Raynald Morris, chief information officer at W.M. Jordan Co., explains the value that the $470-million general contractor gets from keeping dedicated technologists for the field and for the office as part of the Newport News, Va., general contractor’s seven-person IT department.
“A unique thing about us is probably our field technologist,” Morris told the contractors gathered at the Associated General Contractors of America’s IT Forum 2016. “As we set up job sites in the field, we put monitors in place driven by computers and Apple TVs and all kinds of communication and network technology. We wanted some standard practices in place, so we were sending some critical IT staff out of town to job sites of the to set them up.”
To keep that team on task, W.M. Jordan created the field technologist role and moved one of the construction division’s field staff, who also has some technical background, into that position.
“We got him a van and his job is essentially to go out to project sites and make sure the people out there have the tools they need, and they’re using them as efficiently as possible,” Morris says.
“For us as a construction company, that’s where the money is made or lost; out there in the field. Everyone all the way up to the top, really, frankly, is supporting those guys in the field.
“Another position we created recently is a similar role managing conference rooms and media facilities in the company’s four offices: office technologist,” Morris adds. “We’re using more and more life-size video conferencing systems and that kind of stuff. We needed an AV/computer guy that can handle the four offices and train everybody and pull training materials together.”
