Interview: Niall Robinson, head of product innovation, Met Office

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Interview: Niall Robinson, head of product innovation, Met Office

Niall Robinson, head of product innovation at the Met Office, is an experienced executive who turns novel ideas at the ***’s national weather and climate service into valuable outputs. He’s been with the organisation for 12 years and still finds places to drive change.

“One of the cool things about the Met Office is the breadth of stuff it does,” he says. “There have been opportunities for me to have different mini careers within one organisation.”

Robinson is a former academic who joined the Met Office as a research scientist. A PhD physicist by education, he worked as a climate modeller and a field scientist. He then helped lead the Met Office Informatics Lab, where he collaborated with a team of technologists, scientists and designers to find innovative ways to make the most of the organisation’s data.

In February 2021, Robinson was promoted to his current position, where he drives the development of innovative capabilities from research and development to the production of operational services.

“My role is focused on finding new ways for the Met Office to be useful and taking that idea to market,” he says. “I work with my team and colleagues to identify new stuff the Met Office can do, try and gather evidence for that and test it, make a case for it, and then land it as a business-as-usual activity.”

Creating value from data

Robinson reports to the Met Office’s associate director of propositions. While he doesn’t have a direct reporting relationship with the technology department, he has worked extensively with the IT team. His partnership with technology ******** crucial to his work.

“Because of my background, a lot of the function I play is bridging the inevitable gap there sometimes is between the people who know how to build stuff, between the scientists who know how to do things, and between the people who build and deploy services.”

Fulfilling his bridging role includes working closely with the Met Office’s director of technology and chief digital and information officer, Charlie Ewen. That connection is important because much of Robinson’s work involves using digital and data transformation to research and develop new products. Crucially, he’s comfortable and confident working with bits and bytes.

“Before I was in this role, I spent more time between technology and science and built stuff,” he says. “We made prototypes, and I was responsible for designing and making them with my team. Now, it’s more about the value proposition those things can offer. Much of what I do is about how we use technology to create new products and services.”

Robinson says that his big achievement during the past three years as head of innovation has been simple: “To get our data out of the building and into the hands of people.” He says the key underlying element to this work has been providing modern technology platforms that help the Met Office to create value from its data.

A recent independent economic study showed

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to the *** economy over the next 10 years. This figure is equivalent to a return of almost £19 for every £1 of public money spent. The study highlighted the wider innovation-related impact of the Met Office’s activities, such as partnerships and data provision.

“That’s a fundamental part of our work,” says Robinson. “We produce data and are measured on the socio-economic benefit we create. We must ensure our data is useful to the *** economy. And cloud-based technology platforms seem to be the modern way people want to consume data. So, data-driven organisations like ours need to lean into that effort.”

Providing a scalable platform

Robinson says one of his most important projects right now is using the Snowflake Marketplace, which is a platform that allows users to access, explore and provide data services, to create new socio-economic value for the Met Office.

“Selling data on Snowflake, that’s a big project for us,” he says about the implementation that went live in February. “It’s something we’ve been working on for a while. It’s a real shift in how we do data at the Met Office.”

Robinson says that the technology provides a platform that allows all kinds of users to purchase Met Office data quickly and effectively.

“Typical customers for the Met Office are that we have particularly close relationships with regulated industries,” he says. “So, central government, the Ministry of Defence, and the aviation sector and the energy sector.”

“We produce data and are measured on the socio-economic benefit we create. We must ensure our data is useful to the *** economy”

Niall Robinson, Met Office

However, Robinson says the Marketplace also provides a platform for the Met Office to reach new consumers. “The main benefit is economies of scale. Many sectors and businesses that use weather data, we don’t necessarily need to have a direct relationship with,” he says.

“Other customers, such as retail organisations looking at their supply chain, want to take our data and don’t need to speak to us – and that’s great too. So, the Snowflake Marketplace gives us the economy of scale and the opportunity to meet that demand.”

New requirements bring new challenges, especially for an organisation that generates about 400 terabytes of data daily. In addition to Snowflake, the Met Office has close relationships with supercomputer provider

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and cloud partner

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Web Services (AWS). Robinson says that continued innovation will mean finding ways to ensure the organisation’s information is ready to use.

“The main thing is that the raw data that comes out of the supercomputer is quite niche,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of experience in the Met Office of building technologies, for instance, on AWS or on-premise systems to process that data. Those processes are big and fast.”

Moving into novel areas

Robinson continues to look for areas where innovation can create new opportunities for the Met Office. One such development is the organisation’s portals for climate data. These portals make it easier for customers to access information through a specialist interface.

“The portals make the user journey a bit easier,” he says. “So, for example, we’re launching one at the minute. It’s a local authority climate service. This portal targets local councils. These organisations are key decision-makers in adapting to climate change. We’re giving them the data in an easy-to-use interface to make grounded decisions about how cities will cope with the effects of climate change. That’s a big piece of work for us.”

Robinson says that these portals work with ESRI’s geographical information software. “There’s a massive community of geospatial data power users out there who run on ESRI,” he says. “The work we’re undertaking is about getting our data into that system and creating a webpage, with a curated user experience, that makes this information much easier to use.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) is another important area of data-led innovation for the Met Office. Robinson says that there’s a race within the weather forecasting community to develop AI models that can power more accurate predictions. “It’s a promising area, and there are some impressive results,” he says. “The Met Office is in a partnership with the Alan Turing Institute to do some work in that area as well.”

In addition, Robinson is eager to explore how his organisation can use AI in its products and services.

“That work is about taking weather and climate predictions and making them more useful to people,” he says. “It’s early days for the Met Office, but we have some interesting proof of concepts. We’re just learning what the possibilities are at the moment.”

One area where his team has made progress so far is by working with Snowflake. The team is using the technology supplier’s Cortex AI model to create natural language descriptions of the weather forecast. Robinson says that the developments are potentially useful. However, any application of emerging technology must be implemented with care.

“One of the considerations for industries like ours is that there’s an established history with our traditional model of verification. We have a lot of methodologies to understand when we’re creating forecasts,” he says.

“There are people whose entire careers are focused on that area at the Met Office. Verification through generative AI is a brave new world for us, so, that’s something we’re thinking about very carefully.”

Leading innovation successfully

Robinson reflects on his achievements and recognises that digital innovation is more important than ever to a pioneering business. In his role at the Met Office, he’s helped the organisation to exploit its huge data assets. So, given his focus on developing creative products and services, what qualities does he think make a good head of innovation?

He suggests three areas are most important: feasibility, desirability, and viability. Robinson says it’s important for innovators to go beyond building the things they enjoy.

“I come from a science and engineering technology background. My happy place is making stuff – and that’s a very important part of innovation,” he says.

“However, there’s also a trap there, which is, ‘That’s not enough, right?’ You also need to ask questions about feasibility. And the questions I tend to ask are, ‘What can you do? What can you make?’, which is really asking questions about technical feasibility.”

For desirability, he refers to a quote attributed to innovator Henry Ford: “If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Robinson says that the quote resonates because innovators can fall into the trap of only focusing on customer demands.

While listening to users is important, ambitious innovators go further: “You have to try to extrapolate from users what they don’t realise they want yet and offer those useful things to them.”

Finally, Robinson says that successful heads of innovation focus on viability: “You can make something useful, but if you can’t figure out a way to make it fundable and sustainable, then it won’t land in the real world.”

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