How Sustainable Tech and Digital Accelerators Help Businesses to Grow? Ft. Andy Webster, Director of Digital – Sustainable Technology Solutions, KBR Inc. | Podcast Ep. 16

At that time, I joined their business in the Netherlands, which is a country that speaks Dutch. And your question made me think, so what’s changed in that time? I started and I needed to learn the language.

So, I sat in meetings, I had a physical dictionary of English, Dutch words, I had a pen and paper, and I’d write things down and I’d go back to my office, and I’d ask my colleagues, what was this word? What was that? And I think today you and I, like we are having this conversation over voiceover IP, we can use a video call with each other.

If we’re unsure of something, sure, we can Google it, but we can ask Copilot or we can ask a chat GPT. The access to information, I mean, I think that’s the obvious thing that I think any person would say is just change. It’s just made life easier.

If I was starting and had to learn a language today, I’d have Duolingo on my phone. I would easily be able to translate maybe even in the moment. I think the other big thing, if I think about my role today with KBR is just how much technology there is.

So, in terms of our company, I mean, we have over a thousand pieces of software that we go out to industry and buy and bring into our company to deliver our work, which is a huge number when you think about it. Your question, you said, what’s changed? I guess the bit that hasn’t changed is still people.

There’s people like you and me that need to turn up at a place of work, do our job, work with colleagues, work with teammates and achieve something that creates value for the people that pay our bills. So, I guess there’s been this huge change, but also when I look at my career, I’m still a person needing to work with other people and find ways to solve problems.

Host: That is really so fascinating and inspirational, really, to learn a new language. Really, it’s great.

Andy: And guess what? So, they say in a business, no good deed goes unpunished. Yeah.

So, I proved to Shell at that time I could learn to speak Dutch. And so, my second job with Shell, they threw me into Denmark and said, well, now try and learn Danish. That turned out to be a lot harder.

And then they threw me, OK, you learned Danish not so well. So, they then sent me to America, try and speak Texan, which… Oh, my God.

It’s basically English, but, you know, learning languages, learning different cultures, learning how people work. Yeah, that’s a real important skill, I’d say, in any role you take on.

Host: That’s really, really fascinating, really. So, moving ahead, the energy industry often functions under regulatory and economical constraints. So, how have you maintained a balance between profitability and sustainability by meeting the expectations of the organizations you have worked with over the years?

Andy: Yeah, you have really big questions for me, don’t you?

Host: Yeah.

Andy: I mean, you asked, you know, how do you have that balance? I think, you know, for me, obviously, when you’re in a business, you’re there to create profit for the company.

Host: Definitely.

Andy: And if you don’t create profit for the company, there is no company. And sometimes I think we can take that for granted. But I’ve operated in the energy sector at times when refineries were really, you know, marginal businesses.

And across Europe, where I started my career, we were closing refineries because they just weren’t profitable. And, you know, big mega refineries were being built in India, not to service the Indian market, although they also were that, but to export to Europe. So, at a starting level, if you don’t make money, you can’t do anything else.

You have to help your business make profit. Obviously, if you make profit, then you have to think about, okay, how do we do this in a way that allows us to continue? And so, sometimes when we talk about sustainability, it’s quite hard to think about because, of course, we all worry now, you know, if we’ve got the right balance for climate change or not, you know, what do we feel about that?

A more simple example that’s been with me in my career, one of the roles I had was responsible for reliability and maintenance. And in maintenance, you know, you can turn a piece of equipment off every day and polish it and look after it and keep it really well. But if you do that, it’s not running and you’re not able to use it to make money for your business.

So, okay, so you leave it running, but for how long? And there’s always that tension, as you put it, that balancing act. If I leave it too long, it could break catastrophically on me and completely damage my business.

But if I go to the other extreme, I leave it for too short, then I don’t have a business to run. And I think this is where technology today is so exciting because it allows you to, well, what data do I have? What does this piece of equipment or what’s the best way to do this?

