[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARK PALMER: Hello, everyone.
I'm delighted to welcome everyone today.
My name is Mark Palmer.
I'm the Head of Public Sector across Europe for Google Cloud.
And today, I'm delighted to welcome Simon Sandford-Taylor.
Simon works for the Office of National Statistics,
where he's the Director for Digital Services
and Technology.
And welcome, Simon.
I'm looking forward to speaking to you today.
SIMON SANDFORD-TAYLOR: Thanks for that.
Very glad to be here.
MARK PALMER: So Simon, I know things have been extremely busy
over the past few months.
Every time I turn the TV on, I see data from the Office
of National Statistics, or the ONS.
But before we get to that, perhaps you
could just set the scene a little bit for us
and describe the role of ONS and the role of technology
in particular within the ONS.
SIMON SANDFORD-TAYLOR: So my name is Simon Sandford-Taylor
and I'm the Director of Digital Services and Technology at ONS.
So as you've said, we see a lot of data now coming from ONS.
And ONS is an independent body providing data
across a wide range of different spectrums
like economy, business, population statistics,
and various information about communities.
And my role is actually to provide the technology
for analysts to work on for intercommunication
between the government departments and everything
else, and software that we then build to help
deliver surveys and analytics.
One such thing that some see, apart
from the COVID work we've been doing that's coming up
is we're doing the technology for the census
next year, in 2021.
MARK PALMER: Wow.
I guess what strikes me is it's probably
the scale of the data you collect on behalf
of the nation, which data and information is
important for all of us.
So perhaps you could describe a little more
about how the technology is potentially
going to be used in the census.
I understand you must-- if it's next year,
could be quite well advanced in that.
SIMON SANDFORD-TAYLOR: That's correct.
So one of the challenges for census
is, obviously, you'll be familiar,
or may remember when you last filled in a census,
it was on paper.
This time around, we're going to try to do it largely digital,
although there will be a paper option.
And one of the things about the scale of the census
is we're trying to deal with 25 million households over a six
week period.
And so obviously, what we want to try and do
is find a solution that was able to cope
with that kind of volume in such a tight timescale
without actually falling over.
So it was obviously at the time to us
that we would have to do this using account provider
and using technologies that were cloud native more than
bespoking everything ourselves.
So what we did was, we looked around
and decided that Kubernetes was the basis for our build.
And the Google Cloud suite of tools, including App Engine,
were the best provider for us to try and rapidly ramp this up.
MARK PALMER: And what kind of, what
was your thinking in looking for those kind of tools?
What was driving the selection of things like Kubernetes,
for example?
SIMON SANDFORD-TAYLOR: So initially we
started off on what we called a multi cloud approach, which
has evolved over time.
So early thinking, so back when I
started looking at this about four or five years ago,
we were under the belief that we would
be able to do this on true multi cloud, which
was the same code could run in any cloud
and it would stop and start the journey from one cloud
to another.
But in reality, by becoming more and more cloud agnostic,
you actually lost the value of all,
of the point of being on a cloud.
So whilst we might be on the cloud for support,
we wouldn't have actually been able to use any underlying
features.
So the common base that we'd stuck with was Kubernetes.
And as my tech guys looked into it,
the best supported option at the time that we made the choice
and still is, was the Google Cloud platform.
MARK PALMER: Obviously, more recently we've
all been locked in our rooms here over this global pandemic
of the past three months and your organization.
I'm sure has taken a very central part in reacting.
Perhaps you could describe a little bit
of the role of how that has played out,
and particularly how technology has played a role in supporting
your organization in that.
SIMON SANDFORD-TAYLOR: By and large, ONS
is fully operational in a virtual environment.
So we were lucky that we were mostly laptop analysts anyway.
So that made it significantly easier.
But we did struggle slightly with this kind
of call, the video call, amongst our colleagues.
And we had a provision through Google Cloud
to use G Suite for centers for operations.
And we managed to leverage that to roll out just
over 5,000 Google Meets to our entire staff.
So within another week, we actually
had backup video conferencing facilities
and full on broadcast facilities across the office.
So that's been well received.
And now everyone is used to Google Meet.
Even when we have to keep saying, note you're on mute.
We still have [INAUDIBLE].
MARK PALMER: Yes, the new normal it
seems, going to be working from home
and using this kind of Google Meet technology to collaborate.
How did the cloud actually help you respond
to those challenges, Simon?
Was it kind of almost like an early dress
rehearsal in some ways for what is coming with the census,
because you had to be very agile and scale very quickly
and change ways of working with so many?
If you look back a little bit, maybe it's
too soon to ask you this question, what
the lessons learned from that, that kind of quick response
into this crisis were.
SIMON SANDFORD-TAYLOR: I mean, there's
been lots of organizational lessons learned.
We've managed to move at a much faster rate
than we would have previously done.
The cloud, without doubt, has made all this far, far quicker,
far more possible.
Certainly the use, so we have a lot of software developers,
they're on what we call off network devices.
That is, devices that are loosely coupled to our network,
but don't have the corporate tools that we
would have perhaps provided.
And without the cloud and the G Suite access,
we wouldn't have been able to keep in touch with our staff.
And also, we always believed on close collaboration.
So staff had to work closely together
in the office physically.
And what we've seen is, through these cloud collaboration
tools, is that that actually has been debunked as a myth.
And we've been able to manage working remotely
with the same efficiencies, and in fact, stand ups
are probably better attended now than they were when they
were physically in the office.
So it's certainly the new way working I think for us,
and that's been a key enabler for us.
MARK PALMER: OK.
Well, one last final question for me, Simon,
perhaps a little to the future.
What's the new lens by which you see digital transformation?
And how is this going to go forward in the light
how the world has changed do you think?
SIMON SANDFORD-TAYLOR: I mean, I don't
like the term, new normal, because that's kind of weird.
But I think the insistence of being
office space, my insistence of us having
physical locations in Newport and Titchfield, the two
main offices, will go.
And actually, we'll start now recruiting
UK-wide, remote working using the tools that we now
need and we now have, make a work-life balance even better
than it was previously.
So I think that's going to be the big change.
Home office is going to be the big thing for people.
That's the thing we're going to embrace.
And hopefully, because of this, the way that everyone now
has more connections to technology, when they wouldn't
previously, when it comes around to do the census,
more people will opt to take it online.
So that's my hope.
MARK PALMER: Well, Simon, thank you
very much for joining me today.
I really appreciate you spending the time.
It's a very fascinating story, and I'm looking forward
personally to completing the census now
I know a lot more about the technology behind it.
So thank you very much.
SIMON SANDFORD-TAYLOR: Thank you as well.