By Tara Richards
 
Steve Ross, CIO of Thornton Tomasetti in New York City, lives and breathes technology. Though he began his career on the design side of the AEC industry, his interests soon drifted to the world of information technology during the PC boom of the mid-80s. But it’s the pairing of technology and business initiatives that really drives Ross. “I’ve always been fascinated more with business operations aspect of technology,” Ross says. “Being able to combine technology with business drivers kind of led me to the CIO role — it’s where I found my passion.”

And this passion is paramount to Thornton Tomasetti’s success. When Ross joined the company two years ago, his first task was monumental: overhaul the company’s base infrastructure to pave the way for international expansion. Now, with company goals of international growth and expansion in mind, Ross focuses on improving technology and internal systems that can help the firm’s 12 domestic and five international offices collaborate and share information more effectively. “We are improving our systems in our London office and restructuring the office in Shanghai and opening a new office in Mumbai,” says Ross, who is based in Manhattan, the company’s headquarters. “Each of these different geographies presents different challenges for everything from services to procurement to licensing. It brings a lot of challenges, but we like to be challenged.”

Ross doesn’t mind the difficulties he and his team face in uniting a large international company. “Some of the things I’m focusing on more specifically are our BIM and our collaboration — being able to use our distributed workforce and talent from around the globe and collaborating effectively,” he says. “You’ve got to find ways to creatively break down the process, break down the data, and put it into manageable components. There needs to be better tools; the size and scope of the projects we work on often overwhelm our traditional infrastructure.” Ross notes that he is beginning to see software and infrastructure solutions that can handle these challenges. “To this point, it’s really been about doing it ourselves,” he says. “That’s something I like to be involved in.”

That’s the kind of CIO Ross is. His job satisfaction is directly related to the number of opportunities he has to impact and improve a process, thus making business easier for his colleagues. “We have so many opportunities to improve and enhance a process to [help] the engineers and architects and scientists…to make their jobs easier every day. That’s probably the best part of it.” And though Ross can’t personally keep up with all new technologies and implement them at his firm alone (he relies on his “talented, great team” to help him with that), he says he gets immediate gratification from the work they do together. “We can almost immediately see a return on what we do,” he says. “When there is a business challenge, it’s often that someone will turn to me and say, ‘This doesn’t work,’ or, ‘What else can we do besides this?’ It gives us the opportunity to immediately try to find a way to make a process more effective for our organization.”

Ross loves his job, but it isn’t all easy. He says it is only now that AEC firms are beginning to realize that there is an important place for technology in their businesses — and that the CIO is the person they can count on to keep them on the cutting edge. “I think one of the biggest challenges [CIOs face] could be awareness of what a CIO is, what a CIO does, what their contribution to the organization is, and when they should be engaged in the conversations,” he says. “The challenge is to answer the question, ‘Why are you here?’”

For Thornton Tomasetti, the answer to that question seems simple: Steve Ross and his team are there to improve how the firm functions, enabling the team members to collaborate from the inside out.