Interface magazine – July 2019

T E C H / T E L C O / F I N T E C H / D I G I TA L I S AT I O N / A I / M A C H I N E L E A R N I N G

Issue 4 / July 2019 / www.theinterface.net

5 influential blogs and resources for CIOs

CLICKS AND MORTAR

Director of Digital Services at Staffordshire University, Andrew Proctor, explains how digital is leading the way at one of the UK’s emerging tech powerhouses…

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EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS

SNAPLOGIC:HOW AI CAN HELP TACKLE THE SKILLS GAP

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Welcome to the July issue of Interface magazine!

This month’s cover centres around Staffordshire University, one of the UK’s emerging tech powerhouses. We catch up with Andrew Proctor, Director of Digital Services, who talks about the digital transformation he has overseen there.

For a sector steeped in tradition, it’s perhaps not surprising that higher education has taken longer than most industries to wake up to the digitisation of operations and offerings that have disrupted virtually every other market. However, with rising customer expectation linked to increased fees, and a battle to establish points of differentiation in a highly competitive marketplace, higher education has had to respond to the changing needs of the client, and nowhere is that more evident than at Staffordshire University.

Director of Digital Services at Staffordshire University, Andrew Proctor, is the man who has spearheaded a massive digital revolution in an attempt to truly harness digital. “If you compare higher education to a lot of the modern digital era organisations or companies, universities can be obsessed with physical assets such as buildings; a new building being a sign of a healthy university,” he explains. “Now, I’m not saying that buildings aren’t a part of that future, they absolutely are, but we are developing what we call a ‘clicks and mortar’ strategy that delivers the best of the physical and the digital. It’s that harmony between your physical infrastructure and your online presence.”

We also hear from Craig Stewart, Vice President of Product Management at SnapLogic, who addresses how tech can provide some of the solutions to the global skills gap. Plus, lots, lots more, including our guide to the world’s best events and conferences.

I hope you enjoy the issue!

EDITOR IN CHIEF Andrew Woods CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Dale Benton Kevin Davies CREATIVE LEAD Mitchell Park SNR. PROJECT DIRECTORS Andy Lloyd Heykel Ouni PRESIDENT & CEO Kiron Chavda

– A ndrew Woods, Editor in chief content@b2e-media.com

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64 5 INFLUENTIAL BLOGS AND RESOURCES FOR CIOS

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EVENTS

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Frank Vorrath, Executive Partner: Supply Chain for Chief Supply Chain Officers and Chief Operating Officers, Gartner

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH SAM ACHAMPONG REGIONAL HEAD & GENERAL MANAGER, MENA A

el McElroy, Sales Marketing Director oud specialists CranGroup

Dr. Marcell Vollmer, Procurement Influencer and SAP Ariba’s Chief Digital Officer

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Director of Digital Services at Staffordshire University, Andrew Proctor, explains how digital is leading the way at one of the UK’s emerging tech powerhouses… or a sector steeped in tradition, it’s perhaps not surprising that higher education has taken longer than most industries to wake up to the digitisation of operations and offerings that have disrupted virtually every other market. However, with rising customer expectation linked to increased fees, and a battle to establish points of differentiation in a highly competitive marketplace, higher education has had to respond to the changing needs of the client, and nowhere is that more evident than at Staffordshire University.

Director of Digital Services at Staffordshire University, Andrew Proctor, is the man who has

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S TA F F O R D S H I R E U N I V E R S I T Y

spearheaded a massive digital revolution in an attempt to truly harness digital. “If you compare higher education to a lot of the modern digital era organisations or companies, universities can be obsessed with physical assets such as buildings; a new building being a sign of a healthy university,” he explains. “Now, I’m not saying that buildings aren’t a part of that future, they absolutely are, but we are developing what we call a ‘clicks and

mortar’ strategy that delivers the best of the physical and the digital. It’s that harmony between your physical infrastructure and your online presence.”

An alumnus of the university himself, Proctor is keen to establish Staffordshire University as a tech leader within the HE sector.

Staffordshire University has a rich heritage in technology and was one of the first in the UK to launch a computing degree. However, modern times had seen the university lose its way a little; languishing in the league tables until the arrival in 2016 of new

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Less chit chat, more chatbot.

Chatbots are taking the student experience to a whole new level.

Empower them to engage better with life on campus and connect more deeply with the university experience.

What are you waiting for?

Join the trailblazers at ans.co.uk

G A M E S D E S I G N AT STA F FO R D S H I R E U N I V E R S I T Y : C O N N E C T TO YO U R F U T U R E

Vice Chancellor Liz Barnes who immediately set an exciting new direction and recruited the team, including Proctor, to deliver it. The digital programme established by Andrew Proctor, and heavily supported by his Vice Chancellor has been a guiding force behind the university’s elevation, seen in higher rankings, nationally and globally and numerous awards as the university becomes a flagship establishment for digital innovation as part of a massive digital transformation. Indeed, Staffordshire

University was the first in Europe to fully migrate to the cloud and is one of only three universities in the world to be granted Microsoft Innovative Institution status.

“The impact of things like artificial intelligence and automation of jobs, is expected to have quite a profound effect,” says Proctor. “But a lot of research actually suggests that across education there’ll be a net gain from what people call the fourth industrial revolution. And the reason behind that is, as companies start to w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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“ w e are developing what we call a ‘clicks and mortar’ strategy that delivers the best of the physical and the digital” Andrew Proctor Director of Digital Services Staffordshire University

make more use of AI, they can probably shrink the size of their workforce, which typically means they’ll be able to sell products and services cheaper, which will ultimately mean more money and time available for the general public. And the things that people tend to want time and more funds for, are things like health care, travel and education.”

A DIGITAL EDUCATION Proctor believes that higher education has lagged behind digitally-led 14

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enterprises in one key area.

