Exit interview: Graeme Hackland, Williams Racing CIO, leaving next month
The outgoing CIO of Williams Racing reflects on two and a half decades in F1
It's never easy to leave a role when you're making a difference - but knowing you've already made one, and are leaving the company in a good place, makes it more palatable.
Graeme Hackland has been the CIO of F1 team Williams Racing for almost nine years, but is leaving next month. His next stop isn't a competing team, though: instead, he's off to Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with Manchester Arena bombing survivor Martin Hibbert, in support of the Spinal Injuries Association. The charity is "close to [Hackland's] heart" due to his personal friendship with both Sir Frank Williams and former colleague Matt King - both of whom have now passed away.
"When they said, ‘Do you want to join Spinal Injuries helping Martin Hibbert get to the summit of Kilimanjaro?' I said yes. And then I thought about it. I don't like hiking. I love running, but I don't hike at all. I'm always cold - since I've moved to England [from South Africa] I've always struggled with the cold, so I'm going to go up a mountain and be freezing. And I don't do camping. I don't like sleeping in a tent. So it's like, why did I sign up for this?"
Despite his reservations, Hackland has spent the last few months climbing mountains across the UK, while Hibbert - who will be in a special mountain trike - has spent his weekends in an altitude chamber, all in preparation for the trek starting in early June.
Hackland's last day at Williams will be the 2nd June, and he is "really proud" of his time with the team. The last eight-and-a-half years have seen new levels of support and investment in IT, moving services to the cloud and scaling up the elastic capability that is so important to F1.
"On a race weekend, so from Thursday to Sunday, the race team needs more compute capacity than you can actually take to the track in the back of a truck or in an aeroplane. We were able to show that with the cloud we could expand almost infinitely - as much as they could use, we could make available to them for three or four days, only pay for it for those three or four days, and then [stop]. You know, all the normal benefits of the cloud that people talk about, but that was real for us."
The Finite Element Analysis (FEA) stress department, which is responsible for making the car chassis as light as possible, is another team that has benefited from elasticity.
"They had jobs that would take six days. We managed to pull that back to three days...just by adopting some cloud compute. And then over time working with them, refining the software, refining how the compute is used. They're now running jobs where they get the result in the same day, and they can then start the next job before they go home, and they come back in the morning [to progress]."
Raising efficiency has been the hallmark of Williams' IT for the better part of a decade, and it's had a host of knock-on effects. Manufacturing enjoys lower production times, which has given the designers more time to work on making the car lighter, and aerodynamics on making it faster.
"There's this constant battle [in F1] of reducing the time that is needed by manufacturing, so that you can spend more time on the creative stuff. We've really focused on that. Those are just some of the things that I'm that I'm really proud of."
Nothing stands still in Formula One
The journey isn't finished. In fact, some of the systems Hackland installed now need to be replaced, because the technology has developed so much. But having spent the last 25 years in F1 (yes, he has a favourite track. Yes, it's Silverstone), he feels it's time to move on. As he puts it, "Nothing stands still for any of us, but definitely not in Formula One."
"I've just gone past 25 years in Formula One...and, I don't know, that just seemed to bug me for some reason, instead of being a good thing... I'm starting to sit in meetings and think, ‘I think I'm done; I don't want to be doing this again'.
"It is all going to be different and there are new technologies coming in, like AI and quantum computing and things, but I think - partly because of the cost cap - maybe they're a little further out than I was hoping."
Other changes at the team, like the sell-off of Williams Advanced Engineering and, of course, the death of founder Sir Frank Williams, also contributed.
"It just felt like the time was right for somebody else to do that next part of the journey... I didn't want to go through another digital transformation at Williams. I've done that step, and now it's someone else's turn to take the next step."
That new person is likely to have more of an operational role: Hackland says his replacement will be "more hands-on" than he is. With that in mind, they're also likely to be known as ‘IT director' rather than CIO. But no matter the title, efficiency will remain a top priority.
"It may well be that it's someone who doesn't have F1 experience, because I don't think they need to. The next phases for the Formula One teams are going to be around driving efficiency, automation in manufacturing, digitising manufacturing, and building that infrastructure - again. We're now eight years into the infrastructure that I put in, and most of that is either being replaced or needs to be; so it's someone who's got their finger on the pulse of what's coming and what the next iterations of technology look like."
Race fast and break things
While past experience as an IT leader will be important, Hackland warns against thinking of the role in the same way as other technical positions.
"As a CIO in a Formula One team, you get involved in so many areas where the only parallels I've seen is other sporting teams: football or rugby or something... When you're working in a sporting organisation, there is that focus that you're a team who are going racing, and through good or bad everyone is working for that single purpose. It shouldn't be multiple teams. Lots of organisations try to create that team dynamic somehow and they call themselves a team, but they might just not succeed in that central focus of what it is they do."
We have a three-year plan but change it every year
Of course, like any CIO or CTO, a certain amount of future-gazing is important, and agility is a must.
"If you're someone who likes long term, who needs a five-year plan, Formula One's probably not for you. We have a three-year plan but change it every year. We are trying to look five years out at what technology is coming, because we don't want to miss something if we can adopt it early, but we are constantly reacting to regulation changes, what our competitors are doing, maybe legislation that's coming in, or some of the sustainability initiatives might change how we operate. I have been involved in all of those things, which maybe CIOs don't get to do in every organisation."
Frustrations with the pace of change are a common complaint among IT leaders, who - always - want to move fast. That's never an issue in F1, where agility is baked in from the start.
"You could never be frustrated with the pace at a Formula One team. But I also think sometimes that means we are not as thoughtful as we should be, sometimes we can't take as much time as you would to consider something. And so we do fall into the fail fast [approach], which is the culture of a Formula One team. You do it with the car, you put something on the car on Friday morning on Free Practice One, if it works it stays, if it doesn't it comes off, and there's that expectation that you will do that almost agile way of working right across the whole organisation. Not all companies have that kind of culture."
That's a lesson that Hackland is taking with him from Williams: after climbing Kilimanjaro, he hopes to help build a school where he was born in KwaZulu-Natal, and is looking at fundraising and NED work. Nothing stands still, indeed.