CIO Interview: Cathal Corcoran, CIO, Gatwick Airport
Corcoran discusses brain scanners, drones, networks refreshes, and using data to sell more whisky
Gatwick Airport started life as the Surrey Aero Club in 1930, a small airfield where enthusiasts putted about in their Gipsy Moth biplanes and similar, a far cry from the international hub which today serves 45 million passengers per year.
Its CIO, Cathal Corcoran is refreshing almost every aspect of the Airport as it grows to meet its demands, with the IT team itself one of the first things he has looked at improving.
Corcoran took the unusual step of refreshing IT talent by first hiring a dedicated technology recruitment team, moving away from the previous policy of using multiple external agencies.
"We needed to refresh talent in IT," said Corcoran. "We needed to hire in highly qualified project managers, proper ITIL-run people, and to bolster our cyber and architecture capability. In some cases we were under-resourced, in others certain functions needed higher-grading of staff. Some of these roles were niche and in high-demand, so the right people were hard to find," he added.
By taking the work in-house and driving it ourselves, we got a much better outcome.
He chose experienced people, some of whom had run their own recruitment firms.
"They were able to sit with us day in day out, and form professional relationships with us. They understood the business and IT context of what we needed, and our culture.
"By taking the work in-house and driving it ourselves, we got a much better outcome."
He explained that previously the organisation had used 13 different external recruitment providers, leaving them "bombarded by CVs" when they wanted to make new hires.
A fresh wave of talent recently arrived at Gatwick Airport
Corcoran added that the organisation used its "innovation pipeline", part of the IT department dedicated to using the latest technology to come up with new tools and ways of working, to attract staff.
"We also used our innovation pipeline to educate the market about what we're doing and why Gatwick is an exciting place to work, and that became an award winning feature."
Brain waves
One of the new initiatives to have emerged from this pipeline is the idea to help security staff recognise potentially dangerous items by analysing their brain waves.
Security staff wear a piece of headgear which measures their brain waves as they watch passengers' bags being scanned - at a faster rate than their conscious brains can register - and a computer recognises the brain wave pattern as the sub-conscious perceives a dangerous item.
Corcoran explained that the machine first needs to be trained on how each person's brain registers certain objects.
When you use it in a lab environment you get around 90 per cent or more accuracy. If you can replicate that in the live environment, that would be special
"A gun for you could be six flicks on the brain wave monitor, whereas for me it could be four," he began. "You have a piece where you train the software at the start, then you can process up to three images per second."
This is three times faster than the current rate, where security staff process around one image per second.
Corcoran added that whilst the system is very accurate in lab trials, it still need to prove itself in the field.
"When you use it in a lab environment you get around 90 per cent or more accuracy. If you can replicate that in the live environment, that would be special, but it needs regulatory approval.
"We're not even at the MVP stage yet, it's early in our innovation pipeline," he said.
Gatwick Airport CIO Cathal Corcoran
Corcoran said that he envisages using the system for quality assurance, that is verifying the findings of security staff scanning in the traditional way, rather than replacing existing techniques.
"Say you've got three people processing one image per second traditionally, you could have a fourth using this system and providing quality assurance for the other three. It's an extra layer of defence, and it'll be there in that capacity until everyone gets used to the technology and the regulators get comfortable."
He admitted that the concept still needs work, with its level of false positives a particular stumbling block currently.
"The thing that needs work is level of false positives. It would be great if you can analyse three images per second with 90 per cent accurancy. But if there are lots of false positives, they all need to be worked through manually which can cause delays, and that needs solving before we can use it in the live environment."
Fighting flight delays with data
Another innovation is the use of data to help lessen the impact of flight delays, something which loses airports revenue, and annoys passengers.
The airport is leveraging data in an attempt to improve the speed with which is ‘turns around' aircraft - unloading passengers and baggage, refuelling, reloading and getting the plane back into the air for its next journey.
Gatwick Airport
Corcoran told Computing that the organisation is using sensors to gather more data to help drive this improvement.
