CIO interview: Steve Capper, CIO, SNC-Lavalin
Steve Capper, CIO at engineering and building specialist SNC-Lavalin, took an uncommon path to the highest. Now he’s reached the IT management pinnacle, he’s eager to create a long-lasting influence for the enterprise and the brand new expertise he’s bringing by way of in his personal division.
Capper started working for engineering and growth big Arup as a trainee aged 16, having left college with no {qualifications}. Over the following 20 years, he labored in a variety of roles, taking up extra obligations, till he finally headed up the know-how crew: “I started in the print room and, after 23 years, left Arup as the head of IT globally.”
He subsequently labored for building firm Skanska, design specialist AECOM – the place he labored in Dubai and Los Angeles – earlier than turning into world CIO with Royal BAM Group within the Netherlands in late 2017. He joined SNC-Lavalin in February 2020.
“I took my opportunities,” says Capper, reflecting on his profession. “I never set out from school thinking I was going to be a CIO. But I did a lot of hard work to get to where I am today. I’ve put in the hours. I showed people I could do it, and that’s how I progressed and moved from the back office in Leeds to running IT for massive companies around the world.”
Bringing the whole lot collectively
During the previous two years, Capper has centered on bringing disparate folks and techniques collectively to create a single IT organisation at SNC-Lavalin. As a part of this course of, he’s decreased the corporate’s core datacentres from 16 down to a few within the UK, Canada, and the US.
Capper says knowledge administration is a giant problem for his organisation. The firm collects an enormous quantity of knowledge when workers work on initiatives. However, whereas as a lot as 80% of this knowledge isn’t touched once more after six months, it additionally must be stored as a file of the totally different work the agency has produced for shoppers.
“Obviously, we might use some of our data at some stage, but a lot of it is quite static, so it doesn’t lend itself to being kept in the cloud,” he says. “Pushing everything into the cloud would be expensive.”
As effectively as price, the corporate wants to contemplate knowledge sovereignty. For this mixture of causes, Capper says personal cloud is a greater resolution to the enterprise’ knowledge storage problem than public provision.
“We’ve got data sovereignty to take into account because we have nuclear work and sensitive work for governments around the world,” he says. “We need to make sure we know where that data is and that it’s protected. Instead, we have managed services, but in our datacentres. So, we pay a specialist player, Creative ITC, for a private cloud.”
Application consolidation is one other precedence space. SNC-Lavalin consists of a variety of organisations which were introduced collectively over time. The outcome, says Capper, is a large number of enterprise useful resource planning (ERP) techniques. His crew is working a three-year programme to consolidate enterprise ERP right into a single occasion from Oracle within the cloud.
Creating a single model of the reality
To help cross-business collaboration, Capper has additionally applied VMware’s Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to create a trusted supply of information for the corporate’s design and engineering professionals.
“We use that technology heavily because we have design centres around the world and we send a lot of work to places like India, but they need to collaborate in real time with people in the US or in Canada or the UK,” he says.
“It’s high-end compute because the models are absolutely huge. But we’re finding massive efficiencies because we’re not having to drag and drop drawings across the world, which take hours to copy. Everything’s just hosted in a central place.”
Capper says the shift to VMware VDI has supported a giant shift in working strategies. Rather than storing after which engaged on information domestically, workers across the globe can collaborate on the definitive model of fashions and designs. This single model of the reality additionally ensures computing assets are used successfully.
“The traditional route was that everybody had a big meaty machine under their desk. They connected in to their local office and server. But the problem was that we couldn’t have people working in different offices at the same time on the same model, because you couldn’t work across the network,” he says.
“Rather than people copying models, everything is now just going into one central system. VDI has also driven massive efficiencies in terms of IT costs because for each person we used to have to buy a high-end computer. Some of these computers can cost up to £20,000, and then they sit under a person’s desk and they’re only leveraged by that person, which is crazy.”
Embracing new approaches
Capper says the enterprise now advantages from a joined-up, cost-effective approach of working. Rather than having to spend huge on servers and high-end computer systems for each workplace, the corporate can provision know-how because it’s required.
