Bechtel Rebuilds Its Computer Network from Scratch

The construction giant's chief information officer tells how input from Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com helped him reconstruct his IT system

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• Bechtel Rebuilds Its Computer Network from Scratch
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Bechtel Chief Information Officer Geir Ramleth

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Last year, Bechtel Chief Information Officer Geir Ramleth fulfilled what's only a pipe dream for most IT executives: He rebuilt Bechtel Group's corporate data network from the ground up. In March 2007, after nine months of research and analysis, the construction giant started work to revamp the way employees, contractors, and others use Bechtel's network. Early on, Ramleth looked to what he considered some of the most technologically advanced companies, including Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG), and Salesforce.com (CRM) to see what lessons he could learn about overhauling Bechtel's network.

What emerged was Project Services Network, which now lets authorized users such as Bechtel employees, contractors, and partners access the corporate network with any device at any time through an Internet portal. There, they can find e-mail, software applications, and the files they need to do their jobs. Although it may sound simple, Bechtel built three data centers from scratch, essentially creating an internal cloud computing platform. Now the company is testing so-called virtual desktops that would work with Bechtel's new network and potentially make it even easier to manage so many far-flung computers. In November, Ramleth was inducted into CIO Magazine's Hall of Fame for his innovative work at Bechtel. He recently spoke to BusinessWeek.com writer Rachael King about Bechtel's new network. Edited excerpts follow.

Tell me why you decided to completely rebuild your IT network and model it on Google, Amazon, and other companies.
We basically asked a very simple question: If Bechtel started business today, would we do IT the way that we are doing it? The answer was no. So we basically said, Let us go to the people that actually have done paradigm shifts in the way they operate and let us learn from them. We probably dealt with about a dozen and a half companies that we researched.

Did these companies open their doors to you?
Some were extremely helpful. Salesforce was probably the most helpful from the very beginning. We learned a lot from them and they have been very good at it.

What business challenges made this transformation necessary?
What we really tried to solve was to be sure that we had solutions for how to protect our intellectual property. That's where it started. We do business in more places around the world, so we have more locations in more distributed ways, and those locations are not necessarily as permanent as [during] the old world order. Because of the nature of where you go, you have more of a transient workforce as well.

And yet even a transient workforce, for a period at least, needs access to your systems.
You have full-time employees, temporary employees, supply chain, and customers. We do projects where our customers participate with us. We do projects where our suppliers participate with us. And when you say we're doing [projects] in more places around the world and we have people who are transient, how do we protect what matters to us? …There are myriad other companies that are trying to solve the same problems.

How is your network different today with Project Services Network than it was a couple of years ago?
First of all, the technical side of it is different in the way that there's more capacity in it, more redundancy in it, and more optimization built into it. We built our data centers in a much more efficient way.