In Tough Times, Maintain a Technical Edge

For Rob Fortin, today's downtrodden economy sometimes has an upside. As director of IT for Arrowstreet, a 100-person architectural firm in Somerville, Massachusetts, Fortin provides the design staff with necessary technology tools while trying to keep costs under control. That job got a little easier when Fortin bought two high-end servers late in the summer and found their prices were significantly lower than what he had budgeted for last January. "We saw a 20 percent savings that was due just to the state of the economy," he says.

Fortin isn't alone. Technology officers at other architectural firms are also finding ways to take advantage of a slow economy. The key, they say, is to resist attempts to slash IT budgets and use these resources to prepare for better times. "In a down economy, we do have to tighten our belts," says Jill Rothenberg, AIA, chief technology officer at ADD in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which specializes in corporate architecture and multi-unit residential projects. "Nevertheless, this is a time to keep putting money into technology, as well as the people to support it, so you can continue to develop."

Outsourcing strategies

At Davis Brody Bond, Paul Seletsky, AIA, has invested in IT despite the recession. A new IP telephony system lets staff manage calls through their PCs.

Moving forward means different things to different IT managers. Rather than maintaining a business-as-usual approach, some firms are now overhauling their IT infrastructure to make it more efficient.

One such company is Manhattan-based Davis Brody Bond, where a bare-bones, three-person IT staff serves a 100-person design firm. Paul Seletsky, AIA, director of technology, is aggressively moving to off-load as many of the firm's technology services as possible, including the phone and e-mail systems, to third-party outsourcers. "My philosophy is that the company should focus on its core competency-design-and not make the IT department the tail that's wagging the dog."

Seletsky believes that most firms, in both good economic times and bad, have trouble providing a complete range of IT needs with an in-house staff. Instead of fighting for more people, Seletsky is opting to stay small and tap outside expertise. "I wouldn't build an electrical system to provide the firm with power, so why should I even attempt to do that with the phone or e-mail systems?" he reasons.

Part of Seletsky's vision was shaped in 1993, when he worked in the World Trade Center. He saw firsthand how the bombing that year disrupted IT infrastructures. "I experienced what business continuity really means," he says. One of the advantages of outsourcing is that a large portion of critical technology and company data reside off-site, protected from internal problems or disasters.

Outsourcing is also saving the firm money. Seletsky pays a Manhattan-based e-mail service, MI8 Corporation, $20 per person per month to deliver the resource. He estimates this arrangement is saving him about $1,000 a month compared to managing e-mail in-house, which would require one person dedicated to the job.

Similar savings are accruing from outsourcing the phone system to M5 Networks, of New York City. M5 provides a new type of telecommunications platform called IP telephony that sends voice traffic over the Internet rather than long-distance telephone lines. Because each call is billed only as a local charge to the firm's Internet service provider, the system is saving the company about $2,000 a month that they'd otherwise pay in long- distance charges. In addition, the silicon brains of the new phone system reside at M5's headquarters, fulfilling Seletsky's goal of protecting key technology in a remote location. "If a fire broke out in our office, I could redirect incoming calls to the home phones of employees," he says, adding that calls and voice mail would be lost if the old, in-house phone system were damaged.

The company is even outsourcing some of the specialized tools of the design trade. ABC Imaging, based in Washington, D.C., now installs and maintains all of the firm's printing and plotting equipment. "We have color plotters, high-end black-and-white production plotters, and three new multifunction printers, which we can swap out [with new equipment] as our needs change," Seletsky says. He estimates the firm saves between $4,000 and $5,000 a month by using a service contract versus buying and maintaining the same equipment. An on-site manager from ABC keeps all the printers and plotters supplied with toner cartridges, paper, and other consumables. "He provides better service than I could expect from an employee," says Seletsky.

Finally, leasing rather than buying PCs shields the firm from IT obsolescence. All of the computers at Davis Brody Bond are part of a three-year lease agreement with Dell Computers. The arrangement allows the firm to standardize on a common platform, which reduces networking and application software conflicts. "You don't save money by leasing, but it makes us better able to manage expenses," Seletsky says. "We understand the costs better each month, compared to buying equipment in bits and pieces."

Another firm that has seen the benefits of outsourcing is The Office of Michael Rosenfeld (OMR), of West Acton, Massachusetts, a 42-person residential, commercial, and municipal architecture firm. Paul Woyda, AIA, the firm's IT manager, is the sole person dedicated to the company's IT needs. To help him provide necessary services, he outsources LAN and telecommunications services. The firm has also recently hired financial software vendor Intuit to provide secure, Web-based database services using a product called QuickBase. "Our focus is the real-time sharing and tracking of construction administration information," Woyda says. Currently, the company is using QuickBase in a $73.9 million high school project under construction for two Massachusetts towns. All modifications to construction documents, meeting reports, submission status, and construction progress photography are available via the Web at any time to authorized people, including the client and contractors. "The result is significant time and cost savings for the project owner and all project participants," Woyda says.

But not everybody embraces outsourcing. Arrowstreet's Fortin takes comfort in having in-house experts who can tackle problems as they arise, rather than relying on service technicians who juggle the needs of numerous customers. He's devoting more time to staff training and what he describes as a move toward greater self-sufficiency. "We're giving our network administrator all the training he can get," Fortin says. "The need for people to have the best possible tools is more important than ever." And one of the key advantages of outsourcing-the storage of critical information off-site-also makes firms vulnerable to unexpected downtime, system crashes, or other problems experienced by the companies they do business with.

Selective do-it-yourself

With a relatively large IT staff of eight, ADD has traditionally followed a do-it-yourself approach, choosing to let in-house talent manage technology tools. But that stance has become less rigid in the past year as the firm began to consolidate disparate data sources, including separate human resources and financial databases, into a central system with reduced redundancy and fewer opportunities for errors. "A year ago, we saw some applications coming onto the market that would allow us to bring our data together under one umbrella," Rothenberg says.

Committing to a new off-the-shelf product called Deltek Vision for practice management represented a break from the past, when the IT staff would develop software in-house to enhance its various databases. Although this gave the firm exactly the capabilities its staff needed, there was an expensive downside. "When you develop [software] internally, it can become a never-ending process. Everyone wants this or that tweak," Rothenberg says. "When you get a shrink-wrapped package, that can end those discussions."

Rothenberg's new philosophy is to devote IT resources to developing programs that aren't available commercially, while buying off-the-shelf yet customizable solutions whenever possible. "Why reinvent the wheel?" she says. The firm is currently using its in-house staff to expand its intranet beyond being a clearinghouse for company news and policies-it's now becoming a resource for the design process itself, with archives of model templates and project documentation.

ADD will also use the months ahead to catch its breath. The pace of technological innovation has slowed compared to the constant stream of new hardware and software that characterized the past decade, and IT departments have barely time to install an application and learn its features before the next release hits the market. In addition to constantly shuffling installation disks, Rothenberg's staff felt they rarely mastered an application's capabilities in depth, she says. Today, her staff spend more time fully evaluating new technologies, like the parametric modeling program Revit from Autodesk, or revisiting existing programs. "We can now look at our current infrastructure and see how we might get more out of it," she says. "We're looking for unused features within [Microsoft] Outlook or [Bentley Systems] Microstation that we can now use to our advantage."

Stay strong

IT managers say the biggest lesson today is to stay focused on the goal of using technology to boost productivity. "Don't let management try to stop computer purchases to save costs," Fortin maintains. "That just gives you frustrated architects who don't have the tools they need to take on a fast-turnaround project. It's more important than ever to maintain your technical edge.