“It doesn’t matter what device people are using,” he says. “We don’t actually need to always buy fancy computers anymore. We could use Chromebooks if we wanted to. The power is in the supercomputer in the datacentre that’s hosted on VMware. All the processing takes place centrally. All the data is stored in the private cloud across three datacentres.”
As effectively as Horizon VDI, SNC-Lavalin additionally makes use of VMware’s virtualisation know-how vSphere, its vSan hyperconverged infrastructure software program, its safety platform NSX, and its multicloud service vRealize.
“There’s lots of buzzwords that come out of the IT industry, but I think just working smarter and doing things more efficiently is going to be the big thing next year”
Steve Capper, SNC-Lavalin
Capper says his IT crew will use this suite of know-how and a variety of different techniques to deal with making certain the enterprise advantages from info and perception.
“We’ve been talking about data as the new oil for years,” he says. “There’s lots of buzzwords that come out of the IT industry, but I think just working smarter and doing things more efficiently is going to be the big thing next year.”
Capper says one other precedence for 2023 is to proceed honing inner functionality, together with rising range inside the IT crew. “It’s something that we are trying desperately to do. One thing we’ve done recently is taken our help desk from 15% female to 30% in the last six months, so we’re getting there,” he says.
“Trying to encourage people into technology is quite hard. The good thing about working for a company like ours is that we’ve got so many things we’re doing – we’re looking at networking, security, ERP, storage systems, and solutions for VDI. There’s a lot more work for people to get involved in. We’ve built a training academy as well, as we’re keen to develop graduates and to help people work in teams.”
Leading from the entrance
Although he fulfils a worldwide function, Capper makes as a lot time for his crew as doable. He runs town-hall conferences for the entire division each month the place he offers folks the liberty to ask difficult questions.
“I’ll answer every single thing they ask, whether it’s, ‘Can we have a salary rise?’ or ‘Why are we using that particular technology?’” he says. “I try to be open. We have an internal HR survey in the company and we get some of the highest scores because the team feel that we’re transparent. I will happily walk them through the IT budget line by line just to explain how it works.”
Capper stories to the corporate’s head of danger and main initiatives. His obligations range significantly from day after day and canopy a variety of actions, comparable to cyber safety, service supply, or fascinated by assist enterprise development by way of the appliance of latest applied sciences. To this finish, he interacts frequently with distributors to see how the organisation can take advantage of their new capabilities.
“It can be a hugely varied day,” he says. “I have a team of 800 and I have a management team and their job is to get the best out of their teams as well. So, they take a lot of pressure off me – and it gives me more time with our business colleagues to discuss how we can use technology to help them.”
For up-and-coming IT expertise, Capper has simple recommendation: “Just grab every opportunity with both hands. For me, being successful in IT and business doesn’t have to always be about getting academic qualifications – you need to have something about you, and common sense goes a long way.”
Producing new efficiencies
Capper says digital transformation at SNC-Lavalin will proceed at tempo. As effectively as VMware’s instruments, the corporate makes use of about 5,000 items of software program for areas comparable to heavy engineering and enterprise info modelling from suppliers comparable to Bentley Systems, Autodesk and Esri.
“There are huge changes we’re making at the moment,” he says. “These projects can take up to 12 to 18 months. What I’m aiming for is to try to have a single world where we can leverage our data for other projects and other needs that we might not have thought about.”
Capper recognises that the broader macro-economic and geopolitical setting will influence the decision-making processes all enterprise leaders take through the subsequent few years. However, his broader purpose is to deal with producing efficiencies for the enterprise and to create a single and cohesive know-how setting.
“People talk about digital transformation a lot, but we’ve been involved in that work for years. I don’t think using technology to change your business is a new approach. What we’re trying to do is to work smarter, leverage our data and drive efficiencies where possible,” he says.
“In 18 months’ time, I’d like to see that we’re nearly over the line with some of our bigger initiatives, such as consolidating ERP, as that will drive massive benefits for the company.”
