Driving insights from data at BAM

Computing speaks to Kate Collins, Director of Strategic IT Delivery, and Steve Capper, CIO, at construction firm Royal BAM Group

Most people are familiar with the psychology of limitations - the counterintuitive idea that complete freedom is actually crippling. The concept is most stark for the writer, staring at a blank page, stymied by the universe of possibilities they face.

Whilst limitations promote creativity, they also aid focus, which is essential when you're faced with almost 200 IT projects all vying for prominence in a full-to-bursting pipeline.

That's the situation which Kate Collins, Director of Strategic IT Delivery at construction firm BAM, was confronted with recently. With more than 350 projects either ongoing or about to start, she could see the urgent need to prioritise.

Adding complexity to the mix, BAM runs in a federated way, with ten operating companies, known as ‘opcos', serving clients in their own national construction or civil engineering markets.

CIO Steve Capper is working to bring BAM's operating companies further together, albeit whilst retaining aspects of their strengths and individuality.

Computing recently published a full interview with Capper.

Prioritising IT projects

BAM's response to this need to prioritise has been to create a new department called ‘Strategic IT Delivery'. The department employs around 40 project managers around the globe.

"In January we did our first global workshop in which we identified the full global portfolio of projects", Collins begins. "That gave us insight into the 175 projects currently being executed, and 196 in the pipeline, just waiting to be started.

"There's a very rapid rate of these projects going from pipeline into execution, with around six new project requests per week", she adds.

With this large volume of projects and swift timescales, Collins recognises the challenge, and explains that the individual operating companies under the BAM umbrella do some of the prioritisation work themselves.

"We're working through the prioritisation needs now we know the size of the problem. And there are still governance models in each of our opcos. They determine which projects go ahead, we don't yet have the ability to manage that centrally.

"Each operating company has its own must-win battles and key goals, and IT has to marry up to that. That makes portfolio management quite difficult when we've all got different priorities.

"But within that first workshop, we actually went through and identified where there was overlap, and where we potentially would benefit from coming together as a Group. And we managed on that very first day to reduce the project count by 12 per cent.

"It was really positive to have that success in the very first workshop."

She explains that there is an array of programmes and projects of all types currently executing.

"That could be like a global ERP or a large infrastructure project, or a smaller digital project. We're involved, for example in developing the technology of automatic asphalt damage recognition and so taking the next step towards the digitalisation of infrastructure asset management.

"And we also work side by side with our digital construction community. They look at the innovation and the construction execution.

"So we have to technically deliver the back-end for a lot of the digital construction projects as well."

Capper adds some examples, explaining that the ultimate aim is to get to a point where BAM can sell on some of its services and experience in IT to other organisations - monetising its expertise.

"That's where we're getting involved in sensors in roads, or innovation around data analytics, make it a platform that might be so we might be able to resell to other companies.

Collins explains how the broader IT team works with the smaller digital construction teams.

"An example is Microsoft's HoloLens. The digital construction colleagues worked with Microsoft to deliver them out to construction sites. But when it comes to physically rolling it out or hosting it, then IT would be involved.

[Turn to next page]

Driving insights from data at BAM

Computing speaks to Kate Collins, Director of Strategic IT Delivery, and Steve Capper, CIO, at construction firm Royal BAM Group

Capper continues: "So we're all side by side and we work together really well. We're creating an enterprise App Store which staff go to in order to find all the applications they need. We're all trying to help the company to be successful."

He explains that his team gets involved in a variety of work across the business, including BAM's construction and maintenance projects.

"For one of our airport projects we are involved in all the asset tracking and understanding where maintenance might be needed. And it might be something mundane, like when an airplane turns up and the passengers disembark, you might turn the pumps up in the toilets near that gate and turn them down somewhere else.

"But there are more sophisticated tasks too, like capturing lots of information about the airport and using AI to help understand what needs maintenance and when. How long did we leave that part of the airport last time before we went in and changed 6,000 bulbs?

"That's the area we want to grow in. A good 60 to 70 per cent of the IT team are in what I would class as traditional IT. Things like end user support, storage networks, cloud, Skype, VDI, security. And now we're trying to say, ‘How do we grow our capabilities in digital to help us be the port of call when we win a project? And it might be sensor based, it might be analytics, it might be something completely different."

Driving insight with Business Intelligence (BI)

This sort of intelligence has very obvious value right across the business, and the demand for dashboards offering these types of insights is spreading at BAM.

"Everybody in the business is on board with the idea that data are the new gold, and they're all looking for dashboards. They're all either doing something ‘BI-lite' themselves, or looking to us to build out proper capabilities to help them get more insight into all this data we have.

"If we maintain something for 25 years, the insight you get from the data around its maintenance can be invaluable, especially because the client will want you to innovate and evolve as time goes on.

"We don't just want to build something, we want to build an asset and maintain it. So we might build a tunnel, and we might invest in it so we've got skin in the game. We might maintain it for 25 years, so there's an incentive then to keep costs down so we can all share the savings. That means we're driven to find better ways to use our data."

Capper explains that he has around 30 people involved in BI across the Group just in IT - not including those within the end user community who are experimenting with dashboards.

"But overall we see BI as the way we can drive efficiencies in a low-margin industry like construction."

With this tight focus on project prioritisation and data-driven insights, it's clear that BAM sees IT very much as an innovation engine, and one which can positively affect the bottom line.

The days of IT being widely seen a cost centre are very much over.