What are others doing? And I can find out those things. I can benchmark.

I can use data to say, well, what do I know about the emissions or the impact this business is having in the environment or sustainably? And I can take more informed decisions. And I think in my career, the more informed the decision was, the better I felt I was helping the business because it wasn’t just a guess.

That’s the worst informed. Yeah. You just flip a coin.

It had data. It had engineering behind it. It had insights.

And I think that’s where today just we have so much more data so we can take so much better decisions. I think this has got easier, although it may feel hard in the moment. Does that make sense to you?

Because it was quite a tough question to unpack.

Host: It really makes sense, obviously. So, you have recently been promoted to Director of Digital Sustainable Technology Solutions from Digital Director Integrated Solutions in KBR INC. Which shifts and responsibilities you have encountered so far?

Andy: Yeah, I mean, I imagine for anyone that isn’t inside KBR, that sounds really complicated. So maybe if I simplify it a little bit. So, KBR has really put its attention into underneath the brand that is out there, KBR, to say we have really two technology focused businesses.

We have a mission technology business that’s really focused on the things that we do around defense or space. We do some incredible stuff there. The bit of the business I sit in now is called Sustainable Technologies Solutions.

And of course, everyone acronyms it to STS, but it’s really sustainable technology. And so, my change was really about moving from just focusing on one pillar within sustainable technology to what we’ve recognized with digital is we need this to be across all of what we’re doing, sustainable technology. And the challenge with digital, I think anyone involved in it, anyone trying to bring new technologies into their company, you don’t always know from the starting point whether it’s going to work.

So, you have to take on a bit more of an experimenting approach. Does that make sense? So, let’s try.

What could I help us with? That’s probably a big one that a lot of people that listen to your podcast think about. And honestly, from the outside, you might not know.

So, the way we’ve set ourselves up and my role and why we made it across all of sustainable technology was really to say, how do we test it? How do we test any technology idea, any digital idea we have? See whether within our KBR way of working, our KBR clients, whether it helps us.

Very simply, does it help us make money for them or for ourselves in a better way? And if it does, great, let’s do more of it. If it doesn’t, we need to stop it.

So, my role elevation was really to bring that consistency with the team I lead, with the great people that we integrate from our corporate IT function into the business function. How can we really help our business?

Host: That sounds like an exciting transition. Great to see how your role is evolving to focus more on sustainability, which is an important area today. Moving on.

Andy: I think different companies I’ve been in work in different rates, but KBR as a company, I think people often say change is the only constant, but KBR really is regularly changing. And it does that because we really want to focus on our customers. And, you know, who would have thought three years ago we had a global pandemic like we did and who would have thought some of the challenges we’re facing now.

And so, our business has to have this ability to change. So, yeah. Sorry, you wanted to move the conversation on.

Host: No, no, no. It’s great. Like, yeah, you’re saying, right?

Andy: Yeah.

Host: So digital accelerators are set to enhance operational flexibility and efficiency in organizations. What other benefits does it offer for businesses advancements?

Andy: Yeah. So, you know, you’ve come across the term that KBR is using for all of our digital work, our digital accelerators. And we really thought hard about it because there’s lots of really point ideas and solutions and products that we have within our mission technology business, within our sustainable technology business.

But it can be very confusing if that’s what we explain to our customers when we meet them the first time, you know, we have these thousands ideas. So digital accelerators was really that overarching term that we said, we’re part of KBR and this is what we can bring to your business. And we wanted that word accelerator in there because that’s, frankly, every time I meet a senior executive or a CEO of companies, we do business with, that’s what they’re asking for.

How can digital, they don’t say, slow me down, make me take longer, cost me more. No, they say, how can it give me something faster? How can it allow me to design this asset in a quicker way or make it better or safer?

