Interview with Steve Capper, CIO, BAM

The CIO of one of the world's largest construction companies discusses his ambitious programme to centralise IT across 10 federated businesses

What do the V&A building in Dundee, Manchester's Ordsall Chord rail bridge, and the Museum of the Future in Dubai have in common?

The answer is they're all recent construction projects by Royal BAM Group, a 20,000 person company with annual revenues of seven billion Euros, based in the Netherlands, but with hubs all over the world.

The company has its fingers in many pies, with involvement in civil engineering projects including Crossrail in London, and non-residential and residential building projects.

Steven Capper, CIO at BAM, explains that the firm is four years into its five-year strategic plan ‘Building the present, creating the future'.

"We're two years from completion, and we want to accelerate," Capper begins. "Could we go faster if we become more co-ordinated across our businesses?"

Major consolidation

The challenge for Capper is that BAM is a federated organisation, with ten operating companies effectively huddling under one umbrella. Whilst this creates areas of strength especially with local markets, it's less helpful when you have multiple different systems spitting out streams of incompatible data.

"IT has done a good job in all of those businesses. There are no major problems, but if you want to put some financial numbers together it takes time, because you have to gather it all from different systems.

"We want to make sure that all the data we produce are standardised and consistent. What we're not looking to do is start building more dashboards to take different types of data. It makes more sense to have one ERP and one CRM, especially when a lot of our businesses are going to be moving to new releases of their systems, or entirely new versions.

"So let's standardise now."

Capper says his team has spent the last year looking into the many disparate ERP systems in use across BAM's ten main operating companies.

"You can imagine that over the years they've built up bespoke finance and project management systems, or they've got time recorded in a time sheet system, so it won't be consistent across the board. So the end goal is to try and standardise where it makes sense.

"But at the same time our Executive Board asks us to find the balance, because we still want those ten operating companies to differentiate. We actually pride ourselves on our culture of being an entrepreneurial company, and we want people to be able to continue to be innovative.

"So what we're trying to do is globalise where it makes sense but leave certain things local. For example there might be legislation in the UK that tells you you've got to do it this way, so you can't standardise everything."

BAM's ten operating companies are organised in two business lines in each of BAM's five European home countries; one business line for construction and the other for civil engineering. This is another area ripe for consolidation in the field of IT.

"We're also moving towards bringing those businesses together within each country so they're able to support each other with their IT. What we're aiming for is that when you're in one business, and you walk across the road into the other, it's as if nothing has changed, you still can connect and get onto a video conference.

"And you've got to remember that over the years we've built up a series of independent solutions that are only suitable for that business. If you looked at web conferencing up until recently we have nearly every solution going.

"So there's WebEx, GoToMeeting, Skype, you name it, we've got it. We're now moving everyone towards Skype, and that's the strategy across all of our applications.

"We are making a standard catalogue of all of our applications to see what we use today. The next step is to build an app store for our 6,000 applications."

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Interview with Steve Capper, CIO, BAM

The CIO of one of the world's largest construction companies discusses his ambitious programme to centralise IT across 10 federated businesses

He gives the example of a tool to measure wind speed on the top of a building, which might be needed to assess the safety of workers operating at that level.

"We want to have just one tool so we can extract the data and see things like how many people have been injured in the last month. What were the injuries? Can we actually learn from that data to make our people safer?

"The idea is we'll make lots of applications available via this app store, and we'll put a star next to the one which we want people to move to, and shut the others down over time."

Capper expects this to make a big difference to construction sites themselves, which are currently run as further separate businesses, with their own connectivity and IT equipment.

"So with this you go to the construction site, you know you have 100 people to support, and you just order everything you need from the catalogue. That stops you reinventing the wheel every time, and then we get consistent information that we can leverage for better insight."

This policy will also help with BAM's license auditing process, as it will help to understand exactly what is currently in use and where.

"Some software suppliers get in touch quite frequently saying we have a lot of user accounts, whereas nobody internally has been told to use that software, as the standard is Microsoft.

"So the first thing is to give people the tools to make it work. That extends to things like laptops, using Microsoft's out of the box approach. So people get their laptop delivered, connect to the internet at home, type in that they're with BAM, and then all the software and policies download automatically."

Capper and his team are not just looking to simplify the set up process for corporate devices, but to simplify the devices themselves. BAM is one of the world's leading users of DCW, essentially a virtual CAD tool.