“Successful digital companies offer products and services that very much adapt themselves around customer needs and requirements and higher education hasn’t yet faced up to that challenge. We take £9000 pounds a year off our students and then we expect them to adapt to our timetable and our way of delivering courses.” With that in mind, Proctor spun the bottle 180 degrees with the university’s latest offering. With many students experiencing stress and

anxiety when starting higher education, often far from home, Beacon AI is a smartphone app that acts as a virtual life coach. Helping the university’s 15,000 students to organise their diary, alerting them to lectures, and supporting them in revision, Beacon AI also acts as a gateway to pastoral care that many students are often not confident enough to seek. It’s an AI-driven digital aid, hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform that complements the entire student experience. “The guiding

ethos of AI is that it’s human-centric and can actually free up time for staff and students so that they can spend more of their time building social connections, engaging in activities, and just doing things that are far more interesting to them,” Proctor explains. “We think we can actually increase your social activity and motive relationships that people have via the use of AI, rather than the idea of AI being this cold thing that replaces relationships and makes us quite insular and secluded.” w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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campus

Supporting Students through every stage of their journey From recruitment to retention, alumni and beyond, build your digital relationships with campusM

Leading digital transformation with innovative solutions Mobilising existing investments Cost effective attendance capture Integration with core services Simple administration In-built analytics Exceptionally engaging cross platform experience Empowering students with integrated workflows

www.campusM.com

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Beacon AI can provide nurturing to learning, organisational help and emotional support. Should a student lose their ID card, Beacon can initiate a replacement, thus saving a certain amount of stress on behalf of the user. Its biggest boon is to learning, however. “The coaching area is this idea of incentivising and using nudge techniques to guide students towards activities that will benefit them and likely help their levels of achievement,” Proctor enthuses. “We can use things such as gamification, by saying to a student: ‘You’ve spent five hours studying this week, and you’re one hour away from your personal best, how about you try to beat it?’ It could be, ‘We’ve noticed that the amount of studying or the amount of time you’ve spent in the library, has started to drop. Are you OK? Are you struggling with something? Would you like me to make an appointment with someone?’ Because one of the things we’re aware of with new students, is that there can be this stigma attached to putting your hand up and saying, ‘Actually, I’m not OK. I’m struggling.’

It can be quite an intimidating thing.

Beacon will actually check in with students and ask them: ‘How are you

feeling today?’ And the student can answer with a happy, neutral or sad face. If a student starts answering with a sad face, Beacon can explore that in more detail, ‘What is it that’s upsetting you? Is there anything we can help you with? Can we make you an appointment with a wellbeing coach or with financial support if that’s what’s worrying you?’ It’s just trying to really connect students with the fantastic human support we offer as a university.”

Proctor and his team took a blended model approach to building Beacon as Proctor is a “huge believer” in the talented creativity of in-house staff, “because they absolutely buy into the whole purpose of the university and our mission”. Proctor then reached out to the private sector for AI expertise, and had them working side by side with his team. Proctor and his team had already used ANS to help gain cloud management skills and so they were a good fit in providing the private sector expertise that blended with the creativity and passion from the university. “That’s a big part of why we got the results we have, and how we were able to hit those deadlines. It’s been great because we’ve w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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gained new skills in using AI that we can apply much more broadly now.”

Proctor gave his team four months to develop and release Beacon to the students, the ethos being that the quicker they could get something into the hands of the students, “the quicker we can learn how good or how bad it is before starting to improve it”.

Beacon follows on the university’s other core digital channel, the ‘MyStaffsUni’ app, which Ex Libris helped to develop. “‘MyStaffsUni’ is a mobile app for things like attendance capture, so a student can check in to a lecture when they’ve arrived, which feeds some of the exciting work we’re doing around learner analytics; students’ engagement data is a key part of that. We’ve been working very closely with Ex Libris to trial the ability to capture that information via a student mobile app so the experience for the students is pretty slick.”

Proctor’s comments were echoed by Matthew Sherlock, Director of Product Strategy at Ex Libris: “During my time of working in higher education I saw how technology can empower both institutions and students and drive change throughout the university.

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“ Beacon has been a massive success in boosting student response times 24/7 while building on the university’s award of the Times Higher Education’s ‘Most Improved Student Experience’” Andrew Proctor Director of Digital Services Staffordshire University

At Ex Libris we are thrilled to have been able to work with Staffordshire University to help them on their digital transformation journey, by supplying the campusM platform that the MyStaffsUni mobile app is built on. We love what the team have done with the platform to really enhance their student experience and can’t wait to see what the future holds.”

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Beacon has been a massive success boosting student response times 24/7, while building upon the university’s w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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award of the Times Higher Education’s ‘Most Improved Student Experience’.

Beacon is just the latest product of this digitally-led establishment and its massive digital transformation, overseen by Proctor who inherited a rather clunky legacy system on joining Staffordshire University in 2017.

“We were the first university in Europe to migrate fully to Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, and that was really putting in place the platform for transformation. And the reason for that is because, beyond a sort of business case or a project based on cost, it was more about increasing business agility and our ability to experiment and gain access to technology quicker than we’ve been able to previously. This was a big driver in freeing up more and more time within my internal departments.

I didn’t want them spending 90% of their time plumbing and fixing things when they break. I wanted them to spend more and more time talking to students, finding out how we could use technology to help students and use their creativity to build new solutions rather than just keeping the lights on. We used to have monthly meetings that would report on some 20

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of the traditional KPIs such as system up-time, the number of incidents we’ve resolved, etc. and I completely changed that, so we have a leadership board once a month, where all of my leaders and managers come to the table armed with a list of all of the things they’ve done for our students

Andrew Proctor Director of Digital Services An experienced IT Executive, specialising in transforming and leading IT/Digital functions and digital transformation across the public sector. Passionate about harnessing digital opportunities to improve the lives of people throughout the UK. A proven track record of successfully leading technology and digital functions; achieving improved credibility and performance at the same time as reducing running costs.