And so, everything we’re doing in those digital accelerators, and you’ve touched on some of it, but it’s really how does it release value for our customers and how on our side do we set it up in a way that creates value into a company like KBR? How do we do it in a way that we can repeatedly sell as a product or integrate with our service as a solution? And that’s what we’re really looking at with them.

So, look, if it doesn’t bring value to our customers, there’s no point doing it. And we explore the areas that our customers are asking to, like I’ve already said, you know, artificial intelligence. But even big areas like data analytics, how do we use analytics to make more informed, faster informed, really give our customers decision advantage?

Host: Great, great. So, KBR INC has expanded its operations by launching two full scrum teams in Chennai and London. What strategic goals does the company aim to achieve with this expansion?

And how does it expect these teams to contribute to overall vision and growth?

Andy: I love that you know this about me because I think I posted it on LinkedIn a couple of weeks back.

Host: Yeah.

Andy: I mean, you know, first of all, KBR as a huge business has been phenomenally successful delivering what we might call waterfall projects, projects that if they have to hit a milestone, they hit that milestone. And, you know, for me, joining this company, it’s very cool to be in a company that does that so well. But when we look at any company touching technology today, you know, more than likely they are using agile development methodology.

Really well proven. And so, we’ve absolutely jumped on it. We’ve used we’ve adopted scrum agile because it’s just so prevalent.

But there’s other variants of agile. I’m not going to get really picky on it. And what we wanted to have is a scrum team, a small team, six to eight people that could really take on some of these ideas we had.

And you picked on that. We’d launched one of these scrum teams in London and one in India. And that was what we discovered is some of our problems that we’re trying to solve are really problems that our engineers are facing and how they do their work.

And we try doing that with, you know, a globally dispersed scrum team trying to do the same thing. And it just for us right now, it didn’t work. We found that we needed our developers, our innovators, to be close to our engineers that are doing work for our customers.

And that’s why we said, OK, let’s put ourselves a scrum team in London, a scrum team in India. They’re there really trying to innovate, see if we can solve. And what I really love about agile, the challenge we put on those teams is, look, we need to be really good at doing something quickly, seeing how it’s used and then iterating on it.

And so agile as a methodology gives us that opportunity because every scrum cycle, we look at, can we push a user story out? Can we push something that our user has asked us for? Test it in real world and say, oh, we misunderstood something, or we learned something different than we expected.

No worries. We course correct and we go again. I think my vision is, you know, we start having scrum teams, many of them in more than just India and London because we are a global company.

But we’ve started with those two hubs. And strategically, what they’ll allow us to do is to take on more and more challenges that we see our customers are asking for, whether they’re internal customers, whether they’re external customers, that we can help the business just completely transform how we do our work and how we create value for our end customer.

Host: That is a fantastic move. It is amazing to see how KBR is achieving global talent to drive innovation and growth. So, sustainability has become a crucial aspect of today’s business.

How do businesses incorporate sustainable technologies that can be beneficial for society at large?

Andy: Yeah, another lovely teed up question. I mean, so in our title, we call ourselves the sustainable technology solutions business. And so, you’re absolutely right.

Your homework is spot on because KBR has invested in these technologies that they believe. And it is a belief when you run a business, you have to invest and have an opinion. And then ultimately the market decides.

But KBR has looked and its technology business has licensed technologies that we think are critical, some of them starting very adjacent to the world that I started in an oil refinery where there’s still many oil refineries in the world and other technologies that can help make better products in those refineries that will still exist. But if you move further away from refineries to technologies like ammonia or hydrogen that we hear a lot about, could hydrogen become a different transport fuel? But then also technologies for the future.

So, a huge amount of effort into what do we do with all the plastic in the world? So, can we have plastic recycling? And KBR is really trying to invest in plastic recycling technology or critical metals that we know are needed for all the batteries we’re getting as the world goes electrical or even things like we still want to be able to travel the world in airplanes.

So, what about sustainable aviation fuel? Can we help with that? KBR took a view that we want to have offerings for our customers.

