Constructing a cloud-based IT strategy: an interview with Aggregate Industries CIO Mike Gibbons

Gibbons says decisions including replacing IBM with Qlik and dropping Microsoft in favour of Google are boosting efficiency at the building materials firm

Aggregate Industries might not be a household name, but as one of the UK's leading quarry operators and suppliers of construction and building materials, its products have been used in the making of many iconic structures.

The Shard, the Olympic Stadium and Blackfriars Bridge are just some of the feats of construction that were accomplished using products from Aggregate Industries, part of the larger LafargeHolcim group, which also owns Lafarge Tarmac.

With bases across mainland Europe and Scandinavia and more than 60 quarries across the UK, Aggregate Industries has a turnover of around £2bn.

It is CIO Mike Gibbons and an IT team of 70 who are tasked with managing the firm's enterprise technology.

"I'm responsible for the IT that's delivered, but also I have a remit for delivering value, whether that comes from delivering new technologies or getting the best of out of existing technologies," he tells Computing. That, Gibbons explains, means Aggregate has recently "been on quite a trail of embracing cloud-based solutions".

One of those is Qlik's QlikView business intelligence dashboard, which Aggregate has adopted as a replacement for IBM's Cognos BI platform.

Gibbons says the move away from Cognos was triggered by a desire for the company to better exploit its data.

"We wanted to encourage a change of culture where our users and our business saw more value in our data assets, or actually even viewed them as an asset," he says.

"We're an organisation that's very physical; we blast rock out the ground and we crush it and people here can see a value in those physical assets. But it's much harder for that perception to be translated to data."

Ease of use

Gibbons says QlikView allows Aggregate staff to make better use of business intelligence.

"The things that really made the difference was it was easy to use. It could handle large chunks of information and do it quickly," says Gibbons, who describes the speed of deployment when compared with the weeks it took to deploy IBM as "as a real contrast".

"You could deploy in hours," he says.

QlikView also brought the benefit of being "cheaper to run" and allowed "our BI guys to spend less time developing and more time delivering", says Gibbons, adding that it was a "no brainer" to run all of Aggregate's business intelligence on the platform.

"It's the first point of call, if somebody needs a view, they either go to the app and if it still doesn't give them the view, we develop it or produce a new one," says Gibbons.

"Now we have a tool that's responsive, easy to use and we can deploy something if there's a tool missing, it's helped change the culture," he adds.

The deployment has been so successful for Aggregate Industries that Gibbons is looking to extend the use of Qlik's Sense platform to provide analytics on mobile devices, especially the tablets that have recently be issued to a team of sales representatives. The reason for this deployment, Gibbons explains, was that staff never really took to using laptops.

"We felt that our sales managers never really embraced the concept of laptops, they underutilised the product in different areas," he says, describing how the combination of Qlik Sense and a tablet means he has "high hopes it can transform the way our sales managers show information and products".

The policy represents a shift in the way Aggregate manages IT.

Aggregate on Android

"This is a new step for us in terms of giving more power to the end user. I believe we've got to make more steps forward in our culture, we've got to start empowering and trusting our employees with better tools," Gibbons says, explaining how this fits in with a wider digital mobilisation initiative that has seen travelling sales personnel issued with Samsung Android tablets.

"You'd find the laptops had been rattling around in their boot, they wanted something instant," he says, going on to explain why Android was chosen over Apple.

The lower cost of Android was an "obvious benefit", especially given that sales staff will often venture into "hostile" environments such as quarries, factories and plants, which could result in damage to devices. "The lifespan of a tablet in our industry is shorter than others," he says.

The reception to the Samsung tablets has been positive. "They did everything they wanted and a little bit more," Gibbons says, describing how the Google-powered Android operating system fits in with the rest of Aggregate's Google For Enterprise ecosystem.

"We've done quite a number of mashup applications using Google and Qlik and that really helps us with Android devices," he says.

According to Gibbons, Aggregate "very much used to be a Microsoft house" but after three years of lobbying on his part, the firm now bases its enterprise ecosystem on Google.

Describing working with Google as a "very agreeable partnership", Gibbons explains Aggregate has trained non-IT staff to be "Google Guides" and help expand the use of the software among 4,000 users across 260 sites.

"It's very good and worked very, very well," he says, adding moving to Google was "the most effective, value-adding move for us".

The increase in the use of mobile and collaborative technology like Hangouts has also led Aggregate to do everything it can to ensure cyber security is as strong as it can possibly be.

Top-down security strategy

"Security is really high on our agenda. We're doing lots of work reviewing our compliance all the time, but we're also looking at behaviour and safety. I think we've got the right tools there, but we're focused on awareness," says Gibbons, who describes a company-wide video initiative designed to drive home the security message.

"We actually created a character to really bring it home to people that they're at risk, not just at work but in their own personal lives. We're trying to raise awareness and change behaviour," he explains, adding how "the challenge is at the senior level, getting the senior level engaged and changing their behaviour".

"If you go on the basis that the senior team is carrying the most valuable information, their behaviour becomes critical; how they behave with emails, how they behave with passing information, how they behave when they travel," he explains.

"If you look at it from that perspective, ensuring your senior team is acting in the right way, it ensures the information is protected and you can spend the money in the areas you need it. If you need it for encryption, it's fine," Gibbons adds.

However, risk management isn't just limited to cyber security; it applies to every decision involving enterprise technology across the business.

"The biggest thing we've got to contend with is business risk. We've got to ensure as we go through these change programmes we're minimising risk and delivering value. Even if the projects go well, the biggest burden is on the users, engagement has to be complete and the accountability is very well defined," says Gibbons.

"There's a lot of work to be done," he concludes.