Able to represent organisations at the highest level by building relationships and generating opportunities with partners from the public (e.g. the Home Office, local authorities ) and private sectors (e.g. Google, Accenture) Experience of managing IT/Digital delivery by third party private sector suppliers via excellent commercial acumen.

Extensive experience of a variety of roles within programme and project management at all stages of their lifecycle – from commissioning business cases, through to delivery and benefits management.

Excellent stakeholder and relationship management skills, with experience of rebuilding trust and confidence in technology departments within an organisation. A confident speaker and presenter at national events.

Currently working to transform Staffordshire University into the UK’s leading digital university.

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and staff.”

A DIGITAL BEACON A good example of the university’s new direction is seen in its adoption of Microsoft Teams; one of the first universities in the UK to use the platform as its sole learning environment on a number of its courses.

“We’ve had great results from that by just getting Teams into the hands of some of our lecturers rather than us keeping it under lock and key until we fully understood it. It’s that sort of user-centric and partnership approach of working with people to be innovative and creative. That’s gone really well and some of our lecturers and senior lecturers are now designated ‘digital champions’. It was about us getting new technology into their hands, and helping them figure out whether they can use it to benefit our students while enabling and supporting the creativity of our lecturers.”

Staffordshire University has also embedded digital skills across all of its courses to fully future-proof its graduates. “We are starting to embed the development of digital skills across all our courses. The idea is that, if you’re 22

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a fashion student, you will graduate not just being great at producing really interesting items of clothing, but also being able to market them. When I say digital skills, I don’t just mean technical ones. There’s something we call soft digital skills, which are things such as embracing change, problem solving and entrepreneurial spirit as well. People who are great with technology, tend to be people that embrace change. They tend to be the ones that want the latest device or the latest version of software because they can’t wait to get the hands on it.

It’s not just about the technical skills for us, it’s about those softer skills as well. We’re the first university in the UK to embed some Microsoft professional programs to teach students about analytics, artificial intelligence, across some of our business-related courses. If you’re studying a degree in business, you can start on some of the track that takes you towards becoming a data scientist, to get a grounding in how you analyse and visualise data, which is really important in modern business.”

Staffordshire University is on the

up. Proctor’s work has seen him earn number six in the UK CIO Top 100 list, which is “more of a reflection on the team than myself”, he says. “I just get to do the publicity around all of their hard work to be honest.” Beacon recently won the “Best Not-ForProfit Project’ at the national Digital Leadership Awards and the university received a gold award within the Teaching Excellence Framework, moving up from silver to the highest level. “We’re one of the highest climbing universities across the league tables as well. Five years ago, we were really languishing. Now we’re in the top 50 across all the league tables, and we’ve actually entered into the world rankings too. It’s just a reflection of a lot of the hard work that’s been done so far. And, it would be remiss of me not to mention Vice Chancellor Liz Barnes, because she wholeheartedly believes that digital is fundamental to the future of universities. And as a digital director, if you don’t have a CEO that really buys into digital, you’re always going to be limited in what you can do.”

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The holy grail of autonomous datacentres will soon be upon us W R I T T E N B Y M a t t h e w B e a l e , M o d e r n

Datacentre Architect, Ultima

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M AT T H E W B E A L E M o d e r n D at a ce n t re A rc h i te ct , U l t i m a

xperts have been predicting for some time that the automation technologies that are applied in factories worldwide would be applied to datacentres in the future. Not only to improve their efficiency but to help gather business insights from ever-increasing pools of data. The truth is that we’re rapidly advancing this possibility with the application of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and machine learning in the datacentre environment.

But why is this so important?

At the centre of digital transformation is data and thus, the datacentre. As we enter this new revolution in how businesses operate, it’s essential that every piece of data is handled and used appropriately to optimise its value. This is where the datacentre becomes crucial as the central repository for data. Not only are they required to manage increasing amounts of data, more complex machines and infrastructures, we also want them to be able to generate

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improved information about our data more quickly.

In this article, Matthew Beale, Modern Datacentre Architect at automation and infrastructure service provider, Ultima explains how RPA and machine learning are today paving the way for the autonomous datacentre.

THE LEGACY DATACENTRE Currently, businesses spend too much

T H E H O LY G R A I L O F A U T O N O M O U S D ATA C E N T R E S W I L L S O O N B E U P O N U S

“xxxxx”

time and energy on dealing with upgrades, patches, fixes and monitoring of their datacentres. While some may run adequately, most suffer from three critical issues;

• Lack of visibility for the business, for example, multiple IT staff look after multiple apps or different parts of the network with little coordination of what the business needs.

• Lack of consistent support, for example, humans make errors when updating patches or maintaining networks leading to compliance issues.

• Lack of speed when it comes to increasing capacity or migrating data or updating apps.

Human error is by far the most significant cause of network downtime. w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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“ Automation provides ‘cobots’ to work alongside humans with unlimited benefit” Matthew Beale Modern Datacentre Architect Ultima

This is followed by hardware failures and breakdowns. With little to no oversight of how equipment is working, action can only be taken once the downtime has already occurred.

The cost impact is much higher as the focus is taken away from other things to manage the cause of the issue, combined with the impact of the actual network downtime. Stability, cost and time management must be tightened to provide a more efficient datacentre. Automation can help achieve this.

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‘COBOTS’ MAKE HUMANS SIX TIMES MORE PRODUCTIVE Automation provides ‘cobots’ to work alongside humans with unlimited benefits. The precisely structured environment of the datacentre is the perfect setting to deploy these software robots. There are many medial, repetitive and time intensive tasks that can be taken away from users and given to a software robot with the effect of boosting both consistency and speed.

