As the scope and geographic spread of Bechtel projects continued to enlarge, Geir Ramleth, senior vice president and CIO, found himself with challenges that even a recent IT modernization could not solve.
For every 100 employees in the U.S. and Europe who retired, Bechtel had been able to replace only 60. More and more project locations needed support in 50 different countries around the globe. And all of a sudden, about a third of the people accessing Bechtel’s network were non-Bechtel employees. Teams of employees, contractors and supply chain partners in every part of the world were collaborating around the clock.
Bechtel found itself in need of a new way to support these teams, including a full measure of “liquid security” to match the fluid support services. The just-completed modernization had streamlined IT systems and cut costs by nearly 30%, but these emerging support issues went beyond cost savings.
Mr. Ramleth redefined the support problem with this question: “If we started Bechtel today, would we do IT in the same way we’re doing it now?” The answer, according to Ramleth, was “No.”
So, after examining how post-Internet companies that started with a clean IT slate had designed and applied technology, Ramleth decided to follow the networking practices of YouTube, the standardized server approach of Google, the extreme virtualization of Amazon, and the multi-tenant application support strategy of Salesforce.com.
As a result, Bechtel is growing their Project Services Network (PSN), their own private cloud that is designed to deliver secure, simple, ubiquitous, and rapidly deployable information services for all Bechtel teams everywhere.
The PSN is Bechtel’s own SaaS offering for all of Bechtel’s project teams, delivering a “Google-like” experience through their PSN portal. Where more extensive versions of applications need to be supported, Bechtel will continue to support those in more traditional (fixed) fashion.
Creating the Bechtel PSN as their own internal proprietary cloud solves a lot of transparency problems, and creates enough digital trust for the Bechtel enterprise to capture some value now, and explore just how such an undertaking can be used as an interim step to third-party (public cloud) SaaS offerings in the future.
— From "Digital Trust In The Cloud," by CSC's Ron Knode