Dal Virdi, IT director at Shakespeare Martineau, found himself in an intriguing position when he joined the law firm in 2018. The business had grown quickly due to a series of mergers and acquisitions, but rapid growth also meant the firm’s digital infrastructure was overly complex and inefficient. 

Virdi knew he’d need to take a different approach if IT was going to continue supporting business growth. After assessing the options with his team, he decided the solution to the challenge the firm faced would come in the form of a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform supplied by technology specialist Nutanix.

“We wanted to deliver value to our external and internal clients,” Virdi tells IT Pro. “There’s never going to be a silver bullet, but the technology we introduced needed to simplify the operations of our internal team, so they could invest their time and effort into activities that will create an advantage for the firm.”

Handling a mishmash of old and new

Virdi inherited a complex IT environment. The business doubled in size with the merger of Shakespeares and SGH Martineau in 2015. Subsequent acquisitions meant the firm, which now employs more than 850 legal experts in offices across the UK, was left with a mix of external providers and internal IT resources. 

With Shakespeare Martineau also having ambitious plans to double its size by 2025, Virdi knew IT systems would have to work more effectively, reliably and efficiently to support the firm’s business strategy. The aim was to create a “one-stop-shop”.

“We’d inherited lots of staff, with different skill sets and different backgrounds, and we really wanted to simplify what IT needed to do moving forward. It was a difficult decision – and it took us a long time to make that decision – but Nutanix absolutely ticked that box,” says Virdi.

The firm implemented the Nutanix HCI platform after a thorough evaluation process. Virdi’s direct reports explored various hardware options and were “blown away” by a demonstration at an IT conference. Virdi says, however, he was nervous about their recommendations, at first, because he didn’t have much experience with Nutanix or converged platforms.

“I guess I can be quite challenging in terms of some of the probing questions that I ask around the technology and how it works, so it took many months for that decision to be reached,” he says. “It was either going to be our traditional HP hardware or an alternative – and Nutanix was the only provider that met the brief as an alternative.”

The selection process took nine months from the initial discussions to the implementation, during which time Virdi explored reference customers and talked with some of Nutanix’s international clients. He also met the company’s CEO in London and was impressed by how the provider took the time to show how they could make a difference. 

“A number of factors – the cost being very comparative to what the HP traditional architecture would have incurred, but with the opportunities of improved performance and easy upgrades – swayed the decision in Nutanix’s favour,” he says. “We went forward with some specialist tests and the performance just flew, so it was an absolute no-brainer for us.”

The best of both worlds 

Virdi says the Nutanix platform offered all the abilities of a public cloud-first strategy, combined with the security, performance and compliance needed from an on-premises private cloud solution. The ability to reduce the complexity around support and management was a key factor in adopting the Nutanix platform.

“We decided a few years ago that we would have a cloud-first approach. But being a law firm – with many of the legacy applications and systems that we have, and some of the sensitivity around our data – means that we have to consider anything that we introduce alongside every other system that we still need to run the firm in the way we do,” he says.

“Because of that, we always considered a hybrid approach – and Nutanix gave us that opportunity to start to de-camp some of those legacy systems and move them on to a newer platform, to maintain the other systems that were needed, and also give us the performance that we required.”

Shakespeare Martineau went live with the converged platform in early 2020. The IT team used Softcat as its implementation partner, but also leant on Nutanix’s own expertise to ensure the firm received the desired high quality of delivery.

“The experience, once we started to migrate services, and the support that Nutanix gave the internal team, via upskilling and internal education, meant the internal team could pick up how to make the most of the technology very quickly,” says Virdi.

Back from the brink

The firm’s initial investment in Nutanix technology cost just below £1.5 million. Virdi says choosing Nutanix gave the company a more performant platform for less money than going down the non-converged route. Traditional hardware would have cost more than £2 million, and as the firm’s kit was old it needed to be updated anyway.