Ultima calculates that the

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productivity ratio of ‘cobot’ to human is 6:1. By reviewing processes that are worth automating, software robots can be programmed, and once verified, they can repeat them every time.

Whatever the process is, robotics ensure that it is consistent and accurate, meaning that every task will be much more efficient. This empowers teams to intervene only to make decisions in exceptional circumstances.

THE SELF-HEALING DATACENTRE Automation minimises the amount

of time that human maintenance of the datacentre is required. Robotics and machine learning restructures and optimises traditional processes, meaning that humans are no longer needed to perform patches to servers at 3 am. Issues can be identified and flagged by machines before they occur, eliminating downtime.

RE-DISTRIBUTION OF RESOURCES AND CAPACITY MANAGEMENT As the lifecycle of an app across the business changes, resources need w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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to be redeployed accordingly. With limited visibility, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, for humans to distribute resources effectively without the use of machines and robotics. For example, automation can increase or decrease resources accordingly towards the end of an app’s life to maximise resources elsewhere.

Ongoing capacity management also evaluates resources across multiple cloud platforms for optimised utilisation. When the workload is effectively balanced, not only does this offer productivity cost savings, it also allows for predictive analytics.

THE ART OF AUTOMATION These new, consumable automation functions are the result of what Ultima has already been doing for the last year when it found itself solving similar problems for three of its customers. It was moving three customers from their end of life 5.5 version of VMWare and recognised that it would be helpful to be able to automatically migrate them to the updated version, so it developed a solution to do this.

Where once it would have taken 40 days to migrate workloads, the business cut that in half, resulting in a 33 30

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“ Ultima’s infrastructure is used as a code to create repeatable deployments, customised for customer environments” Matthew Beale Modern Datacentre Architect Ultima

per cent cost saving for those companies. It then moved on to looking at other processes to automate with the ambition of taking its customers on a journey to full datacentre automation.

Using discovery tools and automated scripts to capture all data required to design and migrate infrastructure to the automated datacentre, Ultima’s infrastructure is used as a code to create repeatable deployments, customised for customer environments.

These datacentre deployments are then able to scale where needed without manual intervention. w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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THE JOURNEY TO A FULLY AUTOMATED DATACENTRE The first level of automation provides information for administrators to take action in a user-friendly and consumable way, moving to a system that provides recommendations for administrators to accept actions based on usage trends. From there automation leads to a system that will automatically take remediation actions and raise tickets based on smart alerts. Then you move to a fully autonomous datacentre utilising AI & ML, which determines the appropriate steps and can self-learn and adjust thresholds.

AI-DRIVEN OPERATIONS START WITH AUTOMATION Businesses are adopting modern ways of consuming applications as well as modern ways of working. Over 80 per cent of organisations are either using or adopting DevOps methodologies, and it is critical to the success of these initiatives that the platforms in place can support these ways of working while still keeping efficiency and utilisation high.

In the not too distant future is a central platform to support traditional 32

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“ Over 80 per cent of organisations are either using or adopting DevOps methodologies�

Matthew Beale Modern Datacentre Architect Ultima

and next-generation workloads which can be automated in a self-healing, optimum way at all times. This means that when it comes to migration, maintenance, upgrades, capacity changes, auditing, back-up and monitoring, the datacentre takes the majority of actions itself with no or little assistance or human intervention required. Similar to autonomous vehicles, the possibilities for automation are never-ending; it’s always possible to continually improve the way work is carried out.

Matthew Beale is Modern Datacentre Architect, Ultima, an automation and transformation partner. You can contact him at matthew.beale@ ultima.com and visit Ultima at www.ultima.com w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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The philosophy of procurement WRITTEN BY D a l e B e n to n PRODUCED BY H ey ke l O u n i

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EDGAR LIM, VICE PRESIDENT OF TECHNOLOGY AND P R O C U R E M E N T, E X P L O R E S H OW A S O U N D P R O C U R E MENT PHILOSOPHY ACHIEVES GROWTH IN A “SOLARCOAST E R ” M A R K E T

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ince 2005, EnterSolar has established itself as a trusted, single source for corporations looking to advance towards clean energy. In the years since, it has become one of the largest commercial solar developers in the United States. EnterSolar’s value proposition is built around longterm relationships with clients to enable a seamless transition to solar while navigating a volatile pricing market. Key to achieving and delivering on this value proposition is the company’s procurement process

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and most importantly its procurement philosophy. This is where Edgar Lim, Vice President of Technology and Procurement, comes into play.

A technical engineer by trade, with a passion for sustainability, Lim worked his way through the ranks from engineering right through to leading maintenance operations and divisions, learning everything he could about solar along the way. For Lim, he feels it created a “white collar/blue collar” combination of experience, which caught the eye of EnterSolar.

“I was brought in initially as a technical director wearing multiple hats,” explains Lim. “But I was also shadowing Peyton Boswell the Co-Founder and Managing Director, where I would attend a number of meetings with vendors; watching and observing how he nurtured those relationships with vendors and understanding the role it played in the growth of the business.”

After close to a year, carving out a procurement function to his role piece by piece, Lim was made Head of Procurement and charged with dealing with all vendor relations.

This is where he feels his strong engineering background, coupled with 38

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managing operations, enables Lim to be successful in navigating this complex and ever-changing industry space.

“Every other month it seems there’s a new product and each one claiming to be better, cheaper and faster than its predecessor,” he says. “It’s exciting and challenging because you need to understand how to sift through all that noise, work out what’s real and pinpoint technologies that would be a good fit and bring the best value to our clients.”

EnterSolar is both a developer and Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) company and so it w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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goes without saying that procurement forms a significant part of the company’s operations, particularly when it comes to executing a project on time, on budget and up to standard. But while it is central to EnterSolar’s value proposition, the global procurement space is rapidly evolving and becoming a key business driver in any business across multiple industry sectors.

