A day in the life of a digital disruptor

[gallery type="slideshow" ids="871689,871690,871687"] 7.30am My day usually starts with a run in Brockwell Park, close to home in south London, before catching the Tube to work. 9.30 I arrive at the Buckley Building in Clerkenwell, EC1, home to Deloitte Digital, and set myself up in the café area on the first floor. That’s my base for the day. My role as disruptor is to work with new technologies to understand how they can benefit our clients and Deloitte. The technology I work with is laid out on work benches in prime position in the café. There are 3D printers, including a food printer, virtual reality and augmented reality headsets, an industrial internet of things demo, a mind-controlled Nerf gun, drones… It is a space for collaborating with clients and colleagues and coming up with new ideas. We have a number of new projects ongoing and I start my working day by catching up with the team on those. Current projects include a new 360-degree camera rig, which uses 16 cameras to shoot stereoscopic film. The effect is so immersive. We are going to use it for some property tours around the UK. There are usually four or five people working on projects like this, splitting their time with client projects, and a team of 18 people to draw on overall. 10.30am I begin a client workshop. The focus is on the experience, not the technology, so for a retail or developer client, for example, this could start with a demonstration in the Connected Store we have built in our studio. Putting someone physically in a store is so different to showing them PowerPoint slides. In the last store we built, the experiences we were looking at included indoor navigation, mobile payments, smart mirrors and intelligent display. It was all about user-centred design, so we had a real persona who stepped in and we followed her experience. Being able to take clients on that journey is really important. That applies to lots of technology. To show direct benefit, it is no longer good enough to say “trust me, you will see the benefit”, you need to tangibly demonstrate how it will work. It is not about using tech for tech’s sake. We try to encourage people to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Workshops typically run over two or three days, but can be shorter (half a day) or run over a two-week period. The result might be that a client wants to do their own proof of concept, focusing on a specific area. 1pm There is no shortage of good places in Clerkenwell to order lunch in from. Burritos are a staple for digital developers. 4pm After a workshop, I will typically spend part of my day working on Deloitte’s new offices at One New Street Square, EC4. It’s so important that we create an adaptable space. We are working on the “future of work” for our clients and best practice for our clients is often going to be best practice for us too. Clients are coming to us and saying that they know their real estate needs are going to change, their workforce is going to change. My role is working with clients and also helping us to practice what we preach by testing things out on ourselves. Clients say to us that they realise they need space that is more flexible, more modular, because their needs are going to change. They might complain that the design process is too slow and the need to speed that up is so pressing. We are looking at how we can work more collaboratively across real estate, technology and human resources to make that whole process more iterative and agile. 6pm A perfect day would finish with a mash-up day: every three months, we hold a hackathon where our digital teams around the world have 24 hours to build whatever they want. That’s how the mind-controlled Nerf gun came about. 7pm I usually finish around now, but on a mash-up day I might work until 1am.