CIO interview: Carl Stokes, head of IT at NHBC

Stokes discusses digital opportunities for his business, including exploring augmented reality via a Microsoft HoloLens

Carl Stokes, head of IT and business programme management at construction standards body NHBC, talks to Computing about innovation.

Stokes explains that his policy is to explore new technologies, and fail fast, or operationalise any experiement which is found to be useful.

"There are a lot of technologies coming together to create disruption," says Stokes. "We're looking at a whole bunch of stuff, incliding a Microsoft Holo Lens which we bought to have a look at augmented reality. We want to explore as many technologies as possible, then when we find something we think is interesting, we want to build a prototype really quickly.

"We've got into this cycle where it's okay to experiment, it's okay to spend a bit of money looking at a different technology. Spin something up, show it to people, work out if it's got any value or traction at NHBC, and then operationalise it if necessary.

"As an example, we recently put some technology together to allow our claims department to do some triage for any issues that home owners have got, without having to send a claims investigator to the house. it's really simple, it's just video. It allows the home owner to use their phone without any clients, they don't need FaceTime or Skype, they just click on a link, and it records the video back at base.

"So the technology we explore ranges from something fairly simple like that, through to launching a complete mobile inspection service using Panasonic ToughPads, which is coming out in the summer.

"So digitilisation and innovation is top of the agenda," he concludes.

In a previous video, Duncan Stott, CIO of engineering group Kier, explains why CIO is "the best job in the world".