Lim has seen this impact his role firsthand. “I find myself sharing and telling the story of our procurement philosophy more and more with teammates

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on the front lines and other business developers. I’m being brought in more on meetings or conference calls with buyers from finance or technical backgrounds,” he says. “Our combined knowledge and experience allows us to communicate in a language that we all understand so that we can translate what we do into something that can add value. This will continue to be very important, bringing that technical know-how and infusing it into our procurement decisions, so to speak.”

E N T E R S O L A R P H OTO V O LTA I C SYST E M - A M A ZO N

Negotiation is crucial to any business interaction and so this shared language is key and Lim recognizes that he has to try to understand the best interests of all parties involved in order to formulate and figure out a win-win scenario. This approach starts at the very top and Lim has the support and the trust from them to deliver his procurement philosophy and drive growth for the company.

This, Lim recognizes, has been instrumental not only in enabling his own journey, but that of others. “What

they have been incredibly good at, is putting the right people in the right positions so they can shine,” he says.

“With me, they didn’t just see someone who would come in and do the job, they saw someone that would use that as a stepping-stone to do bigger and better things for the company and take on greater responsibilities.”

This is particularly the case in an industry in which he describes as a “solar-coaster”, where Lim has had to deal with a number of challenges out of his control such as policy risk and w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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“ I T H I N K TO H AV E S U CC E S S F U L LO N G -T E R M R E L AT I O N S H I P S , H AV I N G A W I N -W I N M I N D - S E T I S I M P E R AT I V E ” EDGAR LIM V P, Te c h n o l o g y & P r o c u r e m e n t Entersolar

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trade tariffs. “The fact I’ve been able to deliver value and maneuver certain headwinds has built trust in me,” he says. “In turn, it’s given me more rope to do what I need to do for the company.”

Lim has a key procurement philosophy, one he has developed and implemented within EnterSolar through years of understanding and learning from his peers and from connecting with the global procurement space.

His philosophy is a simple one: find synergies and operate in a paradigm of win-win with clients and vendors.

“I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game.

It’s a non-zero-sum and everyone’s out to do well for themselves, to do well for their company,” he says.

“This is more important in the solar industry because there are only a few key vendors that you want to continue doing business with. When our clients are purchasing a solar system or getting into a contract for a power-purchase agreement, you know, buying power for long periods of time, they’re investing in us. Simply put, it’s a long-term investment.”

“That’s the same mind-set that we want to have with our clients and with our vendors. The only way to nurture and maintain successful 44

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long-term relationships is to have a win-win mindset. ” As part of his role, Lim must “sift through the noise” as to what is happening in the market from a technology perspective. This becomes a task of trying to strike the right balance between implementing Edgar is a North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners (NABCEP) PV Installation Professional and holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology George W. Woodruff School, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude.

Edgar Lim VP Technology & Procurement Edgar manages all procurement efforts for the organization and nurtures key vendor partnerships. After spending more than a decade working in the industry, Edgar specializes in solar design optimization, best practices, energy simulation, procurement strategies and technology evaluation.

Edgar started in the industry by working with a startup residential solar company in Los Angeles where he learned the art of solar design and engineering. He eventually went on to lead their Engineering Department and played a role in quadrupling their installs per month within a year. Edgar then went on to be part of a large-scale solar development firm based in New Jersey where he worked on multi-megawatt solar projects and gained tremendous experience in all aspects of solar design and engineering. While there, he worked on engineering ground-mounted, roof-mounted and parking lot canopy systems. He proceeded to lead the firm’s Operations and Maintenance team to ensure proper preventative maintenance and maximum uptime of their solar portfolio.

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“ I T H I N K I N TO DAY ’ S WO R L D M O R E T H A N E V E R , H AV I N G I N T E R D I S C I P L I N A RY K N OW LE D G E I S C R U C I A L TO STAY O N TO P O F T H E G A M E ” EDGAR LIM V P, Te c h n o l o g y & P r o c u r e m e n t Entersolar

what’s right for the company and staying ahead of the competition.

As technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, Lim believes that a healthy dose of skepticism and due diligence will remain key to achieving this. “In a perfect world, you’re always in equilibrium. But entropy, will always find its way into the environment and taking some risks is important for any procurement professional,” he says. “That sense of skepticism is definitely present but at the same time, we’re not letting it hold us back from being on the forefront of what’s up and coming, what’s new. For me what’s key is really digging deep and 46

ENTERSOLAR

understanding what the advancement is and what it entails, and how it affects the manufacturing process and the supply chain. This helps to de-risk the decision a little.”

A lot of responsibility rests on Lim’s shoulders, and he knows it. Having established a level of trust that allows him to drive the company forward through informed decision making and philosophy, Lim continues to educate himself as much as possible through global conferences in different industries and encourages any procurement professional in any industry to do the same. “I think in today’s world more than ever, having

interdisciplinary knowledge is crucial to stay on top of the game. Because I think the companies that are able to learn from other industries and see how they do things are the ones that are going to be ahead of the game here,” he says. “Get a picture of some of the tools that other CPOs are using that we’re not and see what’s available and how they’ve added value to these different organizations. Then explore how these tools or processes could be aligned with what we’re trying to do and if there’d be value in implementing them.”

Over the course of his career with EnterSolar in particular, Lim has

achieved great success in implementing a procurement philosophy that drives value and growth for the company. He attributes this to an internal drive to continue to learn and continue to challenge and this is something he looks to bring to EnterSolar more and more. “I want us as a business to de-centralize some of our decisions in an effective manner. To help all departments think a little differently in a way that can be shared with others. So that different people can take on different parts of procurement responsibility,” he says. “In order for us to grow we need everyone to grow their skills and mind-sets with regards to procurement so that there’s no threshold limit that we place on ourselves.”

