Supernova Award Category

The Problem

Due to a federated system of environments from the companies it acquired over the years, Parsons Brinckerhoff had an aging infrastructure and disparate IT processes and communication across the organization.  IT was tasked with an overall transformation to streamline its IT footprint, modernize the technology and enable better content exchange among its employees, consultants and clients so the business would continue to grow and expand.

Additionally, a major challenge in the design consulting industry is the capture and accessibility of institutional knowledge from a workforce that will lose a percentage of its workers due to retirement in the next several years.  This loss of extensive content and best practices would present a big gap in the efficiencies, accuracy and growth of the organization.

The Solution

To address the disparate technologies and efficiencies to deliver to their businesses, PB implemented an IT transformation program that consisted of a series of initiatives each with their own business purpose, but collectively providing better operations to run, transform and innovate as an organization. 

• Consolidating Parsons entire data center footprint would modernize antiquated technologies, reduce IT location risk and costs and restructure a more efficient IT workforce.
• Moving to an independent support model to support a recent major application upgrade while enabling the funding of additional technology initiatives that bring value to the business
• Implementing a first time knowledge sharing and unified collaboration platform to effectively capture institutional knowledge and consulting expertise and share across the primary stakeholders in the business

The results

• Technology was outdated, and data center location was not ideal producing risk to operations. By making aggressive changes to the data center footprint, PB was able to relocate, therefore updating their data center technologies, gaining new facilities and operationally restructuring the IT organization to be more effective and cost efficient.
• Beyond data center infrastructure enhancements, software application support fees can cost organizations millions of dollars annually, yet yield little or no ROI for the high costs.  By switching to an independent support model with Rimini Street for their Oracle EBS applications, PB was able to reallocate a significant portion of their IT budget to greater IT efficiencies and innovative initiatives such as funding 100% of their new knowledge sharing platform.  This restructuring positively impacted their competitive advantage as well as bottom line.
• As part of the transformation, IT moved to a unified collaboration platform integrating Microsoft collaboration technology, Sharepoint, coupled by Lync.  This combined platform helped create Practice Area Networks which captured the extensive knowledge base from its teams around the world and moved them into a collaborate environment to a) help fill the knowledge gap between the company and b) resolve communication redundancies across IT environments from previous acquisitions.

Metrics

confidential

The Technology

Microsoft Lync, Sharepoint

Disruptive Factor

• PB had to do what no other organization in the industry had done before - leverage its extensive knowledge base and ensure the right knowledge sources were available to the right people at the right time. PB build the first-of-its-kind collaboration platform in the global design consulting industry. The ability to access best practices, case studies and other critical resources from experts around the world was a game-changer and now a vital aspect of the business, especially given the high rate of retirement for much of its baby-boomer workforce over the next few years. Similarly, the upgrade in its unified communications implementation provided a more cost-effective, scalable solution that helped to decrease redundancies and provide new types of advanced capabilities for both on-site and remote employees.
• By switching to an independent software support provider in order to cut its total overall support costs by 90% for its Oracle EBS and SAP ERP software environments, PB was able to find creative ways to reduce ongoing run costs and reinvest multiple innovative initiatives.

PB modernized an entire IT organization from workforce to technology to operations - Streamlined processes, improved reporting and built a knowledge collaboration effort that is key to their business in driving game changing results that helped validate their strategic objectives to ‘Run.Transform.Innovate.’

Shining Moment

On top of all of that, we've freed up enough money to build out our data center infrastructure to support an additional mobile initiative called VICE-Virtual Computing Environment that is a new robust private cloud that changes the delivery model from PCs to a thin client addressing mobility demand, improving work sharing among offices, project sites, client sites and allows the workforce to an anytime, anywhere, any device environment."  Savings reinvested.