Andy brings his unique blend of frontline military experience and deep technical expertise to his role as Business Development Director for defence and space at Made Tech. In this Insiders interview he shares his vision for defence’s digital future, the need to get working software in the hands of the users quickly and why we need to break free from legacy.
Q: You started in an infantry role in the Army, what sparked your shift towards digital and technology?
That’s right. I joined the Army as an Infantry Officer – very much at the pointy end of the organisation. Then I was selected for my first technical job around the adoption of Bowman – which was the Army’s adopted digital tactical communications.
I was responsible for its introduction into the first armoured infantry battalion and its first deployment in Iraq. I was then promoted to Major and did a masters degree in information management technology. This set me up to build business applications for the Army.
When it comes to digital, I was responsible for overseeing the build of some of the software that the Army currently uses in its legacy portfolio. Back in 2012, this was the best that was available. Fast forward 12 years and it’s definitely not the best that’s available anymore…
Q: What career path did you take after leaving the Army and how did it lead you to Made Tech?
When I left the Army and before Made Tech, I went into consultancy with quite a generalist delivery approach. But found that when I looked back at the work I’d done, it had all been about digital delivery.
I realised that whether I intended to or not, I found myself to be something of a technologist. That was the work I enjoyed doing and the next logical step for me.
What I found most exciting about Made Tech was that joining was an opportunity for me to help an organisation that had lots of good experience delivering digital programmes, in what I described as an agile-native environment in government. Being able to bring that into defence organisations along with my experience and different perspectives is something that I think defence really needs.
Q: What’s your approach to digital in defence?
The reality is that everything’s a computer nowadays. Right from your toaster through to armoured fighting vehicles. For me this is one of the key points where defence should sit up and take notice.
By thinking about capability in terms of the underlying information system within it, you start to separate out the hardware and software elements and the platform and data structures too. All those things we take for granted as digital natives.
Once you start to think in that way, you come up with a very different approach to tackling big problems.
Q: You touched on legacy technology, let’s talk a little bit more about that.
Legacy creates a problem across defence. For example, when you look at the Army, they still roll around much of their technology in vehicles designed in the 1950s and introduced in the 60s and 70s.
There’s some old bits of kit knocking around. The traditional approach is to use it till it falls apart, then build a new one because that’s what we’ve always done with vehicles. That doesn’t work with digital technology – we need more of an evolutionary approach.
They didn’t think much about how they would integrate or keep pace with the wider industry and developments in technology. That oversight now creates a big problem in the sector and defence needs to fix it.
Q: Beyond legacy, what other challenges are we seeing in defence?
Well, we’re now at a nexus point where the expectation of the user – the next generation joining the military or the next generation of civil servants – have expectations of what digital technology should look like. The realities of defence’s digital environment really mismatch those expectations.
That impacts a number of areas. First it’s lower workforce happiness, which feeds into the second one which is that it also impacts productivity. So you’ve got a less productive workforce and not a particularly happy workforce. That makes everything about the business harder to do.
However, the thing is that having lots of legacy platforms operating in their own silos means that there’s lots of opportunities to improve things. Artificial intelligence (AI) is really hard to apply to defence because their data is not organised in a way that allows them to take advantage of it.
Defence organisations have got to get their digital information systems into a position where they can properly exploit the opportunities available in the wider market – like AI.
Defence is starting to chip away at this stuff. As they do, the data they release is going to help others to justify doing more. But at the moment, because most haven’t sorted the data side, they find it difficult to justify their work and show the productivity benefits.
Q: How do you think the industry can bring in these new ideas – and implement them well?
One of defence’s biggest challenges is how to get new blood, new organisations and new, innovative ways of doing things into an organisation. If you’re looking at the same old suspects, big primes—and by big primes, I’m talking about the big defence engineering contractors— we’re not seeing the change we want and we’re missing out on innovative talent.
Defence needs to adopt more innovative commercial approaches and dynamic frameworks. This would allow more experimentation, similar to the GDS ways of working. Smaller, innovative companies could then come in and expose the wider market to the true breadth of the defence ecosystem – which those primes currently hide.
This also requires a significant mindset shift. We need to do more in the discovery space and start talking about alphas, minimum viable products, and running betas—all things we’re used to in many other areas of government.
We just need to accelerate that thinking into not just the back-office of defence, but also into battlefield capabilities.
Q: What strategic shifts could defence organisations introduce to optimise their approach to digital?
Defence must focus on services, not platforms. Currently, they prioritise large platform procurement in their discussions. Their system is designed to build these platforms. And again, this design, rooted in old manual processes, is part of the problem.
How did you build a tank in the 1950s? You do it like this.
That’s how procurement systems are set up in defence. But that doesn’t work if you want to evergreen an information system. You’ve got to think about roadmaps rather than detailed requirements documents.
- What’s our north star and how do we go after it?
- What are our prioritised requirements?
- What must we have, would we like, what could we sacrifice?
This allows teams to iteratively work to set up a minimum viable product. You’re then at the point where you can deliver something and iteratively deliver all those ‘nice to have’ requirements afterwards. That way we get working software in the hands of the user much more quickly.
We can keep improving that software so they’re not paying for a new platform in 10 years time. By continually improving and updating the platform you get better and better software and a better user experience.
This requires a change to the procurement system and a change to the way defence thinks about projects and programmes. It needs to be much more about service management and incremental upgrades to get something out in the world much quicker.
In this post I mention the need to digital information systems into a position to properly explore opportunities like AI. If you’re looking for a framework to help you navigate those challenges, download our whitepaper, Laying the groundwork for AI.
About the Author
Andy McLannahan
Industry Director, Space and Defence
Andy McLannahan has over 25 years of experience in the Defence sector. He started as an Infantry Officer, diving into the digital transformation of Defence through roles like the Bowmen trials Brigade and later as part of Army Information Services at Army Headquarters. With a Masters in Information Management and Technology from Cranfield University, Andy played a key role in developing critical MOD systems and apps still in use today. Since leaving the Army, Andy has focused on delivering digital programmes across the Army, RAF, and Defence Digital.
