Major General Tom Copinger-Symes CBE has been in post since August 2019, the latest stopping-off point in a career which began when he was commissioned into The Royal Green Jackets in 1992, and one that has encompassed a wide variety of staff appointments and operational experience, including commanding an Army Division of 30,000 soldiers, setting up the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Brigade and commanding a battle-group in Afghanistan.

So why swap combat fatigues and the pressure of command in military theatre for a desk job? While it’s certainly not your average career path, Copinger-Symes says the opportunity to work alongside Defence CIO Charlie Forte, to actively shape digitalisation and transformation across the armed services was simply too good to turn down.

Advancing through agile

One way that the Major General and his team are seeking to turn digital blueprints into battlefield reality is through the effective deployment of agile methodologies, something that he views as a vital channel through which to effect rapid but sustainable change, particularly when it comes to something as sweeping as digital transformation.

He is at pains to stress that digital-inspired disruption is by no means the only type of disruption Defence is contending with – its horizon also encompasses the risks and opportunities in climate change and Covid-19, to name but two. Digital, though, throws up its own challenges, not least the importance of understanding the difference between ‘digitalisation’ and ‘digitisation’.

“Beneath the bumper sticker of ‘digital transformation’ I would describe several different steps,” he says. “We know what the mission and task is but we can use digital processes and technology to operate and fight better – I think this is what most people call ‘digitisation’.

The ‘digitalisation’ part is about reimagining how we deliver the same outputs, which for us is about reimagining how to operate and fight, once you understand what digital can do”.

So, where does agile fit in?

Interestingly, Copinger-Symes – while stressing that he doesn’t “know my Kanban from my Scrum from my Lean Start-Up” – draws some strong and pertinent parallels between agile and the military operations he learned about as a teenager.

“We practice something called ‘Intelligence Preparation of the Battlespace (IPB)’ to start to understand how in any given mission the terrain and enemy are going to need to be engaged with. I would say that this IPB is exactly the same thing as the business analysis that agile folk would start off with, using spreadsheets, existing data and so on, to understand the rough shape of a problem.

They then go into a Discovery phase but for me this is merely reconnaissance – which is what is drummed into us from day one as a soldier. We are trained from a very early stage that in an uncertain environment such as conflict, you’re never going to know enough and it’s constantly changing. But the first thing you can do is inform yourself about the problem – ‘if in doubt, push a recce out!’ So I see the parallel between Discovery and reconnaissance very acutely – looking at the situation from various angles, and trying to understand problems from the perspective of different users and stakeholders.

And where I really love the comparison is when agile proponents go into Alpha, Beta and then Live, which mirrors the phrases we have in the military - ‘it’s not about the plan, it’s all about the planning’. With the agile stages, you’re deliberately iterating towards solutions, you’re not jumping to a final solution too early. And again, this is just how a battle group sends reconnaissance scouts down different routes, finding where the blockages are and where the going is good, testing their way through to a solution, and always ready to rip up the plan and move to another one.”

Engineering empowerment

These links somewhat beg the question as to why agile hasn’t been adapted more widely in Defence. Copinger-Symes admits that it’s been a slower process than he would like but argues that this is not about the benefits of agile, but rather a reflection of the long-standing challenge about how to ensure that quick decisions made in pressurised circumstances on the battlefield can also take place back in barracks.

We connected with Alok Raj at the beginning of lockdown. He, too, had been working from home for several weeks, but it quickly became clear that physical separation from colleagues is making little difference to how he approaches his dual roles of Chief Architect and interim Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at the Department for Education (DfE).

“This is the first time I’ve worked in a central government department and I have found it both challenging and exciting,” he says. “When you’re enabling the delivery of policy and seeing the impact on parents, children, teachers, schools, academy trusts, and so on it is hugely rewarding. But most fundamentally, I have been struck by the people I have found in the department. Their determination to be impartial and make a difference is unlike anything I have come across before.”

Alok has been in post at the DfE for a little over two years, taking on the interim role of CTO last December. Recent events, though, had presented an altogether different type of challenge: leading the department’s technological response to the Covid19 pandemic.

  
Life in the shadow of a pandemic

The DfE has had to respond quickly to challenges such as cancelled examinations, supporting pupils eligible for free school meals and much more – all while its workforce has, like organisations up and down the country, been adjusting to working from home.

“Overall from my perspective the department has adapted very well,” he observes. “I think we were quite well prepared in terms of the tools the staff already had and the resilience of our infrastructure. So we were able to transition several thousand staff to start working from home the day after the official announcement was made, and they have been using their laptop and home Wi-Fi to seamlessly connect into the department’s systems.”

He is keen to stress, however, that DfE didn’t arrive at this picture overnight – it’s been a process that has taken several years. “We’ve been on a journey where we have started to standardise corporate tools like laptops, tablets and phones and a lot of work has gone on,” he says.

Fortunately for DfE staffers, they already were well equipped with vital tools such as laptops, but this hasn’t been the case for their counterparts in other government departments, it transpires.

An outsider’s perspective

Looking ahead, managing the impact of the pandemic will clearly take precedence in the weeks and months to come. To do that, he will be bringing his experience from the private sector – something that he has valued from day one of starting his role.