We know it’s competitive, but we believe in our technologies. We want to be able to offer those technologies to our customers. And digital and the part of the business that I compliment says, how do we design those in even better ways, even smarter ways?

How can we support those technologies throughout their whole life, not just up front when we’re designing it with engineering, but when we’re supporting our customers’ operations? How do we use all of this information? If I link it right back to the first question you asked me, we have so much information today.

How do we take advantage of it in how we design, think about, deploy and operate these kinds of assets that are needed so that we all have energy in the future?

Host: It’s heartening to hear how businesses are stepping up to make a positive impact on customers.

Andy: We’re trying. Yeah.

Host: Yeah. Finally, technologies like AI and ML have been influential for individuals and businesses. So according to you, what opportunities and challenges do they offer?

Andy: You said this is the final question, huh?

Host: Yeah.

Andy: I mean, that’s a huge question. And I think one of the, one of the ways I try to explore it with my team is obviously we have a business life, and we have a personal life. And in our personal life, many of us have smart devices and we have computers in our home and we’re seeing things come up.

And maybe we’ve gone to a school where we’ve tried out some artificial intelligence, maybe a chat bot. Maybe we’ve been on a phone call where we’ve been speaking to, you know, one of those automated voices. We collect all of those experiences and then we come into the workplace, and we’re given tasks, and we think, well, surely some technology like AI or machine learning could really help us.

We’re looking at the same things. We’re looking at large language models or optical models that can, you know, see some of the documents we produce and check for errors. Can we use new terms?

I’m also learning. One of the challenges in my role is always be learning. So, I’m reading about things like agentic AI.

So, you can just spin up a little like mini bot to go do something for you or postgres AI to process, you know, if you’re a company like us that has a lot of data, how do you use artificial intelligence to sift through that data and find the meaningful bits of data? So, we’re trying to take advantage of technology once it’s had a little bit of real-world challenge on it. New ideas come along, and I think people can get very excited.

We call it hype. And then often there’s a bit of reality that sets in. Maybe it’s not as good as we thought.

But what we want to do as KBR is we want to be ready to take advantage of technologies when it’s had that little bit of proving and we can use it. So, you know, ahead of artificial intelligence, we do quite a lot in my team with things like robotic processing, just looking at the task we normally do and saying, well, can I use a robot basically, not a physical robot, but a digital robot to carry out that task? I’m excited by AI because, again, back to that information question, the challenge I think many of us face today is almost information overload.

How do I pick that right bit of information or that right bit of data at the right moment I need it? And something like artificial intelligence that just think of it as just mega processing power and what it can bring to us personally, but what it can bring to us as a company. You know, we’re wanting to be ready to embrace it, but we’ll always use it to solve a problem.

We’re not just trying to play with technologies, although many of us do because we’re sometimes a little bit geeky like that. But back to our focus on our customers, what problems do they have that we think we could solve better using machine learning or using AI? And as soon as we spot those things, we’re the company that’s trying it and deploying it with our customers and using it to create value.

Host: Great insights. It is clear that while AI and ML open up incredible opportunities, they also come up with challenges that needed to be addressed thoughtfully. So, Andy, thank you.

Andy: I appreciate hearing your playback because, you know, the questions you’ve posed to me in the conversation we’ve had, these are really technical and complex areas. And I think for maybe many of your listeners, that’s the challenge, isn’t it, is how to keep understanding new things as they come along and translate what we were maybe doing yesterday to that new challenge. Yeah.

Host: Yeah. So, Andy, it was great to have you with us today. And thank you so much for sharing insights and experiences with us.

It’s great to have you with us.

Andy: No, thank you so much. And a real pleasure to spend time with you. Thank you.

Host: Same here. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I’m your host, Sudakshina, signing off.

See you in the next episode of ExtraMile by HiTechNectar with our next extraordinary leader on board, sharing their thoughts and knowledge. Stay tuned.