Dave Adamson. Image: Brian Sibley
Espria’s Dave Adamson discusses his role as CTO, the role of IT in sustainability and the effects of AI and quantum computing on cybersecurity.
Dave Adamson is the chief technology officer at managed services provider Espria. Adamson has more than 18 years of technical experience as an IT professional. He took up his current role at Espria in 2018.
As CTO, Adamson says he wears lots of hats. “My main responsibility is to develop the services and solutions we take to market to help our customers effect change in their organisation, but I also run our technical pre-sales and post-sales teams and am responsible for how we adopt technology internally, which helps to put me in the shoes of our customers.
“The big challenge is finding the right mix of cutting-edge and stable that keeps us at the forefront of technology adoption but doesn’t deliver a constantly moving target to our managed services team.”
What are some of the biggest challenges you’re facing in the current IT landscape and how are you addressing them?
The analysts suggest we are (hopefully) coming out the back of a period of asset-sweating driven by the Covid and post-Covid economy as we move into 2024. If there is some IT investment to happen, the big challenge is getting the most bang for your buck – do you invest in your device strategy, your security posture, adopt new applications and services, become a generative AI powerhouse?
Generative AI and cybersecurity together and separately are hugely complex topics to navigate and so we’re continuing to deliver education and thought leadership to assist our customers in planning their strategies for the year.
What are your thoughts on digital transformation in a broad sense within your industry? How are you addressing it in your company?
The managed services provider space is a broad church, from those who have invested in R&D and are seeing gains in customer experience and time to resolution to those who are struggling to keep up with the changing demands of customers. The successful ones are those who can demonstrate they walk the talk, moving their relationships with customers into business outcome led ones rather than transactional ones. This is only possible if you can engage with your customers on topics such as business change programmes and ESG, and it definitely helps if you can show you have walked a mile in their shoes.
In the case of Espria, we spent much of 2022 and 2023 integrating two businesses together and that led to us to implementing an ERP [enterprise resource planning] platform, analysing and digitising processes, and implementing a dedicated integration/automation function for the first time. Open standards and integration possibilities are central to every technology decision we now make – five years ago I would never have expected to become an API-first business. In my conversations with peers within customer experience it’s been extremely helpful to have recent experience of successes and challenges to share, and indeed to learn from their experiences.
‘Security incidents are a case of when, not if – we will be defined by our ability to recover’
Sustainability has become a key objective for businesses in recent years. What are your thoughts on how this can be addressed from an IT perspective?
IT has a huge role to play in the sustainability conversation, which is starting to move on from just calculating the BTU [British thermal unit] of the next generation of storage appliance. It is critical as an industry we move beyond box-ticking tree planting schemes and begin to embed sustainability in everything we do. ESG is playing a central role in every RFP [request for proposal] we see and there is definitely an uncomfortable conversation that needs to be had about the environmental impact of everybody racing to embed generative AI in their processes.
We are rolling out free-of-charge training to our managed services customers through our customer portal, just to help lay out the ESG landscape and how IT influences it both positively and negatively. It’s something we take extremely seriously ourselves and are in the happy position of being an ESG case study for our auditing partner; this is only possible because of a top-down and company-wide commitment to environmental matters.
What big tech trends do you believe are changing the world and your industry specifically?
It’s hard to look past the explosion in generative AI solutions. I think everybody agrees it will disrupt the labour market in some fashion, but opinions are split on how positive or negative that shift will be. I am confident the net effect will be extremely positive, but there’s no doubt it will affect some professions more than others.
Longer term, we are starting to see breakthroughs with quantum computing. While we’re no doubt some way from this being a commodity capability for us to consume, it does raise some serious questions about how secure our encrypted data will remain long term, the environmental impact and whether it widens the divide between the haves and have nots.
What are your thoughts on how we can address the security challenges currently facing your industry?
Education is the best defence and there’s no reason that can’t start very early on. I would love to see cyber skills joining budget management and other life skills on the curriculum alongside traditional subjects. Currently, awareness is growing all the time, which is great to see, but boards need to show leadership on the importance of security in their hiring decisions and investment strategies but also in their own behaviours. It is no longer okay to have an exception for the CFO just because they struggle with technology. We also need to continue to plan for the worst and accept that for most of us, security incidents are a case of when, not if – we will be defined by our ability to recover.
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