Rick Hensley, CIO and VP at Messer Construction

WHAT WE DO:  

“We provide national builders expertise on a regional basis. We live and work in our communities; we don’t import project teams and then leave. We are very involved in the community and we want to continue to be a significant partner to all our communities. If the communities we are in are thriving, then building will thrive.”

How do you align IT with business strategy? 

“I am on the executive team of the organization and work for the CEO. We have monthly executive meetings, quarterly executive retreats, and in 2012 we had a ten year planning session, so I am very much attuned to where the business is going, in terms of business acquisitions, regional office expansions and future planning. Being a part of the executive group and knowing the company’s vision and mission is what I bring to the IT team to make sure that our IT strategy is supporting the business. This is what drove us to put in our new enterprise system. When we were facing the need for either a major upgrade to our old platform or a move to a new and different platform, because I knew how we needed to be positioned to meet our 2022 vision goal, we went through an evaluation of vendors and found a better platform for our middle-market organization. We now have a solid platform in which we can find and afford the resources that enable us to control our own destiny. We continue to streamline some things, but we now have systems in place that can carry us forward to where we want to be in terms of organic growth, and that will make it easier for us when we make acquisitions.

We are a small IT organization of just twenty people serving Messer’s three major groups, the largest being Operations, then Finance & Accounting and Safety & Risk. Each one has its own embedded analysts who work from a business perspective to determine how and why applications need to work and what tools and services the business needs. We at Messer believe that embedded analysts are the way of the future. Within our IT team then, we have Resource Managers who thoroughly understand the enterprise system, Project Managers who must understand the business and Developers who can solve for and develop solutions.  All three of the embedded analysts on our operations team work in a group called ‘Operation Solutions’ and all of them were, at one time, construction management engineers out in the field.  We like this because we have found that when everyone thinks IT is pushing something, it has much less acceptance than when the operation solutions group is pulling, because they are so closely attuned to the organization.

We’ve seen an evolution toward this over the last ten years and even more so in just the last five years. The people coming to work for us, the millennials just out of school, really understand technology so they have great input. They know more about technology than we did in the past and they know about business systems too. It used to be that IT told people how to do something and everything was custom developed; it was much more a push from IT than a pull from the business. That has certainly changed in the last ten years and has moved us toward the embedded analyst, because when the business is justifying the cost and benefits, and it doesn’t fall on IT’s shoulders, the solutions we can offer are better and the adoption rate is better.”