The technology is already delivering a tangible return on investment by helping the firm transition its legacy systems to the cloud. It also provides a flexible and scalable platform for long-term digital transformation plans. 

Benefits have come from other unanticipated places, too. Last Christmas, the firm ran an annual power down to service generators in its Birmingham office, which also houses the firm’s internal data centre. When it was given the green light to return power to IT, the team encountered a number of issues with its traditional HP environment. 

These problems meant Virdi’s team had to invoke a full disaster recovery scenario on the Sunday morning. Thankfully, the firm’s commitment to HCI meant the IT team was able to recover systems within 24 hours – and before any end users noticed.

Laura Dawson, CIO at the London School of Economics, has spent the past 12 months establishing a range of collaborative systems and services to help people login and carry on learning from home. It’s been a challenging 12 months, but it’s also been an intense learning period for Dawson and her team.

In just a matter of days last spring, Dawson and her IT colleagues secured remote links, sent out Windows 10 laptops, and established cloud-based services such as Zoom for the provision of online education. Twelve months on and these technologies are helping Dawson, her colleagues in the IT department and the educators and students they serve to work productively and effectively.

So how did Dawson support her organisation during its shift to online learning and what are the key issues that academic organisations will need to consider as they use digital technology to help shape the future of education? In many ways, she says LSE was in a fortunate position – while COVID-19 undoubtedly accelerated digitalisation, the process was already underway.

Internal expertise

Dawson also says LSE is lucky to be able to draw on the experience of Dilly Fung, a forward-thinking pro-director of education who is keen to explore new and engaging approaches to teaching. Fung’s research around the connected curriculum aims to find ways to foster strong relationships between students and educators. 

“So that whole-of-life learning approach was very much the kind of thing we were looking at when we were exploring the future of education,” says Dawson. “We were already thinking about, ‘What does digital education look like? What does research-based education look like, how will we service that and how will that look in the longer term?’” 

When lockdown came, Dawson and her senior colleagues had the opportunity to answer some of those questions. “That was all about getting the teaching going as quickly and effectively as possible,” she says, reflecting on the rapid adoption of online learning methods. 

Once again, she says LSE had a number of advantages: the institution had already established VPN connections to support secure remote access. LSE had also implemented the collaboration platform Microsoft Teams. Two weeks prior to lockdown, the IT team was able to ask every department to work at home as a beta test for socially distanced working. 

“We asked everybody to go and test it and come back to us and tell us what they thought: How did it work, what worked, what didn’t? That gave us quite a lot of insight into the sort of things that we’d need,” she says.

“There was a weird moment days before lockdown where just about everyone in the IT department was updating Windows 10 machines and getting them sent out to staff. But we managed to work very well with our third-party partner; we managed to get the machines that we needed, and we dished them out.”

Choosing the right software

The second key element of technology provision involved the establishment of the online-learning environment. Cloud technology played a crucial role here: While the institution was already using Teams for collaboration, it decided to use Zoom as its video-conferencing platform for online lessons.  

“We did that because we brought the right people into the room within the first week of the pandemic,” says Dawson. “We went with Zoom because that is the best way for us to get our students online and give them a great experience. So we’d done the due diligence, but we did it really quickly – and that just freed up the discussion.”

LSE also used the online-learning platform Moodle to help deliver assessments. Once again, the team took a similar approach – they made a decision to move the assessment process into the cloud and brought key people together to make decisions and implement systems.

“We created a small sub-team and they went off and did it,” she says. “They got the technology implemented by almost working like a start-up. There’s still more work to be done around honing our approach, but they did it and we were able to deliver assessments.”

Taking the next steps

This rapid but successful digital transformation process has helped LSE and Dawson to develop a much stronger sense of what the future of higher education might look like. What she envisages is a hybrid form of teaching that’s different to before the pandemic. Yes, face-to-face learning will remain but the use of online lessons will also rise.