“I always believe there are two circles: the circles of influence and worry. I think having a lot of personal growth has helped me to increase the circle of influence and reduce the circle of worry. This is something we can all achieve.”

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HOW AI CAN H E L P TA C K L E THE SKILLS GAP WRITTEN BY A n d rew Wo o d s

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The Digital Insight speaks to Craig Stewart, Vice President of Product Management at SnapLogic, an enterprise integration platform as a service built to connect big data, cloud and on-premise apps who addresses how tech can provide some of the solutions to the global skills gap in this space SO, C R A I G, YOU’VE B E E N I N THE INTEGR AT I ON S PACE AND A P PLI C AT ION DEVELOPME N T, DATA AND INTEGR AT I ON NOW FOR MA N Y YEARS NOW …

I was with Oracle prior to SnapLogic and one of the big drivers back in 2011 when I joined SnapLogic was this whole new thing of how the cloud was actually making the difference to the enterprise world. Back in those days, in the Oracle world, the cloud was just somebody else’s computer running in their data centre. There was nothing 50

different about the cloud.

Having experienced it firsthand with Oracle’s customers, it was obvious that that was not the case and so we needed to be doing something different. That’s what led me to join Gaurav (Dhillon) at SnapLogic because the business world had changed and the computing paradigm was changing.

The paradigm had changed and the enterprise was adapting to it. I think we see that change continuing to happen now; not only is the cloud providing the infrastructure on demand and those things, but it’s also now able to provide a

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degree of power demanded of things like AI and the machine learning world.

W H AT E F F E C T S D O E S D E M A N D H AV E O N T H E PROVISION OF THIS TECHNOLOGY? That power on demand has become available and the corollary to that is, the algorithms and the capabilities on the other side have also really come

into their own. When you bring those two together, you’ve got the algorithms and the ability to train; both of those things happening at the same time. That makes possible the application of this technology in a way that simply wasn’t there previously.

For most organisations, the last thing they are going to want to put into their data centre is some beefy GPU base machines that are going to be

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“ We’re trying to make a change in the enterprise and we know that AI and ML have got great possibilities” Craig Stewart Vice President of Product Management at SnapLogic

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used every other day or whatever it was, equating to minimal utilisation. Now, with the cloud and the cloud providers like Amazon and Azure and Google, you can just rent that on demand, if you’re going to use it for just a couple of hours each day.

T H E PA C E O F C H A N G E I S R A P I D , ISN’T IT? TO SUCH AN EXTENT WHERE THE HUMAN COMPONENT IS FA L L I N G B E H I N D , A L I T T L E B I T, W I T H THIS SKILLS GAP IN TECH. HOW BIG AN ISSUE DO YOU THINK THIS IS? It is significant. We’re trying to make a change in the enterprise and we know that AI and ML have great possibilities, but in order to apply it, organisations need to have that set of skills. It starts with a layer of data literacy within an organisation. It’s one thing having a team of data scientists able to do the machine learning and apply it. There’s absolutely an issue in getting enough of those people but within organisations, you’ve got to have that fundamental data literacy across the organisation as well and that’s one of the things that organisations need to be encouraging people to understand. Universities need to be providing that to the graduates.

If you’re a data science graduate, a statistics graduate or whatever, you’re going to have that level of data literacy, but the economics and business graduates today need that fundamental capability as well. If they don’t have them, then the organisations that they work for simply aren’t w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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going to have the wherewithal, even the capacity to envision how they could apply these technologies, if only they could get the data scientists and data engineers to build these things for them. The universities are certainly doing a good job in trying to refocus onto giving us people that are literate in AI skills and ML. They’re doing their part from that end, but for the vast majority of organisations, the number of graduates that you’ve got coming in is actually very small in comparison to the incumbent organisation. The upskilling of the incumbent organisation is one of the things that organisations really need to focus on.

That research we’ve done indicates we have more than half of businesses not having that set of skills in-house to execute on an ML strategy. The gap is there, which means that you’ve got to up-skill people you already have.

I think we’ll see the same kind of thing emerging in the data science world. Of course, not only is there that skills gap in terms of actually being able to apply the technology, whether it’s programming or generating the code to do these things, but there is 54

also then the next step on from that, which is the ethics and bias, which is a fundamental challenge for the application of these technologies.

Anytime you are dealing with real people and the lives of real people, it is something that needs to be very carefully thought about.

It also touches upon the role of women in teach as well, doesn’t it, because obviously they’re running at a much lower percentile in tech than men.

It’s having that ability to understand what’s going to influence these things.

What are the things that need to be thought about in the preparation of the

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data for training into models and those kinds of things. That’s a fundamental skill, which I’m not sure that even having a low code platform, a very productive platform, is going to give you. There are some inherent things that we need to have, like the data literacy. Obviously the more productive we can make the people that are trying to apply the technology, the better, whether it’s with a low code, no code type platform. You are democratising the availability of the technology, where you make the technology intuitive and usable enough for a wider group who can actually deliver the results.

HOW DO YOU BEGIN THIS PROCESS? This all starts in the preparation of the data; just going into applying machine learning. The data needs to be prepared, formatted in a way that the algorithms are expecting it. That is a very flat and wide structure of data with the data features, the things like the dates and those kinds of things, extracted into a form that is meaningful to the algorithm. If we can actually get more people who are able to do that, the vast majority of the time that data scientists are spending on that preparation of the data is going w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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to be reduced, giving them actually more time to be productive with the magic that they can work with the algorithms.

W OU LD YOU S UGGES T G RE AT E R COLLA B O RATION BETW E E N E N T E RP R I SE S A ND EDUCATION AL ESTA BLI SHMENTS ?

Here at SnapLogic, we’re actually lucky enough to have a chief scientist who is also a professor at USF, University of San Francisco. We have a number of the master students joining us to do their internships.