"We're trying to turn aircraft around in thirty minutes," Corcoran said. "Typically you can't turn them around faster. We're putting sensors on everything, and taking the information produced back to our data analytics solutions.
The airport uses Axon AI, a small company which Corcoran states can produce accuracy levels that are significantly more accurate than a human, using just 12 months' worth of data.
"We'll enrich that with the data we get from our sensors, then feed that into our big data analytics solution. That will make us better at predicting our capacity to turn a plane around. The control tower plans on what the analytics system tells it, and pilots schedule the plane to leave at that predicted time.
"Say a plane's coming in late, you want to be able to make that time up. So you want to be able to use a combination of people, processes and technology to help get that plane turned quickly. We now have technology more accurately forecasting what we can do. Can we reschedule that plane going out and avoid delays? Can we get it into the airspace more quickly, and minimise the impact on outbound passengers?
"The accuracy levels we're seeing in the MVP [Minimum Viable Product] phase are encouraging. We'll run the new technology in parallel with the standard process for the next six to twelve months before switching, and deciding to trust what the computer tells us. The early signs are very encouraging," he added.
Corcoran also described the airport's use of data to understand the flow of passengers around the airport, and how that can affect shopping opportunities.
Augmented reality at Gatwick
When we know there are planes flying out to Canada and China, we put a guy in a kilt outside the whisky shop and suddenly it'll sell a lot more.
"We're taking on technology from the retail world, a company called Aisle Labs, which helps us to understand the flow of passengers from the curb to the gate. Where do they dwell, do they turn left or right when the walk in? We use technology which hooks into our Aruba WiFi data and starts to understand where people go, did they stop at a particular place or not? We then hook that into our POS [Point of Sale] data.
"That leads to understandings like the fact that Canadians and Chinese love Scottish whisky. So when we know there are planes flying out to Canada and China, we put a guy in a kilt outside the whisky shop and suddenly it'll sell a lot more. So we then share that information with retailers. The data science and algorithms that sit behind all this have been proven out in over shopping malls across the globe," he said.
But is this technology compliant, given its ability to track individuals?
"It's all built using GDPR complaint technology," Corcoran explained. "It uses anonymised MAC addresses."
The Network
This initiative relies on another key element to have been refreshed recently, the network itself.
The airport spent £15 million on the 18 month project to upgrade the network. Corcoran described the project as his biggest priority and first challenge, after he joined in 2016.
"Previously the network was old, using tier three architecture from BAA [the airports authority which used to own Gatwick]," said Corcoran. "It was clear it wouldn't last much longer, it was really creaking at the seams.
"So we went from the old world to the new world. It's a new fully-meshed spine and leaf architecture, and is around a hundred times faster than it was, and we implemented in in the half the time most other organisations would have taken," he added.
HPE were chosen to supply and support the new network, following a beauty parade of "all the suppliers you'd expect," principally because of its end to end offering.
"There was no service integrator or project partner, it was all HPE wall to wall. It was a simple strategy, with HPE's kit, design, architecture, and HPE's people to install and run it. And because they're also supporting it now that it's live, they've always known that whatever quality they build is the quality they're going to have to run. They also supported the previous network until the new one was ready, which enabled us to minimise the number of suppliers we use.
"We liked the full service offering from HPE, and their flexibility. Not everyone is up for doing a campus-wide network refresh at the pace we wanted, and with the risk profile we were willing to accept."
The project took over 10,000 man hours, with over 20,000 collaborations required. Part of the complexity was that airport operations had to be kept running during the entire project, which enabled any failed switchovers to be rolled back. However, Corcoran added, very few of these were needed.
"Around 96 per cent of implementations went exactly to plan, and the four per cent which didn't were able to be rolled back within the four hour window we had. We had two hours each night to do the switchover, with another two for the rollback if needed. That took a lot of bodies."