“What we’ve proven is that education can take place online – what we maybe need to think about now are our skills for maintaining that,” she says. “I think hybrid just needs to be really good. And a successful hybrid is where you are bringing people into the classroom with people who are not in a classroom together in a really equitable way.”

It’s also important to recognise that online learning remains a constant work in progress. During the first lockdown, Dawson’s team had to pivot to provide socially distanced IT support to people who weren’t in the same location and who were trying to deliver online learning. 

As social-distancing restrictions eased, conversations turned to the hybrid teaching environment and the blend of offline and online teaching methods. There was a significant piece of work around turning physical teaching spaces into COVID-safe spaces with fewer seats. For those who were still unable to attend in-person, the IT team has continued to provide online teaching.

Dawson says it’s important to recognise just how far the move to online learning during the coronavirus pandemic has helped to boost the electronic educational experience, particularly in the case of asynchronous teaching, where teaching materials are posted online and learners work through them in their own time.

The future of education, says Dawson, might involve a whole range of emerging technologies, from virtual reality through to even more advanced forms of educational engagement. She refers to an example from the Imperial College Business School, which became the first institution to deliver live lectures via hologram.

Dawson says this technology is “really cool” and provides a way to get more people together when international travel is impossible. Yet it’s also important to recognise that these technologies are at the cutting edge and are far from replacing traditional forms of learning or even video-conferencing systems. 

For many institutions, such as LSE, the coronavirus pandemic has represented a burning platform for the adoption of e-learning. For Dawson, the priority now is to make the most of the technology that’s been implemented and to build on those gains.

“I don’t necessarily think there’s any special magic technology that we need in order to create fantastic online learning. I think confidence is the key thing; people now know that they can actually deliver education online,” she says.

Shadow IT is now a business-as-normal activity, with non-IT professionals having more interest in technology than ever before, both in terms of using and procuring systems. What does this rise of decentralised IT mean for the role of the CIO and how can digital leaders ensure cross-business collaboration?

For Phil Armstrong, global CIO at finance firm Great-West Lifeco, the answer is simple: digital leaders must spend less time in the IT department and more time talking with executive peers across the rest of the organisation. “Communication skills are paramount for modern CIOs,” he says. “They need to talk in terms the business can understand.

IT and non-IT collaboration

The good news is that most leading CIOs appear to be savvy enough to understand the importance of looking beyond the safe confines of the IT department. The best digital leaders understand the myriad levers of business, not just the tools of the technology trade. They explain how digital transformation can change the business for the better.

Yet the challenge of cross-collaboration communication between IT leaders and their non-IT peers remains significant. While most employees are keen to use a combination of smart devices and the cloud to download their own apps, that growing awareness hasn’t necessarily sponsored a commensurate awareness in how to use systems and services securely.

All executives must work to ensure technology isn’t just bought and forgotten about until the IT department picks up problems at a later stage. Gideon Kay, European CIO at Dentsu Aegis Network, says the onus is on all executives to take an active interest in the strengths and weakness of technology. Specialist appointments to advise the board can help in this regard.

“I do believe we’re at a point where boards generally need to be more consciously aware of the opportunity that technology creates and the risk it brings, too,” he says. “It’s time for boards to have technologists as non-executives. That’s really important to help businesses understand and manage their entire portfolio.”

Experienced CIO and former CMO Sarah Flannigan is one executive who is fulfilling such a role. After leaving her position as CIO at EDF Energy at the end of last year, Flannigan is now pursuing a portfolio role, where she is providing consultancy and non-executive advice to a range of organisations, including Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

“You can make all the difference in those moments,” she says. “You learn and grow as an individual, while helping others – and the more that there are others who are learning, the more everyone benefits collectively. Exponentially, you become increasingly helpful to the executives you work with and you also keep learning as an individual. The non-exec role helps you create greater value for everyone involved across the organisations you serve.”

