2020 vision: Atkins CIO and CDO on his aim to transform the engineering juggernaut by 2020

By the start of the next decade, Richard Cross wants Atkins to move all of its systems to the cloud, and be 'digital by default'

When Richard Cross joined design, project management and engineering consultancy Atkins in February 2014, after stints as group CIO at Arup and group technology director at ITV, little did he know that more than a year later his role would be expanded from group CIO to include the additional responsibilities of a chief digital officer (CDO).

His new, expanded role would involve leading the development and integration of new emerging technologies across the firm, as well as helping develop technology solutions for clients. Cross says that the role of the CDO forms part of an overarching strategy for the firm to become "digital by default" by 2020.

But much unlike the role of the CIO, or indeed many other IT roles, the CDO is interpreted quite differently in each organisation. While some believe the CDO is more of a marketing role, others insist the role belongs in IT. Either way, Cross believes that CIOs are in a great position to also be considered CDOs because of their knowledge and background in technology.

"A lot of [CIOs] are trusted to look after the plumbing, but [the CDO] role gives them the opportunity to maintain that trust and also move into a new space which is more about being creative and innovative and driving new business value internally," he tells Computing.

He acknowledges the idea that some CIOs may not be comfortable in taking up a CDO role - but insists that his background is ideal for the appointment, having led transformational type projects in the past both within IT and within the business.

Indeed, Cross sees the CDO as a progressive step forward for CIOs.

"I think that if we [CDOs] are successful, then everything we will do will be digital, so why not have a CDO rather than a CIO?" he says. "A lot of the things traditional CIOs have done, such as looking after systems in-house, is changing. With everything moving to the cloud it is less about running the infrastructures, data centres and the WANs; our plan is not to have any data centres by 2020. So the skills and functions you provide are quite different.

"Could you label that role as a CIO in five years' time? I guess so, but I think a CDO would be a better title."

Cross encourages CIOs to explore new technologies and develop the necessary skills in order to be a CDO, because he says "that's what's going to be the norm in five years' time".

"I don't think it is a one-off change," he says. "There will be new technologies and disruptors all of the time. You only have to look at Airbnb and Uber, where big organisations stopped responding or didn't respond quick enough. You have to keep being responsive."

Engineering its way to the cloud by 2020

When Cross joined Atkins, the company was looking at where it wanted to be in 2020. One of the key areas, he says, was ensuring that all of the company's systems are in the cloud in five years' time.

He suggests that the firm would not switch overnight but would instead take a hybrid approach as a stepping stone. He puts the five-year time plan down to both the complexity of migrating away from on-premise systems and because cloud offerings were not mature enough yet to hold sensitive data.

"Some services are ready now. Things like moving to Office 365 are a bit more mature now, whereas specialist tools such as those in building information modelling (BIM) have had to run on big powerful PCs [up until now], so it's not the easiest thing to [migrate] to the cloud," he says.

Cross believes that the cloud can be safe enough for all of the company's systems, and points to examples of the CIA and Ministry of Defence benefitting from using cloud storage.

"Some of our clients who have sensitive data see the benefits of the cloud and are looking to establish secure environments that comply with all of the security constraints," he says.

"For me it is no different - the roles and the constraints apply to data wherever it may be. Whether it is in the data centre or the cloud, you have to make sure there is no compromise on that."

The firm works with Autodesk, which provides it with 3D software, and Cross sits on the company's cloud council, where he is trying to encourage the firm to move its tools into the cloud.

"I prefer to leverage its investment and strategic change, and it wants to make that move so that it benefits us rather than us trying to do it ourselves," he says.

Autodesk has made a number of acquisitions in the cloud space in order to make that leap, and Cross believes it is only a matter of time before the company starts to become more of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor.

He says that the use of cloud would make a huge difference to the way Atkins works on large-scale projects.

"We have a model where we try to have distributed working, so when we take on a large project such as a metro project in the Middle East, we work alongside a number of countries across the world and we have a global design centre in Bangalore," he says. "We want all of those teams to work together on a single project, so having it all in the cloud allowing access to it is the perfect way of allowing that type of collaboration."

Cross adds that Autodesk has made significant strides in the last few years, allowing its application to be used on iPads so that staff can look at the model onsite, but there is even more to look forward to in the future, he says.

"There is talk about 4D, 5D and 6D which look at things like time dimensions which are really exciting things we're looking to exploit," he says.

This along with virtual reality in order for employees to walk through a model of the site and feel it, and the use of drones for surveying, are also being looked at.

Currently, quantity surveyors go to a site with a piece of paper and pen and note down what they can see, but Cross believes drones could be an option for large-scale projects.

"You can imagine on a big site or on a road we can fly a drone over it and scan the area, and in a few seconds you can get a picture of everything on the site," he says.

"If you flew a drone over a site every day you could see what has changed, what has been done, what hasn't been done, what has been completed and those sorts of things - so it would be a tool to improve efficiency and get people focused on more value-added activities such as design."

Designing new ways of working

Cross describes the firm's traditional projects as "long, thin projects" which went on for years. The firm is now shifting to "short, fat projects" - using agile methodologies.

"We want digital and agile to be the default way of working," he says. "There is an argument about whether it can apply to everything; can it apply to a core network switch for example? We need to look into that, but generally that's our focus. We want to use digital ways of working to develop systems and engage the rest of the business."

He emphasises that it is essential that the whole organisation works in a lean and agile way.

"There is no point us changing in information services and no one else changing in the business," he says. "A good example of that is that our investment committee, which I chair, has decided that we're only going to sign off investments in three-month chunks.

"So rather than saying you have two years for a project, it is about saying you have three months to deliver some value and that helps us to work in a more agile and responsive way."

And with new technologies comes the need for new skills. Atkins has trained a lot of its existing staff over the last six months.

"We've gone through our strategy in a transparent way to involve staff at every step of the process, so they can understand what we're going to do and see how they can contribute to the journey," Cross says. "We have a good programme for training for things like agile - and getting people exposed to how it works and we've had successes around that."

The firm also had several shadow IT groups across the organisation that were successfully working in more "digital" ways with Atkins' clients. The company has now brought these teams inside to the central information services team, so that it can learn from them.

Cross is relishing the challenge of transforming the company by 2020. He goes as far to say that in all of his career, it's the most exciting time to work in IT.

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