Focusing on the future: an interview with British Gas CIO David Cooper

British Gas has already started shifting towards the cloud, unlocking the benefits of data analysis and developing a talent pipeline

With more than a decade's experience at the top of the IT ladder, David Cooper is still relishing his time as CIO at British Gas where he has spent the past four years. He maintains that while many CIOs shift between roles every three or four years, he is happy to remain where he is as long as there is still work to be done and a challenge to go along with it.

"It depends on the business and the challenge; I worked at Three UK for seven years and what happened is that my role expanded from being the CIO to the CTO in that time," Cooper says.

"It depends whether there is anything left to do and at British Gas there has been a considerable amount of change so who knows what the future holds - it is still interesting to do. What drives people like me is that we've had an incredible four years and transformed the business in terms of our IT and people have got a real buzz out of fixing it and out of the new things that we do," he adds.

A lot of the focus for Cooper's team is on the future - on things like smart metering and connected homes - new technologies that enable new services and a different kind of interaction with British Gas customers.

He defends the smart metering programme in the UK, which has been criticised heavily, saying it will bring an end to the many complaints British Gas gets about estimated billing - which is based on past usage and the size of any particular house.

"Usually we're reasonably accurate but it does depend on who lives in their house and what their pattern is," he says.

"Smart meters solve this problem and consumers don't have to take a day off of work. It also enables a whole set of other solutions - we have a lot of data, we can tell you what you're using on gas, how much energy you use to heat water, how much electricity you're using and we can try and point you towards where you can save energy," Cooper adds.

Cooper explains that British Gas's wider strategy is to unlock the potential of its many data sources.

"If you look at the sheer volume of data that Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn have, we face the same problem as them as we have a lot of customer data," he says.

"We've started massive programmes that are not completed, but we've got a Hadoop data lake live and we're using some of the big data solutions that have spawned out of the social media side of the internet to analyse all our data," he adds.

The firm took an interest in Hadoop because it is open source, and Cooper says that it is one of several open-source solutions that the company is using.

"Now typically we might buy a supported version, so we use, for instance, the Hortonworks version of Hadoop, but it is all leveraged in that open-source environment," he says.

British Gas has a number of separate businesses, from central heating and drains to energy supply and service and repair. Cooper explains that each of those businesses traditionally had some sort of silo and their own data warehouse but that this would now change.

"We're bringing in a lot of this data now, along with this extra data from smart meters, and it's starting to allow us to make better business decisions, and we can open up a lot of the data to the enterprise," he suggests.

One example would be of repair teams having been sent more information about customers such as what services they buy, what energy they use, when they had last contacted British Gas and more - enabling a better interaction.

As Dee Mitra, head of big data solutions at British Gas, explained earlier this year at the Hadoop Summit 2015, the firm is now at the monetisation stage.

"We are using data not only for our customers' benefit but also for our own so we can sell better services to our customers and partners and optimise our engineering works," she said, explaining that as well as an energy supplier Centrica - British Gas's parent company - is also an insurance and engineering services provider, giving opportunities for cross-selling.

Putting all of its energy into the cloud

Cooper believes that British Gas will eventually move all its systems to the cloud. He says that currently, the firm has some applications running in Amazon, others in a HP virtual private cloud, and it also has an existing deal with Microsoft Azure.

"We have things in all places but we have some things which are still left on physical hardware at the moment - they are of a massive scale; SAP says we are one of the biggest SAP utility instances in the world and the cloud providers aren't really ready for this yet because of the SLAs that you'd want wrapped around this," he says.

He states that shifting towards the cloud was mainly a "timing issue".

"[Cloud providers] will get there, and they will be able to underwrite the SLAs that they need, over the next several years - even SAP itself would [currently] struggle with the size of our SAP instance on its cloud environment because we've had that discussion; it's just a matter of time and maturity," Cooper explains.

No issues finding talent

Cooper says that British Gas has no problems in hiring the right skills, and this he says is down to a change in strategy.

"We used to rely on the contract market quite a lot and we were causing some of our own issues, but we have reversed that and put in place an apprenticeship scheme which has been highly successful. We've revamped our graduate recruitment as well, which again has been very successful," he states.

What works, he says, is mapping out career paths for the individuals and having the right level of mentoring inside the business.

"We have links with universities that we've established and we're taking quite a few graduates in - they do a year in industry in which you can imagine they pick up a huge amount of knowledge and it provides us with a proving ground and recruitment mechanism," he explains.

The firm is also taking in more summer students than ever before as it shifts its strategy to developing new talent rather than bringing in external skills.

"It's about having a much more balanced approach, an exciting approach - the [new talent] actually want to stay and finish things off, and there are opportunities to grow in the organisation. It's amazing what you can do with a lot of fresh talent, the things you can tackle and the new problems you need to solve," he says.

Cooper says he is resigned to losing some employees but states that he wants employees to stick round at British Gas, much in the same way that he has.

"Why do CIOs move on? Because you need some fresh thinking, a different way of viewing things and the same goes for everyone in the organisation - they need to move to get the stimulation," he says.