A Sustainable Roadmap to Digital Transformation DIGITAL REPORT 2022 IN ASSOCIATION WITH:
CUNDALL
A SUST S U STA INAB L E ROADMAP TO DIGITAL TRA T R AN S F ORMA OR MAT ION 2
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CUNDALL
1976
Year Founded
Construction, Engineering, Business Consulting Industry
1000
Number of Employees
£67,841,073 Revenue
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Lou Lwin, CIO of Cundall, divulges his successful appointment to the position and how he will drive the company’s sustainable digital transformation agenda
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cross the globe, businesses are tweaking and fine-tuning their sustainability strategies to make sure they are working towards net-zero emissions and provoking positive climate change actions. Industries like construction — which contributes around 36% of global energy use and around 40% of emissions in the UK — and engineering are seeking more opportunities to mitigate greenhouse gases and waste. The emergence of new technologies plays a significant role in reducing industrial impacts, but how does Cundall enable technology implementation in these sectors? Particularly in construction, where the productivity gap equates to US$1.6tn in costs to the global economy. “The quality of our people is one of our biggest strengths. Our clients enjoy working with us and the fact that we consistently win repeat business with 70-80% of them is testament to this.” In conversation with Lou Lwin, the company’s Chief Information Officer (CIO), we discussed why the use of data and information technology (IT) is so crucial to the development of Cundall and its clients and how he hopes to use his extensive technology experience to drive the business towards a sustainable future through digital transformation. Lwin began by explaining how he came to understand the importance of technology within the industry that he works in. “I spent about 12 years with an architectural firm, but Cundall.com
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“ We use Revit to look at the embodied carbon content of any components that we might use in a building project or a construction design process” LOU LWIN
CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CUNDALL
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it has probably been the 10 years prior to working for Cundall that have really helped me focus on the need to understand digital transformation for a business,” Lwin says. “During that time I was involved in a lot of mergers and acquisitions that were rapidly bringing businesses on board. When you’re in that position, you need to find ways to be the most efficient and create the least disruption to business processes.” “By doing that over time you build up a mindset that allows you to focus on the key aspects of what’s needed. So, coming to Cundall, where we’re engaging with a digital transformation journey, and bringing that experience of quickly identifying key areas on which to improve and knowing the steps
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LOU LWIN TITLE: CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER LOCATION: NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, UK
Leveraging a digital ecosystem with abundant technologies Lwin joined Cundall in July 2021, taking on a role that did not previously exist. As part of his role as CIO, he is responsible for overseeing the use and implementation of digital tools and solutions in line with the company's strategy of enabling sustainable operations for its clients. This starts in-house. “As a business, if we are taking the lead, in things like sustainability and the technology that helps us build sustainable designs, it always helps if you practice what you preach,” Lwin says.
EXECUTIVE BIO
to take thereafter, will quickly help bring the organisation up to speed.”
Having spent 30 years leading strategic digital transformation and innovation, Lou’s experience has spanned business & IT operations, business & enterprise architecture, security, cloud, software development and everything in between. Turning business challenges into business as usual, Lou has built a reputation for executing rapid change and achievable IT strategy. Currently focusing on data strategy and driving positive technology change by building on internal talent and expertise. As a thought leader and strategist, Lou is committed to driving out efficiency gains and productivity returns from technology by investing in the right people.
Consulting
Digital & Data
Cyber
Technical & Support Services
Waterstons: digital consultancy for leading organisations James Alderson, Client Experience Director at Waterstons, discusses the company’s development of its partners’ technology capabilities The ability to go digital has never been more critical for sustaining global operations. As businesses expand their use of technology, partners provide insight and application of new systems, while leveraging existing solutions for maximum gain. With more than 14 years at the company, James Alderson, Client Experience Director at Waterstons, explains how the company has worked with its clients to support their digital transformations — having delivered strategic and technical projects and driven the adoption of cloud, global collaboration tools and cybersecurity solutions to name but a few.
How does Waterstons support digital development? The company provides digital consultancy services and builds great working relationships with its clients, which can be seen through its partnership with Cundall — a multidisciplinary engineering and construction consultancy — as it celebrates 13 years of partnership with the business.
