's so obvious, but our systems aren't set up for that yet. There are lots of other ways to add value - the programme, the t-shirt, the pencil, the seat in the restaurant afterwards."

Gethen Smith plans to address this by extracting the box office's e-commerce portion from Drupal, and have it work more harmoniously with the other systems. Gethen Smith also hopes this will enable the box office to make more use of social media.

"We'd like to install friends' recommendations, and target last minute returns to people in the area who've signed up for last minute deals," says Gethen Smith.

"As soon as you start putting some simple numbers behind this, it pays for itself."

Simple but effective security

"Like any big organisation, we have to judge our risk in terms of who we are," says Gethen Smith. "We hold confidential information. First and foremost personal data about the customers, CCTV footage, payment card data, and information on our staff.

"We have a combined privacy, data protection and information security policy. Lots of organisations think those three things should be separate, but when they don't link up, it's very difficult for people to know what they should be doing."

Despite its scope, the policy only takes up two pages of A4. "It's really simple. It's first and foremost about protecting against infringement of privacy, and that's really important to us," he says.

"There is a suspicion generally among consumers that we know everything about them, and that we'll use that to somehow manipulate them. Our agenda is absolutely not that," he stresses.

"We want to explore data and capture as much as we can, but only with transparency and good sense. One of our key sponsors is MasterCard - they'd run a mile if they thought we were doing anything untoward with card or privacy data."

Gethen Smith is planning a huge in-house training drive in the near future, with no external influences to get in the way of the organisation's vision. "A huge section of our audience are digital natives, but the majority of our workforce isn't," admits Gethen Smith. "And if you ask people to use social media, or explore web storage solutions such as Dropbox, they're going to get in a tangle quite quickly. It might take two, three or five years, but we need training systems to do all that."

There's plenty of work to be done, but the Southbank Centre's first CIO seems to have a clear shot towards his goal. As the site physically develops and its internal technology evolves alongside it, the London venue could soon be helping technology meet art in a big way.

@PeterGothard