USF is one of the leading universities in the US for their data science course. Organisations, enterprises, should be trying to forge relationships with universities and we’re lucky enough to have been constantly bringing in these new thinkers that are applying the current sets of technologies. Had we not had people coming in with those fresh ideas, some of the AI functionality that we’ve added to our platform wouldn’t even have existed.

W E TA LK ED THERE ABOU T O RG AN I SAT I ON S UP-S KILLING TH E E X ISTI N G WORKFORCE AND ADO P T IN G L OW-C ODE PLATFORMS . WH AT DO Y OU T H I NK THE BIGGES T C H AL L E N G E I S T O ORGANIS ATIONS , E V E N IF T H E Y D E C I DE THAT THIS IS THE RO AD T H E Y NE E D T O GO DOW N? It’s very much that basic data literacy doesn’t exist in organisations today. That is one of that barriers to 56

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“Of course, not only is there that skills gap in terms of actually being able to apply the technology, whether it’s programming or generating the code to do these things, but there is also then the next step on from that, which is the ethics and bias�

Craig Stewart Vice President of Product Management at SnapLogic w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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adoption, but once you’ve gone past that, it’s simply the availability of people with the enterprise skills. The universities are producing people with the fundamental technical skills and those do need to be applied in an ethical and enterprise business way, but there is a difference between academia and the enterprise world. In the enterprise world, more so in academia, there has to be a value associated with any of the work that gets done within an organisation.

In the academic world, it is valid to spend time evaluating and not coming up with a result. The purer research.

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WE ’V E TAL KE D ABO U T ART IFIC IAL IN T E L L IG E NC E AN D MAC H IN E L E ARN I NG , H O W DO Y O U SE E T H AT SPAC E C H AN G IN G O V E R T H E N E X T T WO O R T H R E E Y E ARS? H O W IT ’S G O I NG T O AFFE C T E N T E RP RISE S FU RT H E R? I think we see the risks associated with it, with the recent court case in Cardiff, were a man was being video identified. There is a risk within enterprises that this technology gets tarred with a very negative brush, which has some

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risk for organisations. For example, if during the process of applying the technology to identify the people on the phone, are you seeking to see if they talking in a happy voice? Are they talking in an angry voice? The scope of those things to end up being abused or taken in the wrong way can see actions taken, based on those things.

I think there is certainly risk to organisations from a perspective of social responsibility. Any organisation that is dealing with end users needs to be aware of that, but on the other

side, if you are dealing with things like predictive maintenance, for instance, the value that can be gained within an organisation to use the technology is very significant. If you can improve the efficiency of your asset by a small number of percentage points – if you happen to be in the retail industry or the telecoms industry – even points of points is going to make a significant impact on the bottom line of an organisation.

Where these things can be applied to the non-human workflows, there is definitely some really big value that can be had out of them. It is not just the human interactions that can be improved. It is also the fundamental things, such as running the factory. The value of IoT, for instance, and all of the data that that internet of things world is going to generate, can release data and values. I don’t think, as a whole, we have seen the value out of the internet of things just yet. Only when we start to get the techniques like machine learning, which we can then apply things like preventative maintenance, predictive maintenance, will we start to get real value for the enterprise. w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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OBV I OUS LY W E’RE TALKIN G ABO U T MA C H I N E LEARNING, ART IFIC IAL I NT E LLI GENCE, AUTOMAT IO N , BU T F R OM A NUMBER OF PO IN T S Y O U ’V E MA DE I T S EEMS PEOPLE ARE P RE T T Y MUC H STILL INTEGRAL TO T H IS SPAC E .

Absolutely. We at SnapLogic use the machine learning functionality to actually build into our product to make it more productive for our users as well as offering our users the technology to apply to their data, to make their business more efficient. The business of integration is how we apply it and the reason that we can is that we have that cohort of data, which is the metadata that our users are generating in building pipelines and using the user interface. It’s based on that cohort of data that we can then make our users more productive in using our product. Virtuous circle there; always trying to identify where you can generate a virtuous circle. The fundamental way that the SnapLogic platform itself was built was as a SaaS platform where all of that metadata is stored in the SnapLogic cloud.

Now, we have that metadata, we can now analyse it and apply machine learning to it as it happens. We have the skills in house to be able to do that and then make adjustments in the way that our product works to deliver more productivity to the users of SnapLogic so that the value of our product itself continues to increase. I think in looking forward to where we’re at with ML and AI today, I do think that we are scratching the surface. Today, 60

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“ Now, we have that metadata, we can now analyse it and apply machine learning to it and as it happens” Craig Stewart Vice President of Product Management at SnapLogic

the algorithms are, I’m not sure immature is the word, but they have a long way to go before we can actually build upon them.

H OW WI L L THIS DIRECTLY A FF E C T T HE BOTTOM LIN E ?

So, how can I apply the technology to improve my top line, my bottom line? What are the things that I can do to the business processes? How 62

does this improve my quote-tocash process? I think in the coming months and years, what we will actually see happen is the pre-built patterns of the algorithms, that are going to be the low level code in much the same way that assembler and 3GL type languages are the foundation of what we do in building applications today through drag and drop. The same is going

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to be true as we see the algorithms that are available today form the foundations of this technology in the future.

