During the past 10 years, the EMCOR Group has gone from bankruptcy to becoming a Fortune 500 company with $4 billion in annual revenues. Today, the company is a global leader in mechanical and electrical construction, energy infrastructure, and facilities services.

IT at EMCOR also has undergone a major transformation. When Joe Puglisi joined the company as chief information officer in 1999, a formal IT department didn't exist. He built a lean-and-mean, decentralized IT organization focused on meeting requirements of different businesses, grouped into specific industry segments. Enterpriseleadership.org spoke with Puglisi about the inner workings of his organization and about his traditional approach to IT. Here's what he had to say:

EL: Can you describe the structure of your decentralized IT  organization?

JP: The 120 individuals on my corporate IT staff oversee the company's technical strategy for the 70 companies that comprise the three major divisions -- construction, facilities, and engineering These divisions have a diverse and complicated set of requirements and businesses. Each company has either a full-time or a part-time local IT support staff, which reports directed to the operating company and to me via a dotted line.

Our job is to weave together all of the technologies each division uses. For example, the construction group uses technology for estimating, computer aided design, and collaborating. The facilities division has a vice president of technology who reports to me. He's put together a team of specialists who work through back-office systems and mobile technologies. Engineering is our newest division, so our role for Engineering is to help this division evolve.

EL: What are some of the job functions of people on the corporate IT  team?

JP: My staff consists of highly trained professionals who have specific areas of specialization. We deal mainly at the strategic level by working closely with our operating companies. The goal here is to understand the needs of each business. For example, the director of systems and special projects, who reports to me, does workflow analysis and introduces technologies that streamline business process.

We also oversee tactical and operational areas. A team of network specialists and software support specialists keep up with the daily demands of a highly technical infrastructure.

Our IT strategy is to outsource whatever doesn't add any value to our operating companies, such as desktop support and hosting servers. We also outsource applications development. We're indifferent to offshoring. We'll go wherever we can get the work done for the best price and with the best quality.

EL: What do you look for when you hire people?

JP: I look for a certain drive, or fire in the eyes. Because technical skills are easy to acquire, I place a lot of emphasis on good interpersonal skills. Being a good listener and having good business acumen rate highly with me.

EL: Several trade press articles have mentioned your "low-ego"  approach to project ownership. Can you explain this?

JP: IT isn't about our projects versus the business units' projects. We focus more on what EMCOR's customers want and how we can deliver it. The task at hand becomes, how do we partner with rest of the management team or the operations companies to show ways to improve service delivery and contain costs? We use IT as a strategy for maintaining external client relationships, as well as internal customer relationships. The business and IT can't be separated. When we work with one of the operating companies, we are essentially working with an IT professional who is an extension of my staff.

EL: Are you using best practices such as Six Sigma or  COBIT?

JP: We haven't needed to go with any of the formal best practices such as Six Sigma or COBIT. For the past seven years, we've been continuously improving the company's efficiency. The best training teaches you not to talk before you listen.

EL: Everyone talks about the need to align IT with the goals of the  business. How are you doing this?

JP: We've been doing this for seven years. Because of our strategic concentration and our decentralized structure, we're in a good position to deal with the diversity and complexity each division has. For example, every day our work-in-progress construction systems tracks thousands of jobs in hundreds of locations across the country. The system has more than 100 key performance indicators, and the information we pull together from the system regularly goes to senior management for their review.

EL: Do you have a governance board?

JP: We have the EMCOR management committee, which includes all the senior executives. Any major investments wind up for discussion at this committee's table. I chair an IT operational committee made up of the IT heads from each of the major divisions. The two-part agenda includes talking about what projects we're working on, and profiling new technologies we've encountered. We meet every six weeks.

Once a year, we hold a two-day, off-site IT Summit with representatives from the front lines of companies in each division. We talk about the corporate strategies and directions that we are taking.

Because we're a large company, we like to foster teaming by telling ourselves what we've learned from ideas in the outside world. We aren't eager to tell the outside world the good things we've learned.

EL: Can you talk about specific IT projects that have saved the  company millions of dollars?

JP: It's hard to quantify true improvements in the business based on customer delivery, customer experience (both internal and external), and increased revenue. We prefer to look at what is the relative cost of keeping a customer versus having to acquire a new customer? How do you capture all of that? We infuse efficiencies and effectiveness throughout the entire company. I don't know how you put a dollar amount on that. Things like saving the company millions of dollars by using volume purchase agreements are the tips of the iceberg.

EL: Are there specific platforms you use for each of the  divisions?

JP: We've a diverse portfolio of back-office systems, analytical systems, and tools. We're not concerned with everyone using the same tools. We're more interested in what tools will help us do specific jobs better.

EL: What's the biggest risk you've taken as a CIO and what did you  learn from it?

JP: I'd prefer to say that EMCOR has been the best opportunity of my career. I'm a triage expert. I have gone into three organizations where IT either didn't exist or it wasn't functioning at peak capacity. In each case, I created a highly functional and efficient base level and then got involved with the business to the point of driving it forward.

We've had 42 quarters of consecutive profitable growth. We're changing each day. The strategy for the next five years is to maintain a similar trajectory.

--

Elizabeth M.  Ferrarini is a technology writer from Boston,  Massachusetts.