CIO 100: Beca Group

THOMAS HYDE, CIO at professional engineering services firm Beca, says he and his team are gearing to work on more projects this year.

“Increasing speed of change and deployment, particularly in the area of engineering design collaboration technology, is driving an increase in IT projects as technology continues to be an enabler to business agility,” says Hyde, who leads a team of 51, with 13 of them based overseas.

Beca has headquarters in Auckland, but operates three main hubs – from Australia, New Zealand and Singapore – for its international client?le. It has a substantial Asia Pacific footprint, with nearly 3000 employees in 19 offices worldwide.

Beca teams work on projects across the globe, thus collaboration and cloud-based services are becoming increasingly important as they work across international borders or in joint ventures.

The technology group provides services on systems engineering, business solutions, IT project management and software services, and has developed a number of software and simulation products. This capability has enabled Beca to work in a number of markets, including transportation, ports, defence and water.

Hyde says the biggest business technology projects in this year will be on engineering collaboration toolsets that include VDI and cloud services.

In the past year, Hyde says among the biggest contribution of the ICT team to the business is the improvement in their project delivery systems, as well as doing the groundwork for a major global network upgrade which is in the final stages of rollout.

He also notes the increase in security maturity and awareness across the group.

Hyde and his team will also continue to work on SaaS implementations, “along with an agnostic progression to cloud services to support our global supply chain”.

Major ICT investments in upcoming months will be on big data, business intelligence and analytics, mobile technologies, cloud services, security and risk management and collaboration technologies.

Hyde says the top three challenges he and his team will face in upcoming months are around managing the complexity of two speed ICT, moving to digital platforms, and leading disruptive technology-enabled change.