Joe Jagodich, VP & CIO of EllisDon, discussed the impact of Big Data and IT on the construction industry with theCube co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier, live at the IBM Edge 2013 conference that kicked off today.

EllisDon is a privately held company that’s been operating for over 60 years in the construction industry. Based in Toronto, the company originated in London. Talking about his role at EllisDon, Jagodich sad “I wear two hats,” which allows him to be very much in line with the business.  “I have my profits and loss center,” Jagodich goes on. The company offers services and software for the construction industry.

“If a company wants to sustain growth, IT has become a bigger part of that equation,” Jagodich said, pointing out that construction is still an industry that’s 65 percent inefficient. “The most important reason is information, decision support is so critical for people,” he explained. “Construction is not about bricks and mortars, it’s about innovation, planning, reducing risks.” In order to do that, you have to have all the needed information to make the right decision.

Internet of Things is “great example” of mobile + analytics

Talking about mobile trends and the Internet of things, Jagodich said that EllisDon is a great example of the mobile environment and the use of analytics. “Our people are primarily engineers, they are all mobile and they all want to do work on their smartphones and their tablets.” Thus the company needs to enable its application, based on having a strong cloud infrastructure in place, to make the needed information available. This involves terabytes of information, as the company often has a hundred concurrent projects at any given time.

Sustainability is a huge thing and a common issue in construction. “The demographic is such that there used to be facility managers that did things intuitively, now everything is measured.” Every building has heat sensors everywhere that translate into data, there are no more light switches – everything translates into terabytes of data, Jagodich explained. “We take that data and transform it into information.”

The company uses the XIV storage system to host their applications, “we’ve always had an internal cloud, allowing our smaller contractors to use our infrastructure rather than using their own.” They have now moved to the G3 level, “we’re going to a web-based system,” Jagodich said. “XIV is doing that for us, we are providing cloud services to multitenant clients.”

Why not go with public cloud services?

Asked why not go to the public cloud instead, Jagodich said that having the ability to control and manage data is very important to the company. “We are very transparent about it, but we have 60 years of construction experience.”

Liability and scalability are critical, he said, “you no longer have the time to say, ‘OK, let’s take this down for a couple of days or weeks to reconstruct your infrastructure.’ We need a cloud infrastructure with no downtime and no failures, XIV provides that for us.” He also added that the company migrated to G3 in less than 3 days.

As CIO, you have to think about data architecture

“It used to be apps that used to drive they way things are done,” Jagodich added: build an app, create storage around it. Now, storage and data are being really open, “you have to think about your data before you even think about an application or your infrastructure. As a CIO, you have to think about data architecture.”

There are a lot of elements to data architecture, he explained, including mobile, consumerization of data, BYOD. “If you’re into that type of environment, which many CIOs are, you have to think about your data creed.” If you have 1500 people with different devices, they can be going out to iCloud, or other different cloud environments, and “that is where you start losing control of the valuable information that your company holds as crown jewels.” CIOs  have to think of how to integrate and work in this environment, they cannot ban it. A company needs to have the ability to be fast, fluid and flexible.

Infrastructure as a Utility

Asked about what’s next for EllisDon, Jagodich said he saw multi-tenancy becoming greater and greater, infrastructures becoming more of an utility. “We’re no longer viewed as a core construction company, we offer services,” and not just IT services. “We have moved into R&D and finance, we’re trying to be innovators.”

Asked if the company can monetize the data it has available, he explained that “what we are doing is through these services, that data is giving us analytics,” it gives credibility when they go out to sell their services. “We can scale the data available to us into best practices.”

Commenting on the key message IBM send, Jagodich said “IBM has captured the imagination of IT. Finally they captured a way to align IT to business,[…] and that’s innovation. There is a true belief and some energy here that says it’s doable.” It’s no longer something that IT news magazines talk about, “but if you really look at the technologies that are coming you can really help the bottom line of your company.”

Asked what pieces of advice he’d share with CIOs, Jagodich encouraged them to “move away from the traditional role of the CIO very quickly, because you are going to be left behind.” They need to focus on the harmonization of costs and the benefits of new technology.