“Having this outside experience to call upon has been immensely helpful and I’m not alone – a lot of people have joined the department over the past few years. I think there is a huge value in bringing people in from outside as it helps the DfE shake things up a bit, think outside of the box, think laterally and focus efforts on the things that matter.”

For now that means not the nitty gritty of a digital transformation, but rather ensuring how technology can best be deployed to help schools, universities, colleges and nurseries cope with the drastically changed circumstances prompted by the pandemic.

“The whole department is now thinking about online and remote learning and how we can help. It comes down to helping those in most need and those who are most vulnerable and have been left behind. Doing nothing cannot be an option.”

Commander Jim Briscoe relishes the opportunity to try something new. The need and desire to do things a little differently, to question long-accustomed rules, runs deep. This is probably why he has proven so suited to his role helping oversee NELSON, an innovation programme rapidly accelerating the exploitation of advanced data analytics and Artificial Intelligence in the Royal Navy.

Sure, his technical background and naval experience – on land and sea – has been vital but so, too, has his mindset; the determination to turn the page; the aversion to the status quo and willingness to challenge legacy processes.

  
A civilian starting point

So, how did Briscoe end up in the Navy? A military calling may have seemed inevitable given the exploits of his father – a navigator in the Royal Navy – but, at least to start with, he opted against following in his footsteps. After studying engineering at the University of Liverpool, he worked in the private sector for about four years.

His first naval role saw him serving as a Deputy Weapon Engineer Officer on board HMS Iron Duke –and, with a fire burning in him for more adventure, he volunteered for a Joint Forces Unit, where he came through a demanding selection process.

The time with the Joint Unit had a strong influence on him. “The experience definitely shaped me, opening my mind to the power of small, autonomous, teams, and gave me more confidence to take risks and challenge norms,” he recalls. “All of which has definitely helped me at NELSON.”

 He goes on to say that this attitude is something he would like to impart on his team at NELSON. “The more traditional command and control leadership styles are not enough on their own when working with digital teams,” he says. An approach adopting a laser focus on unblocking impediments for delivery teams, he adds, would greatly help the organisational agility we need to accelerate delivery of technology to the front line.

“It’s about recognising the need for detailed planning to be informed by doing. Hopefully we can bring others with us. I recognised early on in NELSON that we had to create a sense of urgency in order to help transformation.”

Briscoe has forged strong relationships with colleagues across the NELSON project – not least his partnership with its director, David Tagg-Oram. “I feel genuinely lucky to have had the opportunity to work on NELSON and to bring me in contact with the people from different backgrounds in our team,” he says. “Working with young, knowledgeable and motivated people like Hannah Green, and particularly David, is a daily pleasure and has proved pivotal to NELSON’s success so far.”

  
Wind at their backs

So, what’s next? A long term ambition is, of course, to have the NELSON platform being operational on more major surface combatants – “over the next two and a half years we’re aiming for a larger proportion of the fleet than the carrier strike group” – but he also wants to expand efforts in all services of the Royal Navy, Marines, Fleet Air Arm and the crucial underwater battlespace.

And by no means does he think it will be job done when the NELSON platform is operational on all warships. “Ideally, what I’d like to see is us having uniformed personnel who are part of development teams, learning code and inputting their domain expertise, before they utilise this knowledge while out on deployment and helping to support and iterate applications in near real time. That level of agility in capability upgrades is something we should aspire to. Bringing more people into the development cycle early on powers transformations and this is the model I’d like us to get there eventually – at scale.”

Only time will tell if this vision becomes reality – but such has been the pace of progress so far, few would bet against it.

Christine Maxwell hasn’t risen to senior positions at KPMG, BP and RBS, as well as her current role as Director, Cyber Defence and Risk at the Ministry of Defence (MoD), without fierce intelligence and curiosity.

Maxwell’s approachability belies the gravity of her role, however. She is directing defensive cyber for everything cyber related across the full spectrum of Defence in the UK. So all agencies, all organisations, all units. No wonder she says that she’s “never worked as hard in my life”.

  
Hitting the ground running

Prior to Maxwell coming on board, the MoD’s cyber activities were handled by different teams and in different ways. “There were lots of people doing bits of it but it was described to me as ‘a leg of the stool was missing’ because it was always just a bit wobbly as the direction wasn’t always clear,” she explains. “So it’s my job to bring all these elements together and make sure we’re going in the same direction and mitigating that risk.”

Maxwell, it’s important to stress, is no novice. Her time in professional services, as well as oil and gas and banking, has exposed her to broad leadership and security governance, risk and compliance, as well as the challenges of leading large-scale transformation programmes.

And why was cyber defence not being focused on previously? “Because no one was fighting for it across the cyber framework. Lack of leadership was probably a core of it. I’m only one person and I haven’t got a big army of people to help me, yet, but it’s amazing what you can do when you do think strategically and in the right order.”

A question of priorities

Another area of focus has been ensuring that cyber gets an equal amount of attention as more traditional Defence-related activities. It may lack the visibility of a new warship or helicopter fleet, for example, but it is no less important – particularly as the armed forces pivot towards all things artificial intelligence and machine learning.