Coffey CIO resets path to stability

One of Coffey's next IT-centric projects is the establishment of a central IT service desk.

"At the moment we've got pockets of service desks in strategic locations around the world," Talbot says.

The company plans to consolidate those existing operations into a single, global service desk this quarter. The desk will operate out of facilities in Manila and Sydney.

Manila will run three shifts a day and act as a central point for IT support.

Talbot says the company is "at the pointy end" of a decision on the technology platform that will underpin the global service desk.

He declined to reveal who is in the running for the project but says the system will be "cloud-based" due to the global nature of Coffey's business.

Lync upgrade

Also scheduled is a software upgrade to Coffey's unified communications platform, Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS).

OCS use at Coffey is "extremely high" according to Talbot, and the next version of Microsoft's system, Lync, is expected to bring more benefits.

"The Lync product is the next step change in that technology space and it makes perfect sense for us to embrace that," Talbot says.

"The beauty is bottom line dollar savings are significant in our space. The ability to integrate voice and data [and]... to remove legacy environments reduces our costs."

Talbot says a broad range of "aspirations and ideas" have been raised internally for greater use of Lync, including the potential use compatible clients for smartphone devices.

Long-term strategy

One of the major changes to the CIO role at Coffey is responsibility to oversee software developers that have previously been siloed along particular service lines, such as mining in Western Australia.

Under a revised corporate structure, they will remain embedded in their service lines - close to the end-users they support - but will also be included in a 'virtual' team under Talbot's remit.

One of Talbot's aspirations is to surface these (mostly geospatial) tools for use across Coffey's global business.

"We're looking to try and leverage them across the group," he says.

"[We want to] bring them together and really using them as a competitive differentiator.

"In terms of bringing this together it should be in an IT realm and that is, we [as IT] broker and bring together the different service lines and then create value by sharing the technology capability across those service lines."

Bringing those tools to the global business will take some time, Talbot concedes.

"It's going to be quite a journey but certainly that's in front of me as an objective."