Carillion's e-vangelist

On 17 March, Carillion experienced a surge of its staff logging on to the internet. The reason was England's cricket victory against Sri Lanka, says Steve Connor. But the company's IT director was not angry. Quite the opposite. Instead of being dismayed at staff wasting their time surfing, he was reassured that Carillion's 6000 staff are internet literate.

You see, Steve Connor has a mission: to transform a bricks-and-mortar construction company into a fully functioning e-business that exploits all the best technology for project management, procurement and electronic tendering, and delivers the efficiencies as yet only realised in the dreams of dotcom directors.

Taking Carillion's 6000 staff on this journey with him is a continual challenge. "The role of IT in the company is changing. From supporting the business as it has in the past, to being at the heart of everything we do and people have to get used to that," says Connor.

One way he hopes to convince people is by allowing staff unrestricted internet access for business and personal use. The policy, which Carillion instituted across all its businesses in December last year, may sound nightmarish to the accounts department; but Connor insists it performs an important function.

"It shows that we trust our staff. We don't encourage personal use in business time, but at lunch times and after hours, we are perfectly happy for staff to use the internet."

This may sound worryingly liberal, but the system is not a free-for-all. Carillion uses a software package called Surfcontrol to monitor the sites being visited by each staff member. Downloads are restricted to staff with a business need for them.

Informal training
"We use Surfcontrol and software called Minesweeper to search for key words in internet sites and emails, so inappropriate ones can be detected. But we don't have a big problem with misuse," Connor says.

Surfcontrol produces a weekly report on internet usage throughout Carillion, and provides some interesting statistics (see box). The biggest surge in use so far was when the England cricket team won the test match against Sri Lanka in March.

The relaxed attitude was unthinkable three years ago, says Connor. "It was absolutely forbidden to use the internet at Carillion three years ago. You had to get written permission from management if you wanted to look at anything. Gradually people came round to the idea, though there was still some resistance to unrestricted access. But the fact that we are able to monitor who looks at what reassured the sceptics."

Even so, surely unrestricted internet access is going to encourage people to waste time? No so, argues Connor. "I liken it to reading a paper at work. You wouldn't stop someone from reading a paper for 10 minutes in their lunch hour, but you would question them if they spent all day reading the paper. It's the same with the internet. If someone were using it all the time we would question it. But for a few minutes in lunchtime is acceptable. We do lay down guidelines for use."

According to Connor, the internet also serves as an informal training aid. "Simple things like learning how to use a mouse and performing transactions over the internet can be self-taught through using the internet. This saves money because you don't then have to send people on courses to improve their basic IT skills," he argues.

Role of the intranet
Carillion's growing intranet is another way Connor hopes to improve the IT competency of its staff. "We have a notice board on the intranet where people can buy and sell items, which is totally self-managing. No one from the IT department gets involved in it at all. You have to fill in a form to upload an item to the board, with your email address on so people can get back to you. Items are automatically deleted after 14 days. There is no training for using the notice board, so by using it people have effectively trained themselves."

As would be expected of a top-five contractor, Carillion has already thrown its hat into the ring on e-business by taking a stake in US-based construction portal Bidcom – now part of Citadon. But with clients taking an interest in e-construction and Sainsbury's demanding its projects be managed on theBIW.com's Project Information Channel, the volatile world of e-business presents challenges for Connor.

"We would like everyone to use Citadon, obviously, but clients are beginning to ask for specific e-business tools. All the systems are conceptually similar, and with the half a dozen there are, it is manageable for us to support and train on them. If there were 35 we'd have a problem."

Easy data transfer
Looking to the future, Connor sees advances in broadband technology as essential to the development of e-business in construction. "Cheap, scaleable bandwidth will be the enabler for the proper exploitation of e-business. We are working on getting all our remote workers connected to the network, but with the development of ADSL (asymmetrical digital subscriber line, the broadband technology that will succeed IDSN as a method for transferring data) and GPRS (broadband for mobile phones) they will be able to access our intranet and project collaboration tools quickly and easily."

With that technology, Carillion will have the method – and, if Connor has his way, the will and minds – to achieve the transition from construction company to e-business.