Pierre Santoni, President, Middle East Africa, Parsons • Interview
Parsons’ strategy of “enhance, extend, transform” helps clients develop organizations that are resilient and agile in the face of rapid change and transformation.
“We are here to listen and work with our customers and partners to bring solutions in addition to fast forwarding the application of some of our technologies and the way we work.”
Looking into a future that is increasingly dependent on technology, what is Parsons doing to keep up?
Parsons embarked on a strategy of “enhance, extend, transform.” The enhance and extend part of that means developing organizations that are resilient, agile, and serve our customer needs. The organizational changes we made at the beginning of 2020 were part of enhancement. The extension part is using our technology to support the business model and expand upon it. We want to address the fact that the problems our clients have are increasingly complex every day. COVID-19 highlighted the complexity of the future, and we are seeing developments that we had anticipated occurring five to 10 years from now. Cloud computing, AI, Internet of Things (IoT), and autonomous systems are the four pillars of technology at Parsons. We have privileged relationships, and we are combining these relationships with fast-forwarding the application these technologies.
How are you redesigning or rethinking the way people will move in the future?
In 2019, we were working on smart technology, smart infrastructure, and smart cities, as well as critical infrastructure protection, which Parsons has been focused on for a while. All of that is more important than ever, and we have accelerated to the point where it is business critical for everyone to implement these solutions. In transportation, we have several parts of the company looking at those solutions, and they are all linked. We have a lab in the MEA region that works directly with a counterpart in the US to leverage the technology developed there. We have solutions that were developed locally in the region as well. We have developed some tools for mobility, and one that we have been talking deeply about with our clients in the region since the end of 2019 is a tool called “Intersection as a Service” that we developed in the US. Following a sponsorship challenge associated with participation from some customers in the Middle East, the service provides a fast and cost-effective way to adjust traffic signals along a given corridor that does not require an extensive network of sensors or a central brain to manage them. Congestion affects the health and safety of our communities for pedestrians, residents, and motorists alike. The tool will help make that particular place better by facilitating the movement of people. We are working with our clients to implement this in a couple of places in the regions. We have great hopes for that particular solution, though there are a number of other ones.
Has your business had to reevaluate its vision of the future compared to pre-pandemic notions, and how has the future of mobility changed?
We need to accelerate our thinking about what will happen, what we can provide, and what the world will be like. We are here to listen and work with our customers and partners to bring solutions in addition to fast forwarding the application of some of our technologies and the way we work. In our organization, working from home has been successful, and we have had a number of tools to enhance the solutions we provide to our clients. We have remote solutions as well as a tool called DFuze that enables us to perform site visits and provide executives with a view of their assets and integrate that into a back end management system. For these types of solutions, we had to implement them much earlier than expected. Critical systems such as airports, power plants, and traffic management centers need to keep operating even when people are working from home. It becomes a question of how to keep them operating remotely and safely. Cybersecurity becomes a major issue. As a large organization, the ability to link all of our solutions is just one of many of our key strengths. Even more so over the last few months, we have been creating more synergies across business areas and applying technology and solutions from one area to different areas. We are nimble, perhaps even more nimble during the crisis, and we will continue in that way.