November 2009

At Hill International, IT is driving business growth one step at a time

By Larry Lange

When budgets are tight and staff is stretched thin, innovation is sometimes pushed to the back burner. Michael Petrisko, CIO and senior VP of Hill International, has a different view.  In fact, he is investing more on innovation to help drive the business forward. Hill International, a global leader in construction project management is using existing and emerging technologies to improve internal business processes that deliver even more value to customers-- and at significant cost savings.

Michael Petrisko

Hill International, with 2008 revenue of $380.5 million and 2,300 employees in 80 offices worldwide, needs to stay at the forefront of its industry, and IT is a big part of the corporate strategy. Petrisko takes an active role on the executive management team, which enables him to drive business-process automation and serve as “a change agent for the company.” Although the overall construction industry has stalled recently, Hill’s third quarter net earnings, released this month, were up 12 percent from the previous year’s third quarter, and revenue from consulting and services for the first nine months of 2009 rose 13.3 percent versus last year. In August, it was recognized by The Zweig Letter — an industry publication — as the fastest-growing company among architecture, engineering and environmental consulting firms in the United States and Canada.

One example of innovation is the company’s move to server virtualization and SaaS models, led by Petrisko and the IT group. To date, Petrisko’s team has replaced 60 of 190 physical servers with a virtual-server environment. With fewer physical units, he says, “we were able to reduce about $80,000 in staff costs and $31,000 annually on power.” That’s a total three-year savings of $543,000 when including a $210,000 savings on new hardware purchases. “Virtualization has allowed us to give back to the business and the environment, and ultimately to provide better service to our customers,” he says.

Virtual Savings

Some of the savings are reinvested in “things like tablet PC deployments, building-information modeling research and improved network tools,” which “all give us the ability to be first in the market,” says Shawn Pressley, Hill’s VP of Project Management Systems.

Beyond cost savings, virtualization can greatly enhance an organization's business agility, Pressley says. “This technology offers the potential for a fundamental change in the way IT managers think about computing resources. When managing individual boxes becomes less of a challenge, the focus of IT can shift from the technology to the services the technology can provide,” he says.

What’s more, Hill’s move to virtualization has also meant it can leapfrog competitors by offering cloud computing services for its external clients. Because virtualization freed up underutilized server capacity, Hill was able to expand its service offerings to clients. Among these offerings is SaaS-based access to its hosted project management, scheduling, risk analysis and document management applications. These Web services, portals and other collaboration offerings are a growing segment of the business and complement Hill’s consulting services. “It’s a real value-add for us, and it’s all IT-driven,” notes Petrisko. Moreover, the services “make Hill all the more compelling” to current and prospective clients. In this way, Hill has used its internal innovation efforts to fuel new business services for its clients.

Finding Hidden Value

Taking a practical approach to innovation also meant drilling deep into IT applications Hill already deploys in order to find additional value. For instance, Petrisko and his team stretched the Identity & Access Management (IAM) solution  to do more than automate the management of user identities across enterprise systems. First, they used the tool’s compliance features to consolidate the information Hill needed to provide auditors to assist Hill in meeting its obligations under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Sarbox). Hill’s process now takes two hours instead of a week to 10 days. Deploying IAM also helped reduce the IT portion of a Sarbox audit by 25 percent, which amounts to a savings of $50,000 annually. “That saving helped offset some of the IAM project costs for three years,” he says.*

In his view, you don’t have to “boil the ocean,” in order for top management to gain confidence in what IT is doing. Practical, quick wins on new projects –- rather than trying to “blast one huge project out there that promises to change everything”— is a key strategy for success at Hill.

In another example, Petrisko and his staff teamed with the corporate services group to cut from eight to two the number of days it took to onboard new hires so that they are “billable” and productive to the company more quickly. The previous system required a total of 80 manual processes for onboarding a new employee, and IT was manually entering the pertinent information to five different systems. Using IAM, Petrisko helped  HR become the single point of entry for the data, which is then directed to Active Directory, finance, CRM and project management functions. It is also instantly accessible via Hill’s internal dashboard application.

“That’s a benefit we never expected to use IAM for,” says Petrisko. The solution, previously used by Hill “mainly for identity credentials, is now the key to making sure we have exact information across our systems.” As a result, “we proved that we can really help improve the business. That makes my ability to sell our next project much easier,” he says.

Hill is also finding innovative ways to implement Web 2.0 applications across the enterprise. Since IAM enabled Hill to achieve seamless data synchronization of its extensive and disparate global address book, that information is now accessible via the firm's intranet portal, which is based on Microsoft SharePoint. The platform consolidated and updated 80 different regional e-mail address lists into one complete and up-to-date address book accessible to all.

“It sounds like a simple administrative function,” says Petrisko, “but when you’re a global company, having seamless communication access for employees around the world is hugely important.” Plus, from an administrative perspective, each office no longer has to create these lists anymore.

On a larger scale, Petrisko says: “We must constantly be improving our business processes and bringing in the tools” to continue to innovate. “If we don’t continually move forward, especially in this economy, we could easily fall a year or two behind very quickly.”

For Petrisko and his IT team, practical innovation not only has corporate buy-in, but it’s a proven, de facto methodology that keeps the construction company building toward the future

* “Results for any organization vary based on size and complexity of the environment.”

ASK THE EXPERT

Michael J. Petrisko

Michael J. Petrisko is Senior Vice President and CIO of Hill International. He is based at the company’s headquarters in Marlton, N.J.

Petrisko has more than 20 years of information technology experience, primarily in the engineering and construction industry. Prior to joining Hill, he was Director of Global IT Operations for AECOM Technology Corp., a global architecture, engineering and construction management firm with more than 30,000 employees. Before that, Petrisko was Vice President and CIO for the AECOM subsidiary DMJM Harris Inc. He also served as Director of Technical Services for Foster Wheeler Corp., an engineering and construction services firm.

Petrisko studied management information sciences at Thomas Edison State College, and he is a member of the New Jersey Society of Information Management.

He is a member of Smart Enterprise Exchange and can be contacted on the site.