The dual-role CIO

Sometimes, the answer for organisations and for digital executives is to take a novel approach to the challenge of effective cross-business collaboration. Rather than being the IT chief for a single organisation, David Walliker is CIO at both Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust and the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospital NHS Trust.

Liverpool Women’s NHS Trust (pictured) is one of a number of trusts to successfully share a CIO

Walliker joined Liverpool Women’s in April 2013 and assumed the CIO role at the Royal in January 2015. Walliker is now running an IT-led change programme concurrently across both organisations, and working arrangements have varied since taking on the dual role. He currently works full-time for the Royal and is loaned back two days a week to the Women’s Hospital – and it’s an approach that works well for Walliker and the NHS trusts he serves.

“I enjoy the split because they’re two fundamentally different organisations,” he says. “The Royal’s exactly what you’d expect from a large, city centre hospital – it’s extremely busy and very fast-paced. The Women’s Hospital is a specialist Trust with a very different culture. The difference between the two creates an interesting split through the working week.”

Walliker says the aim is the same across both organisations: using the digitisation of paper records and electronic forms (e-forms) to deliver innovative healthcare to the people of Liverpool – and he is receiving cross-business support from senior executives in both NHS Trusts. “Digitising costs money in the shorter term but the long-term payback is huge,” he says. “It makes your organisation much more efficient and cost-effective.”

Like Walliker, Julie Dodd also fulfils a dual role at Parkinson’s UK. As director of digital transformation and communication at the charity, Dodd overseas IT and marketing functions. This combined role makes it easier for her to ensure there is a strong working bond between professionals across the organisation. As part of this process, Dodd encourages agile working.

“That digital spirit of collaborative, cross-functional teams is really exciting when it allows people to break from their silos and enter debates across the wider organisation as people from separate teams who can bring something different to the conversation on an equal footing,” she says.

Friend-maker, problem-solver

Richard Corbridge, who is chief digital and information officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, is another IT leader who recognises the power of joined-up thinking. Corbridge believes the key role for the CIO is often as a friend-maker and problem-solver. While strong bonds with marketing chiefs will be crucial in this regards, other functions matter too.

“The decentralisation of IT means procurement is increasingly led by others on the board,” he says. “The CIO is then the person who provides detail on why an investment in IT makes sense. Technology chiefs also need to stay close to audit and risk functions. Cyber security remains a risk and the key is knowing how to react when something happens.”

Corbridge believes it is crucial to remember the CIO role as an ever-evolving position. Without the ability to evolve, IT leaders get stuck in an operationally focused mindset. This inherent change in the role means CIOs must concentrate on building cross-organisational bonds – and relationships with communications professionals are likely to be crucial.

“You can and should lean on the shoulders of the digital marketing team,” says Corbridge. “That for me is when we, as CIOs, can make a difference. I think the convergence of digital and communications, and the growing importance of the CIO role, is where we’ll end up as the digital leadership role continues to evolve.”

Photo by Rodhullandemu / CC BY 2.0

The cloud is now established as a business-as-normal activity. Almost three-quarters of businesses have between one and five years of experience with cloud technologies, according to research by IT industry association CompTIA.

So, what will be the key trends for the cloud through 2019 and beyond, and how can CIOs continue to make the most of the cloud?

Alex von Schirmeister, chief digital, technology and innovation officer at retail specialist RS Components, is using the cloud to provide a platform for digital transformation. He is working to create a cloud-first approach, yet the required balance of business benefit and technological risk leaves von Schirmeister to conclude that there will never be a 100% migration to the cloud.

On-prem will always have a role

“There will always be room for some sort of hybrid solution, where certain aspects of your infrastructure – because of issues around criticality, confidentiality or risk – will continue being held on-premise,” he explains. “There are still many legacy companies, like ours, that are still at an early stage regarding the journey of discovery and the cloud.”

“We’re still experimenting in many ways. The clear majority of our main infrastructure still sits on a physical data warehouse and it will continue to do so for several years. But we’re certainly looking at how we migrate in the future.”

