Lend Lease Leads the Way with New Infrastructure Roll-Out

By Steven Russman

“A real added value was that it forced us to look at our ‘sources of truth,’” said Peter van der Reyden, referring to an outcome of the company’s computing-infrastructure upgrade. Van der Reyden, global head of client computing for Lend Lease Corporation, continued: “One of our objectives was to improve the delivery of technology to the sites, and to do that we needed to locate the true sources of data so our people could access it.” That’s no small task in a company as large and geographically dispersed as Lend Lease Corporation, a multinational project management, construction and real estate development company with some 400 locations in 44 countries.

Surprisingly, for an infrastructure upgrade of this size, the company relied on a core project team carved out if its 225-strong IT staff in different regions, with considerable help from the operations staff and field-support personnel. Based in the company’s shared technology services center in Atlanta, van der Reyden is one of 25 IT project-team members who worked on the upgrade under John Miles, senior vice president and head of global systems and services.

Miles explained that the project team’s objectives were “to reduce the complexity of our IT environment, lay the foundation for future initiatives and create a standardized operating environment.” As a result of numerous acquisitions, Lend Lease’s computing infrastructure had become overly complex and expensive to maintain. In addition, IT budgets had been cut by 45 percent, forcing Miles to do more with less. Adding to the budget pressures, the company also needed to implement the internal process and system controls mandated by regulatory and financial auditors.

The company’s directors sought to use information technology as a competitive advantage, a move the directors believed would reduce costs, improve service and allow the company to get up and running more quickly on new projects. With project budgets running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, starting and completing the projects on time—and using technology to better manage the projects—would continue to be critical success factors in meeting contractual obligations and profit goals. Miles knew that to accomplish streamlined processes, Lend Lease would need to empower its end users by bringing better technology to them.

Things got rolling in September 2003 with requests for information from suppliers and proceeded quickly to requests for proposals in early November. Beginning the following March, the initial project included 20 separate initiatives involving 18 new software products. Lend Lease settled on software and services from NetIQ, Remedy, Enterprise Management Solutions, M-Tech, Microsoft and Oracle.

The project team met with vendors last March for an “expectation setting” meeting, according to Miles. “Each vendor signed up for a timetable—committing to what was achievable and agreeing to what was not,” he said. The system went live on June 1 with new software packaging, delivery and discovery applications and change and service-level management and asset repositories from Remedy.

The infrastructure upgrade depended upon more than just new tools, though. Lend Lease also embraced new change management, asset management and procurement processes as part of the company’s move toward adopting the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. “We’re proud of our project management methodology. It’s one of our guiding principals,” said van der Reyden. “We broke the work up into phases—tackling people, process and technology, and cultural change in each piece.”

Lend Lease is blazing trails in its field and is well positioned to respond quickly with a solid IT go-to-market strategy. What’s really impressive is that, for an organization with some 10,000 employees in North America, Asia-Pacific and Europe, it has been able to channel internal IT and project-management resources and, with the support of its suppliers, design and implement a significant application infrastructure in just little more than nine months (the project was completed in June and rolled out in September). That’s a testament to good planning, program management and execution—things you’d expect from a company that makes its living managing huge construction projects and real estate worldwide.

Miles explained what’s on the table next: “Bringing up security and patch management. Software-license compliance, better software asset management and deploying software based on need. Controlling procurement through centralizing purchasing. Creating role-based asset profiles so users get the technology they need. Also, creating a standard set of shared applications users can access on demand.”

Using its state-of-the-art software-delivery, discovery and service-management applications, Lend Lease’s management will be able to access the information it needs to make more-informed business decisions and achieve what it set out to do: reduce complexity and improve productivity with automation. Miles summed up the benefits of the infrastructure upgrade and what it means to the way the business of IT has changed. “We can easily upgrade Lotus Notes and install new applications at the project sites and, instead of visiting each one, we distribute the software electronically—saving thousands in the process. Asset inventory and a consolidated source of contract and service information in the configuration management database are fundamental to our goal of delivering business intelligence to each of our users.