Downer’s digital journey to deliver consistency to customers

With a strong CFO background in a number of ASX listed organizations, Downer group CIO Nicola Dorling is no stranger to transformation. At commodity trading company GrainCorp, for instance, she was integral in integrating a commodity management trading system into SAP. “That was my first push into technology, and utilizing it to streamline processes, data, the way people worked, and have it fully integrated into a full stack solution,” she says.

Now at Downer, an organization with over 30,000 people, efficient use of technologies and talent is essential to the way it designs, builds, and sustains infrastructure assets and facilities across Australia and New Zealand. So on any given day, it supports cleaning in a hospital, for instance, and operates and maintains road networks. “No two days are the same,” she says. “My team across the whole business supports the run technology for all business units. We have heads of IT that report to me in each unit, and we also support strategic programs of work, all with the aim to utilize innovation so we make it seamless to do business with our customers.”

Doing everything from strategy, build, deployment, and run is an effective learning tool to understand all the different businesses and what they need to be more effective for their customers. Underlying it all is Downer’s approach to technology.

“When we’re driving our digital journey, we spend a lot of time assessing what the business does on a daily basis for customers,” she says. “We map out all those journeys, and we understand if they have any pain points for our employees, but we also try and understand what technologies they’re using today and if they’re disconnected or if they need an uplift. Once we’ve got a picture, then we’re able to deliver what our customers want.”

And the list of tech solutions is long. Downer has a lot of AI enabled safety tools, digital twins to support the asset management life cycle, and means to use historical data to predict asset conditions down the road. “That helps organizations like ours predict what work orders need to be in the future, which helps us work with our customers on the demand planning of those work orders, and the supply planning of resources,” she says. “Ultimately, when we say what the value is to the customers on that, we can help them optimize their operating and capital budgets by getting more tailored programs that suit their businesses.”

Dorling also spoke about utilizing AI to improve safety on sites and help predictive asset maintenance, as well as distilling clear, value-driven strategies to service customers and garner board approval. Watch the full video below for more insights.

On AI use cases: We’re an asset management business, so we’re often looking at the existing condition of assets and then working out how we need to maintain them for the public. One of our innovations has been a solution called Fault IQ, which uses an off the shelf detection product. So in Downer Digital, we don’t always need to build everything ourselves. We’ll use something off the shelf if we can, and then configure it to our database of faults we find as we work on our road corridors. What that means is we’ve got a lot of historical data on road faults, and the historical data, in conjunction with the AI, can then predict whether there’ll be faults in the future. This solution revolutionizes the performance of the rail corridor because it transforms the inspection process. It gives our operators and our maintainers the ability to identify faults quickly, but also to take photos of any in real time and get them off to the operator so they can do something about it.

On aligning the overall IT strategy: The Downer Digital strategy has three overarching pillars and 12 strategic programs of work. And those 12 programs align to the business unit strategies as well. So everything we do in the digital strategy is delivering for the businesses and against the Downer strategy. The 12 programs focus on areas where we want to move the needle, and they’ll usually focus on innovation, such as digital twins for some of our customers, or it could be an AI solution that’s supporting safety on one of our road customers. They also support how we uplift our middle office and where we’re looking to get better at utilizing the data we have in our organization to make decisions. And then we’ve got a number of foundational programs of work that look at uplifting our infrastructure, making sure we’ve got flexibility in our cloud solutions.

On CIO aspirations: It all depends on where you start your career. You could’ve already taken a route where you’ve got a deep technical skillset, and then as you move on, it’s a given you’re going to have the appropriate skills to undertake the role. For me, it’s about being inquisitive in the tools that can support you driving a business forward from a transformation perspective. So things such as innovative tools, emerging technologies, data and analytics, cloud based solutions — they’re the things we all need to know about, because they make our organizations more efficient, effective, and more flexible. It’s also about mindset: having a can-do attitude and asking the right questions. For any women who wants to come into the CIO world, moving forward from STEM and pushing that is definitely something I do, and I want to make sure other female CIOs do the same. But resilience is a key to working in the IT industry. When you’re a female CIO, it gives you that extra boost when you’ve got to make transformation decisions.

On getting executive and board buy in: It’s all about creating business outcomes for our customers. When we’re working with the business, it’s on the strategic projects that are going to deliver value, so we’re constantly working with our people on how to run processes, where they’re effective or not, how we can use technology to streamline processes. Those create efficiency for us. From the board, it’s about having a strategy that’s clear on what the strategic programs do and how they drive the digital transformation. And the board is interested in making sure we’ve got the appropriate governance structures and frameworks around the approval of the projects and the design and build, and then monitor the delivery of those projects through that lifecycle.

On immediate business needs vs. legacy tech: This is always a challenge in an organization like Downer. We’ve got four business units and around 25 lines of business. So over the years, there’s been a lot of technology that’s been purchased to undertake delivery of work, which means we’ve got legacy tech throughout our business. There needs to be a balance. You need to understand what legacy technology you’ve got, why you’ve got it, and how long you might need it for. You need to pursue innovation, but you’ve got to get your technology stack right. So for us, it’s focusing on simplifying it, getting our foundations right, and having one place to have all our data across all business units. Once you start to get the foundations and the stack right, then when you want to focus on innovation or decommissioning legacy, it makes it easier because your stack is more robust.