“Our key priority has been immersing ourselves within their business, seeing what challenges they’ve faced; what challenges the sector that they operate within has faced as well, to really help them evolve what they’re doing through the use of technology.” Waterstons’ ability to integrate itself into its clients’ operations adds value to its services. The company is often considered part of Cundall — and vice versa — with employees working across its partner’s global locations. “We also share our knowledge openly and often freely. During the pandemic, we created the Waterstons Academy Lite programme, taking our internal training materials and making them available externally as well,” Alderson explains. Waterstons is also committed to encouraging innovation within the company as it heads up its own research and development (R&D) fund. “We’ve got our own internal R&D innovation funds to encourage development. We set aside time and effort from people within the business for them to invest in innovation. We take those industry trends and insights that we gain from our clients and the broader marketplace, to really focus on how we can innovatively solve those problems.”
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“ Our designs are innovative and we’re always looking to better ourselves and we use some of the latest technologies” LOU LWIN
CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CUNDALL
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As a consultancy, Cundall’s aim is to provoke a cascading effect as it empowers its clients to operate more efficiently and leverage sustainable sourcing options, which in turn affects the performance of their projects and satisfies their clients’ needs. “We’re very much focused on making sure that we can create an efficient future and technology has come to a point that the things we’ve only discussed in the past can now become reality and we have quite a large division that focuses solely on those things.”
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Cundall: A sustainable roadmap to digital transformation
Lwin continues, explaining that great technology solutions aren’t effective enough for the company if they’re used inefficiently. “Internally within Cundall, we’re making sure that we’ve got the bestof-breed technology, making sure we’ve got the right ecosystem of technology. It’s not just about having the best, it’s about having the right mix and the right partners, which is really key for us to make sure that we can support all our engineers so they can focus on doing what they do best, which in turn has quite a positive impact on
not just the customers and clients, but on the planet as a whole.” “Because there is such an availability of tools, we’re actually spoiled for choice now. If you wind back a few years, and take big data, for example, that was a massive challenge: it required lots of computing power to do anything remotely like what we do today with a standard PC. Today, we’ve got an absolute proliferation of tools, meaning selecting the right things can actually be more of a challenge than finding the tools to do the job.” Cundall.com
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Applying digital solutions for emissions reduction Cundall has a clear focus on people. Whether it’s individuals within the organisation or the talent employed by its clients, the company is responsible for ensuring that digital tools are utilised effectively within their operations and by those that are responsible for monitoring those tools. Covering variable types of operations, the firm boasts a high-level talent of its own, with many PhD qualified individuals and chartered professionals
HOW HAS CUNDALL APPLIED DIGITAL TOOLS IN CONSTRUCTION? “Within tools such as Revit, we have built the capability to look at the embodied carbon content of any components that we might use in a building project or a construction design process. The New Royal Hospital in Adelaide for example, was designed in such a way that we were able to reduce greenhouse gases by 50%, by employing such technologies and techniques,” says Lwin. “By using the right technology and working to make the best use of the tools that are available to us, we can meet our net-zero objectives, and having that at the forefront of our minds all the time helps us move forward as an organisation. It helps us to support our ethos and support our customers’ requirements as well.”
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within the organisation. This has proven beneficial in managing a wide portfolio. “From an engineering perspective, we cover quite a broad range of services. Every one of those services, whether that’s acoustics or mechanical or electrical, whatever they might be, they all have their own toolsets,” Lwin explains. “Our job in IT is key in terms of supporting our staff, making sure they’ve got the right technology to hand and that it is well supported.” “We’ve always had a massive focus on people and that’s not just attracting and
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developing the right talent, but having that people-orientated approach, incorporating knowledge management and knowledge sharing, is incredibly important. It has been a huge driver for the business from the beginning and has really paid dividends.” Technology and talent drive Cundall’s positive contributions “We’re fortunate to have been founding signatories of a number of councils for netzero carbon,” says Lwin. “We really pioneered this in the engineering space.” Beyond its
“ How do we continue to develop on that? This comes back to the people; we’re massively focused on attracting and developing the right talent” LOU LWIN
CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CUNDALL
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WE STOP BREACHES CrowdStrike has redefined security with the world’s most advanced cloud-native platform that protects and enables the people, processes and technologies that drive modern enterprise. Purpose-built in the cloud with a single lightweight-agent architecture, the Falcon platform delivers rapid and scalable deployment, superior protection and performance, reduced complexity and immediate time-to-value.
SEEING INTO THE FUTURE: FALCON XDR FROM CROWDSTRIKE IS ALL ABOUT PREDICTING CYBER ATTACK In the post pandemic age, the threat from well organised Cyber Criminals is hotter than ever. CrowdStrike’s CTO explains how not all XDR solutions are the same and how its Falcon XDR product is doing the ‘heavy lifting’ for the data analysts.