Digital tech "a challenge"
Obviously a key advocate of innovation and change, Corcoran nevertheless sees digital innovation as a stumbling block for many CIOs.
Those scars are on my back and the lessons have been learned.
"The technologies emerging now in the digital space are a challenge for most CIOs," Corcoran argued. "Thing like drones, artificial intelligence, machine learning, narrow-band communications and autonomous vehicles - your more traditional CIO will have read about them but won't have real world experience. In an airport environment I've been on a two year learning curve, coming up to speed with all of these technologies, learning where the pitfalls are and applying my experience.
"Drones are great for instance, but they don't fly so well in bad weather and their battery life is limited," he continued. "Fixed-wing drones have benefits, but they can't fly slow enough and stable enough for some of our use cases. Those scars on my back and the lessons have been learned. Lots of CIOs will have to come up to speed with these sorts of things, and they will struggle."
Corcoran also discussed the chief digital officer role, arguing that it should be part of the CIO's remit.
"I don't subscribe to the separation of CDO responsibilities from the CIO role. CIOs need to adapt and become better digital professionals, and to that end CIOs will be asked to become CDOs too. The CTO [Cief Technology Officer] role will however be kept separate especially in engineering-heavy industries. There's clear value in having a CTO that does horizon scanning. But where the CDO role has been split out, I see that merging back over time in many organisations, particularly in small to medium size companies."
In his view traditional CIOs need to adapt to manage digital technologies.
"The CDO role is a coping mechanism for a CIO who has not been able to go after revenue generating opportunities for whatever reason. If you need someone who's an expert in DevOps, that's not necessarily the person doing the heavy lifting on your SAP projects. But that person needs to adapt and learn to do both the more innovative, revenue generating IT and the more traditional IT."
Cloud junkies
He also sees some other technology leaders as "cloud junkies", who use cloud technology when keeping services on premises would make more sense.
Corcoran explained that he's happy to use the cloud for many services, but core processes are likely to remain on premises.
Some organisations are addicted to cloud, says Corcoran
"We use cloud in a pragmatic fashion, so we use it for development, testing, resilience, sales and marketing, business analytics, reporting solutions, finance, procurement and HR. But think about what an airport does. It keeps plans, bags and passengers moving. Those are the three core processes.
"The approach is to keep anything which directly related to those processes on premises. We have a huge engineering capability here at the airport, with access to people that know lots about power, air con and resilience [so we don't need to outsource that expertise]. We try to minmise the number of players and providers in this space."
He added that the airport has used multi-tenanted public cloud in the past, but he feels that the strategy relies on too many different systems to be truly reliable.
"For that to work perfectly you need your telecom providers to work well, the path across internet to work, the hosting firm's telecoms to work, and their data centre support and monitoring not to drop. We have had examples where even in the public cloud using dedicated slices [as opposed to multi-tenanted], you can suffer from noisy neighbours, and we just can't have that. Our operations are too important to us, so we need to keep it close. We use cloud for resilience, and we're very pro-cloud, but not for core services.
"Too many companies are cloud junkies," he continued, reflecting on the 'cloud-first' mantra adopted by some IT leaders. "For a new capability then we apply the cloud-first principle, if it doesn't affect planes, bags or passengers. We try to keep it simple."
Giving a few examples, he explained that the airport uses cloud for its data warehousing requirement and for analytics. "But if it's to do with queue measuring functionality, or the airport operating database, which is our key repository of information, I'd never move that to the cloud."
However, he said that security concerns weren't a factor in deciding to keep core services out of the cloud.
"Quite often cloud providers have better security than you could manage yourself. The reason I don't like critical services in the cloud is purely because there are too many players. There are too many hops and skips; if goes wrong, it's very hard to track down which telecom provider dropped the ball."
Corcoran argued that when firms move to large providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, there are often ten or more providers involved in delivering the final services.
"Look at the sheer number of people invovled and everywhere it can go wrong. You need all your providers to be on top of their game all of them time, so it makes more sense to keep critical stuff on premises."
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