This shifts resource hungry software off an individual machine and into the cloud, resulting in a large saving on both the machine in question, and the network it uses.

"There are not many companies who have adopted DCW globally, and we've just invested 12 million Euros in it to give people a virtual CAD environment so that they're not shifting large files backwards and forwards. That also means they don't need a hugely powerful machine."

He adds that the savings on bandwidth and hardware should lead to a return on that investment within three years.

Further consolidation is expected in BAM's data centres, with the current number of more than ten expected to go down to just two, European politics notwithstanding.

"We're trying to consolidate down to just two or three locations, but obviously we don't know what's going to happen with Brexit.

"So we have a data centre in London and one in Amsterdam, those will be the new primary and secondary data centres. However, depending on what happens with Brexit we may need to do something like shift the kit to Germany. We'll see what happens, we're keeping it under constant review."

Capper acknowledged however that this is a longer term project.

"We have a five year plan for this because obviously you can't just rip everything out and start again. But as things depreciate we're going to start to consolidate those systems into the two or three core data centres."

All of this means that lots of existing infrastructure and systems will eventually be decommissioned, or otherwise exit the business.

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Interview with Steve Capper, CIO, BAM

The CIO of one of the world's largest construction companies discusses his ambitious programme to centralise IT across 10 federated businesses

Inevitably that means that many jobs will fundamentally change, a cultural shift which can scupper the most well designed strategy.
Capper admits that there have been concerns amongst staff, but that jobs will actually expand in scope and improve, rather than shrink or disappear.

"You can imagine people get nervous because it's their system that's going away. We're saying you're now part of the global team that can build your skills to look after systems for a seven billion Euro company, orders of magnitude bigger than where they are now.

"So whilst we're doing this whole transition involving 350 people in IT, we've gone on record to stay that nobody will be made redundant.

"Because we probably need more people and maybe some in a different field, compared with what we have today. So you can grow your career in IT with BAM and find new opportunities. This is not an exercise to cut costs or to remove people."

And Capper is ensuring that the message sticks by regularly communicating it to staff, and giving them the opportunity to have their say.

"We've started a monthly webinar, which is where we broadcast a newscast to all IT staff. We explain what we're doing with our projects and what we're going to do with our people. BAM is a really nice company, we care about our people, and care about their safety. It's the best place I've worked from a people perspective."

Hacking your own organisation

He may think highly of the organisation, but one of the first things he did when he joined BAM was to attack it, or at least organise a team of white hats to attempt to break in, a practice he recommends for other IT leaders.

"When I first joined I organised a hack. So some guys walked into our headquarters, straight into the canteen, and then helped themselves to the upper floors tailgating people.

"They ran through a series of tasks, obviously hacking into our systems and getting into certain areas. Thankfully, they got locked out of a lot of the more sensitive stuff.

"But that process is something that I would recommend to most CIOs because it gives you some insight into a few areas where you need to tighten up. It's an experience, because these guys can take photographs of people's badges and create their own and make it look like they're a legitimate employee."

Capper used an outside firm for this penetration testing, which employed sub-contractors for some of the on-site work. He adds that the facility is far more physically secure now.

"If you go to our headquarters now you can't get on certain floors without swipe cards, and you have to wear a lanyard. We also tightened up on passwords."

He explains that security at BAM has matured as a result of the activity, with some senior staff left shocked at what the hackers were able to do.

"We learned so much from that experience, seeing what they could get their hands on. They took a picture of me from my webcam. At BAM we actively provide webcam covers. It was amazing how they managed to elevate their access rights once they got in to certain systems. We've shut off those channels now, so it can't happen for real.

The more general rules are passed back to the user base, and Capper classifies security as something which can't be left to the individual businesses to run.

"And that's something around which we allow no compromise. We've set up a core security function now that works with partners like the Dutch cybercrime unit, or with the UK government, to make sure that we stay on top of the latest threats because we get attacked on a daily basis.

"Previously each business had its own security practises and people. That's not where you need to be for a company of our size, so we addressed that."

It's refreshing to see such a wide-scale consolidation not being used as an excuse to force redundancies through. And with the ten operating companies running well, with the prospects of becoming more standardised whilst offering career growth to their staff, everything appears to be set up for success in the coming years.

Computing will revisit this transformation in the coming months to report on its progress.