CIO 100: Fulton Hogan

FULTON HOGAN TAKES the lead in the civil construction market with 80 years under its belt in the transport, water, energy, mining, and land development infrastructure in New Zealand, Australia, and the South Pacifi c.

Continuing on from the requirement to have unified IT solutions throughout the group, Fulton Hogan is now into its fourth year of an agreement with Datacom to provide service desk and infrastructure management delivered trans-Tasman from Auckland.

This encompasses infrastructure services spanning distributed computing, server support, network support, service desk, procurement (hardware and software), and project services.

According to Fulton Hogan CIO Brian Northern, “Datacom continues to deliver and we are very pleased to go forward with Datacom as a key IT partner as we work to provide continuous improvement in service delivery and greater responsiveness to customer and business needs.”

Key business technology projects this year include a Procure to Pay project, electronic timesheets, intranet implementation and digital business applications and processes.

Additional technologies to be implemented within the next 12 months, says Northern, would be cloud migration strategy, business analytics, and further collaboration with alliance partners.

Recently, Fulton Hogan asked Davanti to develop an iPad app for its mobile workforce to capture onsite job specific information. Davanti’s Daily Job Report (DJR) is one of Fulton Hogan’s successful Australasian wide iOS apps, says Northern.

Work crew are now able to capture data in real time and department managers have a one-stop-shop for easily and effectively managing all of their assigned projects, allowing the construction firm to stay on top of issues and stay confident in the accuracy of the data entered.

Northern shares that investment in IT for 2016 will be driven primarily around big data, cloud services and digital platforms.

Challenges to be hurdled to complete the projects aligned for 2016, he reckons, would be speed of deployment, shadow IT, and leading disruptive tech-enabled changes.

Northern leads the construction company’s IT NZ staff of 31 and trans-Tasman staff of 14 supporting a total of over 6,200 staff in the whole organisation.