Last year, I published a series on my first hundred days as CIO at McGraw-Hill Construction. I’ve largely been quiet since then, unfortunately (from a blogging perspective), with my head down working with the Business and IT teams. We’ve rolled out some new products like Dodge SpecShare Suite, upgraded several technology platforms, and established an agile project management office among many other achievements. I’ve also spent a lot of time meeting with customers and learning about the construction industry. I am running a CIO panel at ENR’s FutureTech conference in December and started a CIO Council for construction industry CIOs (largely general contractor and design firms).Over the last couple of months, I’ve contributed two articles to Engineering News Record. My first post covered Three Technologies Where Construction CIOs Need Strategies and I contributed a second this week on Tablets, Laptops and Virtual Desktops: Trends for CIOs to Watch.

Some things that I’ve learned along the way

• You have to focus on the now and the future – all while you are still learning. Every day I’m still learning a new detail about the construction industry, our products, customers, and our architecture – yet I still must provide guidance on projects, future initiatives, capabilities, and budgets.
• Improving and accelerating application delivery takes both persistence and patience. Persistence to make changes to internal processes, architectures, and priorities – patience for teams and individuals to adapt.
• It’s a cliche to say technology is changing – but it is in more dramatic ways. There is now a feedback loop on technology demands. Customers and users have all seen benefits in leveraging new technologies; mobile/tablets to access information, business intelligence to make smarter decisions, social media to collaborate and other improvements in usability and search technologies. Users are hooked and have higher expectations for smarter analytic capabilities delivered conveniently with better tools to make them productive.

It’s been a fun ride. More to come.