Tony Peleska, CIO and Head of Digital Transformation at Kraus-Anderson, speaks with Thiago Da Costa, CEO of Toric, in a video interview about prioritizing organizational sources, operations of the business technology investment committee, leveraging Power BI, diversity in teams, data engineering, and organizational challenges.
Founded in 1897, Kraus-Anderson Construction is among the top 20 construction firms in the U.S. Midwest. Toric specializes in data movement and data ingestion pipelines for all major construction data sources.
Peleska begins the conversation by talking about prioritizing sources in the organization. To do this, a business technology investment committee was established which was critical to deciding the strategy, he says.
As a CIO, Peleska chairs the committee which includes the President of the realty sector, COO, CFO, and Legal Head, and the decisions are made collectively. The group decides which area to prioritize.
Next, a solid project management structure is created to measure if the proof of concepts are hitting the right points, says Peleska. This brings a lot of financial data to the data pond, he adds. Peleska says that this enabled the organization to know what the profit margins look like and what to expect on a monthly input.
Explaining the process, he shares that the team took some core reports and assessed the financial performance aspect. Then, it found the critical elements to put into the data, passed them through the ETL, and put them in the data warehouse.
Further, the organization leveraged Power BI to report value and insights for people to see every project based on their requirements and responsibilities across the board. Once the people started seeing the proof of concept and data utilization in real time, they understood where the mistakes were, and how to rectify them, he asserts.
According to Peleska, the most important part of the journey lies in the moments where one witnesses the proof of concept delivering information and the ability to be agile with the next step.
From a lead to a sale, and an active project till close out, he maintains that the team saw the points where a better job can be done throughout the process of organizing and structuring the data.
Highlighting the team, Peleska states that it is extremely diverse. Within it is the IT piece, for which there is a vendor partner that creates data strategy, builds the ETL aspect, and helps strategically to keep the systems running. He mentions cross-pollinating this team with the business users.
In continuation, Peleska mentions a team of construction technologists that have a variety of roles within the organization as part of that business technology investment committee.
The third major thing, he says, is that the ownership of things is federated to leadership within each core business unit. This enables the leadership to have a say in what works and what does not. Then, the report is submitted to the business technology investment committee to decide on the short and long-term roadmap.
When asked about the data engineering aspect, Peleska affirms that the company does not hire data engineers but keeps them to train internal folks, to become ‘light data analysts.’ He reiterates that the data engineering aspect is looked after by the vendor partner, with whom the long-term plan is to go to Microsoft Fabric. Also, he mentions educating the entire organization on data utilization through vendor partners.
According to Peleska, the prime challenge was to learn and process that there are people who have done things a certain way for a long time and they will want it their way. He adds that it was a learning curve.
Moving forward, Peleska states that the organization is focused on getting buy-in at every level and that it is at its right pace. In conclusion, he says that the challenge is to completely define data as is, and hunt and peck mistakes through the process. Peleska says that change is not easy in this space, but value can be seen quickly with tools and technology.
CDO Magazine appreciates Tony Peleska for sharing his insights with our global community.
