How ADCO’s CIO is transforming a construction firm with Dropbox Business

In the construction industry, IT leaders are seeing traditional ways of working being disrupted by innovation and transformation.It means technology teams, tasked with both reducing costs and enabling workers, find themselves traversing a fine line. How do you continue to support the growth and evolution of the business while ensuring even the most transformation-averse are brought along with you?

Enter Doug Zuzic, CIO of ADCO. Founded in the 1970s and completing over 3,500 projects valued at over $10 billion since inception, Doug is now leading the construction firm through a digital transformation journey.

The aim? To make ADCO the builder of choice for clients.

Building a central platform for the business in the cloud

“Our infrastructure was at least seven years old and needed replacing,” says Doug. “We had to ask whether we were going to invest in physical infrastructure, or do we look at a cloud-based solution?”

With fragmented information stored in multiple locations, minimal oversight, and a lack of mobility, ADCO needed a single platform to bring it all together, simplify access and standardise how the team collaborate. That solution was Dropbox Business.

“It allowed us to bring teams and content together, and simplify access for our workers on site,” says Doug. “It’s enabling all areas of the business to collaborate on drawings, plans, and projects. Teams no longer need to submit a request to IT to find files buried in our architecture; they can access on a device while on site. It is completely transforming the business.”

ADCO is now in the process of deprecating all 40 of its file servers. “Replacing servers by migrating data to the cloud means we’ve reduced operating costs,” explains Doug. “As a result of this cloud-first thinking, we’ve refocused our IT employees into more strategic and proactive roles. They are now working on projects that matter, and they’re bringing real value back to the business.”

Enabling the business and its people with technology

With each region storing project-related documents independently, information and departmental silos were hindering the performance of the business. “It was pretty ugly,” confirms Doug. “We recognised that to unlock the full potential of the business, we had to start working as one team. Dropbox Business is helping us do exactly that.”

As a testament to how the new platform is facilitating the business and improving communication amongst the shared services of the firm, Elizabeth Mackison, Graphic Designer at ADCO, explains it best. “Our team is, by nature, incredibly collaborative. On any one bid, I’m working with up to 10 different people. With Dropbox Business, we can easily share documents with the whole team.

“We can see what people are working on, we have a greater level of security and visibility over workflows,” she continues. “Dropbox Business has made our whole team work faster, and we’re able to work with much more flexibility than before. It’s made a huge difference.”

Securely growing and scaling the business

“One of the bigger challenges of our previous infrastructure was the lack of national visibility,” says Doug. “We couldn’t say with any great degree of certainty how we were performing on certain projects or how far along in the process we were. This uncertainty was hindering growth.”

Now, with transparency into project performance, ADCO can successfully plan for the future. Budgets, processes, and provisions are easily-managed, and the flexibility of the platform is making it easy to scale.

“Due to the age of our servers, there were some issues raised during a security audit,” says Doug. “But, being ISO 27001 compliant and having the ability to quickly on-board and off-board users, means Dropbox has greatly improved security for us.”