Bricks, mortar and motherboards

Tasked with creating an IT strategy that will help the construction and maintenance giant Rok Group to double its profits over the next three years, CIO Claire Hamon has a tough job on her hands. But as the rugby-playing tech chief tells CXO Europe, she is more than up for the challenge.

“The key to raising the profile of technology within the organisation is to think of each IT project as a business project”
-Claire Hamon, Rok Group

CXO. How does your role allow you to align Rok Group's IT strategy with its business objectives?
Claire Hamon. I sit on the Executive Committee and therefore work on helping to develop the organisation's business strategy. That allows me to develop an appropriate information systems strategy to support it. This is required to help us achieve our growth ambition as the nation's local builder as we need to be able to provide information, systems support and telephony on a day-to-day basis to help drive profits. A big part of my role is ensuring that the leadership of my team is closely aligned with our corporate values and goals.

CXO. How reliant would you say the construction industry is on its IT strategy, compared to for instance, the financial services industry?
CH. I would suggest that the construction industry is not known to be heavily reliant on technology. It tends to focus on tangible goods and on services rather than the flow of information through the organisation. I find it very challenging to be working within an industry that does not, traditionally, have a strong awareness of the potential of information systems. In order to raise awareness of this potential the organisation's IT strategy needs to be fully aligned with the business strategy. For instance, employees must have quick access to the information they need in order to complete projects such as refurbishing a social housing project.

CXO. How important is it that data about Rok Group's various projects is securely stored, up to date and easy to access for the company's employees?
CH. It's very important, particularly for employees who work on lots of different projects in various locations. For instance our maintenance technicians need to know which job they've got to go to next. A really vital part of what we do is making sure that our people are working within a safe environment. It's as crucial that IT enables them to do that as it is to ensure that the leadership of the company can access up-to-date financial data.

CXO. Rok has ambitious plans to double its profits and increase headcount from 5000 to 20,000 within the next three years. What are the company's main business objectives?
CH. Rok's vision is to become the nation's local builder and that means delivering building refurbishment and maintenance services consistently to every major city across the UK. The unique thing about Rok is that we do that by using directly employed people who live and work in their local communities. It's a really important aspect of what we do.

We operate from a network of local offices; we've got about 63 at the moment with over 5000 employees, and our plan is to have a branch in every major town or city, which would mean more or less doubling in size. In terms of the key drivers for us, we are going to focus on that growth and on growing the maintenance side of the business. We're going to be doing more plumbing, heating and electrical work.

CXO. What do these expansion plans mean in terms of the company's supply chain, procurement, IT and logistics?
CH. In terms of supply chain and the logistics, because of those ambitious plans for future expansion we'll be working directly with manufacturers for key products we use and making sure that we have the most appropriate and innovative solutions to give to our customers. We've got a fantastic innovation called ROK Home of Choice, which is a really good example of this, where we partner with two organisations to deliver a suite of housing types. We'll be using greener products within those housing types, and we'll focus on ensuring better value for our customers. We've got a big fleet of vans so we will be utilising our national strengths again to make sure that we've got the best transport solution. In IT terms we've just outsourced our data centre management. We're in the middle of the migration of the data centre at the moment. I'm really optimistic that this move will give us the national scale that we want and the flexibility that we need to be able to match the growth of the business rapidly. It will also allow me to get my team focusing on providing added value for the customer.

CXO. How are you contributing to ensuring the Rok Group operates in a sustainable way?
CH. Sustainability is something that is core to Rok Group's business strategy. Providing a healthy and safe environment and ensuring the sustainability of our projects is as important as the appropriate use of tools or appropriate safety guidelines on-site.

Traditionally this doesn't sit within the IT agenda but there is a member of my team who is responsible for ensuring that we maintain focus on the sustainability agenda, and in fact, one of the key criteria for selecting our data partner was that sustainability is very high on their agenda, too. Each of us needs to champion sustainability within our own department.

CXO. The management of some organisations dismisses technology and IT as an unnecessary expense, particularly in smaller to medium-size businesses; how important in your view is IT, as a means of improving business process and customer service?
CH. The key to raising the profile of technology within the organisation is to think of each IT project as a business project. The focus of these projects must be to look at how we can engineer or re-engineer business processes to bring in greater efficiency. IT teams must focus more on this than on the technology itself. Too often IT projects are seen to overrun or not deliver the benefits that they were conceived for in the first place.

They can become all about training employees to use the products and less about the benefits this technology will bring. IT can absolutely improve business process and customer service if it's focused on as a business project from the outset, and I think in the same way, it needs to be deeply embedded into the core business process.

CXO. There is a shortage of female IT professionals in senior positions. Do you think this is because women are less likely to pursue this line of work, or do you think it is because they are not as successful as their male counterparts in the profession?
CH. This subject is of particular interest to me. I think firstly, the failure of women to reach senior positions isn't unique in IT. I used to work on the board of e-skills UK that has done some great work educating young teenage girls and also enhancing post-graduate education to increase the potential of females. Their research suggested that the girls become disinterested in IT in their early teens. What it found was that, girls typically lack confidence in doing something they didn't know very much about. They didn't know much about a career in IT other than what they had been taught in classes, such as how to use Excel and Word - which frankly doesn't really stimulate their interest. Boys, however, have a little bit more awareness, but also statistically are likely to be more confident in their abilities in an area with which they're unfamiliar, and therefore, they see greater potential for a career in IT. I think the other issue is that for most of us that choose to have children, and I have two of my own, there is going to be a point at which we have to tread water and re-earn our stripes, and I think we have to remind people why they held us in high esteem before we left. My experience is that it's a case of out of sight, out of mind. Women that are more likely than men to require a career break - and I think that will necessarily close down the number of opportunities for them to be appointed to senior posts.

CXO. What do you and the Rok Group hope to achieve over the next three to five years?
CH. We've exited recently from the development business; we're now reducing our focus on contracting and increasing our focus on the maintenance business. We feel this is a real growth area. For me and for my team there are some fantastic opportunities to use technology in a way that we have simply not done before to deliver the right information to people at the right time and in the right form to support that ambitious growth.