Shell CIO Harry de Grijs on digital strategy

Royal Dutch Shell plc is the company’s full name, yet to most of the world it’s just Shell, a global group of energy and petrochemical companies. Headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands, Shell is huge, with some 86,000 employees and annual revenue topping $305 billion. Gas and oil are among Shell’s top products, but the company also offers biofuels, hydrogen and other products, and it operates an oil and chemicals trading business, too.

A big company, Shell does things big. Consider its new Appomattox oil and gas deep-water platform 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana; the platform stands 16 stories high, weighs a mind-boggling 40,000 metric tons, and can send drills nearly a mile and a half down beneath the ocean’s surface.

Harry De Grijs has worked for Shell for more than 30 years and became the company’s CIO for Services and Operations in 2015. Previously, he was Shell’s vice president of capital projects IT/information management in the Netherlands, as well as CIO of Shell’s manufacturing supply and distribution businesses.

What does digital transformation mean today at Shell?

In a sense, we’ve been doing digital forever, gathering data and then making sense out of that data, whether it’s for our traditional seismic activities or for running our plants. We’re used to gathering data, processing it, and getting outcomes from data that will help with the business.

But now with the advancement of technology, the notion that digital will be a key player going forward is even more clear. I see a couple of themes driving that, and one is agility. Where we see digital shifting the paradigm is in speed and ease. The speed of business is picking up, as is the business appetite for that speed, so there’s pull from the business to respond.

And the other thing driving digital is more awareness of the ways data can be used to improve business outcomes. Again, our industry is traditionally data-rich, but that data has not always been considered an asset by business leaders. That’s changing as leaders realize data is the key to the success of digitalization.

Shell undertakes massive oil and gas projects that take years to design, build and launch. How does digital agility help support those initiatives?

If you think about drilling a deep-water well, that’s not a very agile business; also, the risks are high, from both a physical and financial perspective. These wells are very, very expensive. The interesting bit is the step before drilling the well. That’s when you process seismic data and interpret that data to the point that you can say, “This is where we expect the hydrocarbons to be,” and with such a level of certainty that we’re prepared to spend the money to drill the well.

One thing we’re doing is leveraging the cloud for the enormous amount of data we handle. And new cloud services allow us to do that increasingly faster. So, we are using cloud capabilities to help us be more effective in interpreting and processing data.

Also, we’re in a very broad business with diverse operations. For example, we have more retail fuel stations than Starbucks has coffee shops! So that’s a business where we can do a lot by being much faster in bringing solutions to the market.

Which cloud services have you found especially helpful?

We outsourced our storage and hosting about a decade ago, so we haven’t actually owned data centers for a long time. We’re happy with our current provider of data center capability, so most of what we’re doing in the cloud is where scalability — both up and down — is important, along with services around disaster recovery, uptime and automation. The cloud services we’re using are those offered by what I call hyperscalers, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure. With them, we can start from scratch, building in the cloud and using all the available capabilities — automation, instrumentation, billing and more. All this gives us great value.

Any company as big as Shell would be a natural target for cyber thieves, hackers, even rogue states. What’s your approach to cyber security?

The world used to be simple. I had a couple of data centers, they ran a couple of major SAP systems with their connected applications, and I could monitor all their traffic. But now, increasingly the solutions are hosted by others. That means traffic external to my control is growing exponentially, and so my threat surface is also growing significantly. Therefore, the capabilities you need to have in place, together with your partners, need to be very professional. This is not a risk we take lightly. It requires constant vigilance, investment and getting the right people.

How do you coordinate Shell’s digital strategy, given there are so many executives and departments, each with their own business strategy?

It’s a journey. Shell is a well-established company with a long history. Our DNA is engineering, with a great awareness of health, safety and the environment. Also, we’re very risk-aware. We’d rather spend the time to do things right and make sure we only take appropriate risks, rather than just go fast. Therefore, I wouldn’t say the only goal of the digital space is to go faster.

The first step was to get our business leaders and executives familiar with what digital actually is and what it can do. We exposed them to examples of what other companies have done, how they’ve leveraged digital to succeed at business outcomes. After that, we put some governance around it, to allow experimentation while keeping IT in the loop. Now we’re sitting at the table together, shaping the agenda. Our partnership with the business, maturing the digital agenda and showing early successes, is highly important.

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