That stance resonates with Gregor Petri, research vice president at Gartner, who says most businesses are currently focused on creating a cloud strategy, but concerns remain around existing application portfolios. While some IT leaders might consider lifting and shifting a small minority of services, the majority of CIOs will use the cloud in the future as a platform to deliver innovation.

“That approach means most things will eventually run in the cloud, but not because CIOs pick up existing applications and choose to run them somewhere else,” says Petri. Lifting and shifting doesn’t give you the benefits of the cloud. But what is true is that the next version of the software you’re running today, and in intend to run in the future, will run in the cloud.”

The need for reliable governance

This piecemeal approach is a strategy that chimes with Richard Corbridge, who is chief digital and information officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. His organisation is aiming to move to a cloud-first policy during the next four years. Corbridge, who joined the Trust late last year, says the transition on demand is taking longer because of those previous investments in internal infrastructure made before he joined.

Now, however, cloud increasingly represents the sensible choice for organisations in his sector. “Healthcare organisations are pushing hard to show that cloud is not just possible but almost mandated as the approach of choice, due to its added security and functionality,” says Corbridge. “There’s no point in every Trust in the UK investing in their own infrastructure.”

He says it makes good business sense for Leeds to use the cloud, especially if that approach helps support better investment in security through the big-budget approach of vendor partners. Corbridge recognises governance is still a concern, suggesting this need to keep a tight grip on data location will help sponsor the use of mixed approaches to the cloud.

“There’s probably still a need for a bit of a hybrid solution because of the nature of some of the systems, particularly the legacy technology that some Trusts have,” he says, adding the likely direction of travel for European public sector bodies is on demand. “As we modernise, I think we’ll ultimately all move more towards the public cloud.”

“Cloud is still too expensive”

Like Corbridge, Richard Gifford, CIO at logistics firm Wincanton, says his organisation must deal with legacy concerns. At the moment, his business has a high, fixed-cost legacy installation base. “I’m not able to breathe in easily if circumstances change,” says Gifford.

“Equally, we sometimes want to be able to expand rapidly, so that we can serve our customers in a more agile way. That means we’re looking to move from a fixed-cost base to a scalable operation.”

Gifford says the form of that transition, including choice of provider, is up for debate. The organisation will go to the public cloud for some areas, such as testing and development, and for certain enterprise applications. But where the firm is running 24/7 operations, such as in the case of ecommerce, the cloud is currently too expensive.

So, rather than the commonly-cited security implications of going on demand, Gifford says cost concerns are a bigger impediment to a cloud-first strategy. “We’re embracing on-demand IT, but we’ll be making a tentative move to the cloud because of commercial reasons,” he says.

“In the public cloud, I’m going to have to stand up services to run 24/7, so I’m actually paying for that computing power even if we’re not using it. In a private cloud, that situation is different because I’m only paying for the service when I need it.”

The future of computing is at the edge

It is reasonable to suggest, therefore, that the approach to the cloud varies between sectors and organisations – and that variation will remain a common theme going forward. What is certain, however, is that the cloud will be used to help deliver innovation and new services.

Richard Orme, CTO of Photobox Group, expects the next year or two to be huge in terms of businesses using the cloud to deliver benefits to customers. “People are going to see much more rapid iterations on their apps, software and operating systems and far fewer big, one-off updates,” he says.

Further down the line, as cloud becomes the norm, Orme believes there is going to be much greater use of edge computing. This involves the proliferation of smaller, localised data centres that are focused on machine-to-machine interactions, such as those that could be used to power artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives.

“AI requires vast numbers of interactions between two machines – for example, your phone and the data centre which holds the AI engine – so being physically close makes a big difference in how quickly these machines can interact and, therefore, respond to an end user. As the complexity of AI grows, edge computing and local data centres that are used specifically for super-fast machine-to-machine interactions will become key,” says Orme.