It’s got to be translated into business values, so I can use this technology to reduce churn in my customer base and automate the process. We need to drive it in that direction. There’s a lot of the open source technologies and those

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things need to be channelled and focused on delivering business value. That’s where it’s going to take this from being a great, academic idea to real value in the enterprise. w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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5 INFLUENTIAL

blogs and resources for CIOs T H E E V E R - C H A N G I N G N AT U R E O F T E C H N O L O G Y R E Q U I R E S T H E M O D E R N D AY C I O T O K E E P T H E I R F I N G E R O N T H E P U L S E A S T O T H E L AT E S T I N N O VAT I O N S A N D W H AT T H E Y C A N M E A N T O T H E I R B U S I N E S S . T H E I N T E R FA C E L O O K S AT 5 L E A D I N G RESOURCES FOR CIOS ALL OVER THE WORLD

WRITTEN BY Dale Benton

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01 M E T I S S T R AT E G Y Metis Strategy describes itself as a “brand of perpetually curious techsavvy business strategists�, which is what makes it one of the most influential insights into the modern world of the CIO. Providing strategy and management consulting to Fortune 500 companies, Metis Strategy works to solve the most complex problems in a technological world. Sitting as President of the company, Peter High has worked with some of the very best CIOs from around the world.

A regular columnist for Forbes, he also hosts Technovation, a weekly podcast series which explores the tech trends that are defining and redefining global businesses in a whole host of industries.

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02 C I O.CO M Arguably the most recognisable source of information for the techsavvy or tech-curios CIO, CIO.com is one of the first names that springs to mind when searching for the latest news or insight into the digital transformation of industry. Created back in 1987 as a monthly magazine at the very birth of the role of the CIO, CIO.com is now entirely digital and is one of the most accessed websites in the world. With tips, industry insight and thought provoking blog content from industry leaders such as Google, Huawei and Microsoft, CIO. com has earned its stripes as a true leader in the field.

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03 MICROSOFT - OFFICIAL M I C R OS O F T B LO G It goes without saying that one of the biggest technology companies in the world has one of the most influential technology blogs. Microsoft produces bi-weekly columns from leading executives within the company from all around the world, ranging from Charlotte Yarkoni, Corporate Vice President of Communications, to Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise Group. But it’s not just Microsoft showcasing its latest technology offering, the blog also poses thought provoking questions and looks at how the disruptive nature of technology is transforming the way we live and work for the better. This is perhaps best showcased in its ‘Microsoft On the Issues’ sub section, which looks specifically at real world issues such as clean energy and refugee support.

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04 SAP

The market leader in enterprise application software, SAP has a network of over 437,000 enterprise customers around the world. SAP itself has in excess of 98,000 employees, each with their own expertise and insight into both SAP technology and the digital landscape of business. Through its community landing page, SAP features blogs and insight from people across that vast network.

These posts range from detailed breakdowns of the latest SAP solutions and offerings, to shining a spotlight on the customer experience and the successful partnerships that the company has struck and continues to strike in this ever-evolving digital world.

SAP is a global leader and rather than dictate the conversation, the company seeks to engage and indeed further the conversation through its blog content.

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AW S - AW S N E W S B L O G Compute power, database storage and cloud connectivity are just three of the biggest conversation starters for the CIO of today. With more and more companies seeking out data storage solutions, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has established itself as a go-to provider of reliable, scalable and inexpensive cloud computing services worldwide. Jeff Barr, Vice President and Chief Evangelist of AWS started the official AWS Blog back in 2004. Since then he has gone on to produce over 3000 blogs, all of which are created to interest, inform and technically engage with customers and business practitioners from all over the world. The blog posts showcase Jeff’s ability to distil “complex technical product capabilities into crisp, clear, and accessible prose that resonates with our customers”.

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EVENTS OF 2019

WRITTEN BY Kev i n D av i e s The technology industry can easily be described as the most mercurial and transformative. New ideas and innovations are fundamentally shifting the benchmarks of business performance, skills development and employment, among many other things. These technology conferences provide experts and industry professionals with a much-needed bird’s eye view of what’s happening now and what they can expect tomorrow…

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11.10.19

www

HACKCONF HackConf is Bulgaria’s premier

08.09.19

software development conference, happening in Sofia. Organised “by developers, for developers”,

www

IFA SUMMIT

it covers a wide range of software development topics, regardless of the tech stack. HackConf 2019 will

The IFA Summit is IFA´s think tank

include a full day of workshops on

dedicated to the digital future. Each

11th of October, and two parallel

year the event gathers leading think-

tracks of talks during both confer-

ers, global trendsetters and crea-

ence days - 12th and 13th of October.

tive visionaries who draw inspiration for the next exponential technologies and share their thoughts on the upcoming decade. The IFA⁺ Summit 2019 stands for new visions, disruptive ideas and inspiring entertainment for a data-scripted world.

The event is host to more than 550 international experts and leading professionals. Spend two exciting days at the convention and meet scientists, artists, developers, researchers and digital pioneers within your field. Join one of the most valuable conferences of the year at IFA in Berlin.

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EVENTS

25.10.19

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VEGAS BLOCKCHAIN WEEK The Second annual Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Technology event, World Crypto Conference (WCC), embrace major partnerships with other notable event organisers and work together to deliver Vegas Blockchain Week, from October 25th to October 31st, 2019.

Executives, enthusiasts, and professionals from global enterprise companies, financial service providers, investment firms, traders, advisory & auditing institutions, blockchain focused startups, academic institutions, government policy advisors, and application developers will descend on Las Vegas to discuss the most pressing topics facing our emerging industry.

WCC 2019 will afford 3 days of intense discussions, product demos, expert keynote addresses, panel discussions with industry thought leaders, and announcements from the best and brightest in the industry showcasing new products, ideas, and commercially viable applications of blockchain technology. w w w.th e in te r fa ce . n e t

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13.11.19

www

BIG DATA LDN Big Data LDN (London) is a free to attend conference and exhibition, hosting leading data and analytics experts, ready to arm you with the tools to deliver your most effective data-driven strategy.

Discuss your business requirements with 130 leading technology vendors and consultants. Hear from 150 expert speakers in 9 technical and business-led conference theatres, with realworld use-cases and panel debates.

Network with your peers and view the latest product launches & demos.

Big Data LDN attendees have access to free on-site data consultancy and interactive evening community meetups.

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