This is where CrowdStrike Falcon XDR comes in. “The stakes are higher for organisations, especially on being targeted. The E-criminals. Are simply more sophisticated, Cybercrime is a lucrative business,” says Turedi.
There is XDR and then there is CrowdStrike’s Falcon XDR. That’s according to Zeki Turedi, CrowdStrike’s Chief Technical Officer. CrowdStrike is a security business which helps organisation stop cyber breaches. So why is CrowdStrike’s Extended Detection Response (XDR) offering the best on the market? Turedi Explains: “Extending Detection Response makes sure we have access to all this vital telemetry – that’s data collected from multiple sources across networks and are able to protect it from cyber-attack,” says Turedi.
Turedi says XDR is about future proofing a business from attack. “It’s not just about making sure what an attack does happen, we’re aware of it and we can respond to it. You need feedback immediately; you need to continuously make sure that you’re making life as hard as possible for the adversary. It’s about being able to look at all the telemetry and pick out the right pieces of data. Combating an attack is about an analyst trying to understand what this actually means, so the quicker we can get the right judgement for the analyst the quicker we can start making the response steps. It is all about harnessing what the analyst is identifying and using XDR to automate a response to a specific threat in the future so the analysts can move on to the next new threat and counter it”.
The seismic change in the speed of digital migration during the past two years of the pandemic has made organisations more agile and able to deliver products more effectively. But, from a security perspective this brings huge amounts of complexity. “Brand-new architectures, new environments and new cloud organisations now need protection from cyber-attack across the board,” says Turedi.
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“ It has probably been the 10 years prior to working for Cundall that have really helped me focus on the need to understand digital transformation for a business” LOU LWIN
CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CUNDALL
sustainability credentials, Lwin explains that Cundall is focused on more than just sustainability — without discrediting its importance — and is a leader in innovative design solutions. “For us, how do we build on that? How do we continue to develop on that? This comes back to the people; we’re massively focused on attracting and developing the right talent. The sustainability agenda is absolutely huge, as we all know. We have one planet. We have one opportunity to save it,” says Lwin. “By attracting and developing that talent, we get people who really understand the challenges and are passionate about doing something about them. However, it’s not just about having talent, it’s about sharing relevant knowledge and information. We also consult on business strategy for our clients and their clients, to be able to help people maintain their sustainability and their netzero footprint on an ongoing basis.” Over the next 12 months or more, Cundall will also be working on its use of data to compile information from previous projects and utilise it to develop a targeted approach to new projects. Data is somewhat untapped by the company and Lwin hopes that it will open up new capabilities for 16
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the firm. “One of the key things that we’re focusing on in the next 12 to 18 months is our use of data,” says Lwin. “We have so much information about the designs that we have built over the years and specifically the ones that are focused on that sustainability agenda. To be able to extract all that data is a really big challenge. None of the products, technologies or
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design tools that we use are built with data filtration in mind. The challenge is to pull out the relevant parts and do that in a sensible and structured way so that everybody can access the data that they need.” The ability to extract data from previous designs is likely to provide key insights for the sustainability team, which is currently growing within the organisation.
Collaborative partnerships enable better use of digital tools “Cundall is a very focused organisation. We don’t focus on the bottom line or ‘x’ amount of projects. We focus on quality, growing our business in such a way that we deliver the best for our clients. This isn’t just about sustainability, it’s above that,” says Lwin, before listing some of the digital tools that Cundall uses. Cundall.com
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“Our designs are innovative and we’re always looking to better ourselves. We use some of the latest techniques and technologies such as digital twins, fluid dynamics, energy modelling, all of those things to improve what we deliver back to our clients. Overall, the net result is that we end up with a much more sustainable future. It’s so core to what we do and is literally embodied in everything we do.” Cundall has a clear view of how partnerships can drive business performance and streamline the adoption and continued success of digital tools. The company prides itself on including its strategic partners in key business discussions and, as Lwin explains, it also selects those who have similar business interests or those that have values aligned with the business. “We like to share our roadmap, our technology stack and business agenda with our tech partners, including what we’re doing and where we’re going. By doing that you end up in a much better position than just buying a service, you end up working very closely with the company. In fact, for some of the companies we work closely with, you wouldn’t know whether they are Cundall staff or not. They’re embedded, they’re in our offices like everybody else and it means that when times are difficult, you’ve got somebody right there. A raft of people that can support you.” Incorporating partners to a similar extent that it would employees, can improve working relationships “because they know where your business is going and what your business agenda is, it offloads a lot of pressure from the internal team so they can focus on their core activities.”
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