ALLEN ANDERSON, C.W. Driver Contractors,: I joined Driver after a three-month period where I did a systems audit for them. I suggested that the position be created and called CIO. I'm not a part of the executive team, but I do report to the president. His understanding of where he is going in terms of IT, is left to me. As some of you have mentioned, it's important to have that business knowledge. I came up through construction, and being able to use analogies that everyone can understand in terms they use every day, I think has really helped significantly.

VIC GULAS, MWH Global: I'm a lifer at MWH -- 23 years. I had the opportunity to work globally in the organization. Our CEO, gave me basically the footprint of what I needed to do. He wants to be a global leader in our core areas and deliver products anywhere in the world. That really allows us, from a knowledge management framework, to begin laying some groundwork. To be at the senior management table -- and I report directly to -- is part of the business; it's essential to the business.

PATRICK THOMPSON, The Shaw Group Inc.: I report to the CEO, CFO, COO and the operating presidents. There are three large pillars in the Shaw Group that comprise the executive committee. I was hired to integrate the business because Shaw acquired these large organizations, and I work with all the different departments to carry out that mission.

CHRIS STOCKLEY, Skanska USA Building Co.: Skanska found itself owning a series of well-run companies with independent or separate IT initiatives. And as part of its consolidation of those resources, they felt it was important to have somebody at the helm to help guide it along its way. Interestingly, the consolidation of the company started with IT. The role was primarily an integration type role and is now becoming much more of a business function role. If you go around the room, we were all brought in to fix some problem and ultimately the problem led to opportunities for us to fix more problems. That's what most of us do.

GEIR RAMLETH, Bechtel Group Inc.: Technology in itself isn't really a boardroom activity. I'm not a member of the board, but it is a senior position within the company. The company doesn't really thrive on technology, even though it uses it every day. It is frankly very often looked upon as a necessary evil, rather than actually a driver. My biggest challenge has been to really get the costs under control so that I don't have my other senior manager saying, "I don't know what you do, but it costs too much." The real challenge we have, being a company with a portfolio of business units, is really how you drive out a common service level to an acceptable cost structure, at the same time having enough agility to be able to serve these various business units that have very volatile business cycles, and very short ones. That's where we are focusing at the moment.

JUDY SCHRIENER, construction.com: Is your focus more on your processes or on technology, or on helping your company be competitive through the advantages you can bring with technology, or on helping people with change management?

ANDERSON: When I joined Driver, the infrastructure wasn't there, so I spent the last three years really sort of building infrastructure and understanding. It sort of evolved from plugging in wires to making sure that all of that freeway infrastructure is in place, to now we can drive fast on that freeway. Now we can help people to understand that there is a common place that you look for things, there are not five or six different databases, there are not 30 spreadsheets for each project manager to turn in for his weekly or monthly report.

PUGLISI: I view this as less of a technology role and more of a business role. Part of the challenge is to rise above suboptimization and the myopic view that companies take regarding decisions that are made because they may be the best thing for that particular company. But if you step back and look at activities in the aggregate, there certainly are economies of scale or efficiencies to be gained by centralizing, standardizing and consolidating, in many instances. So we try to do that as much as possible, always keeping in mind that we would never want to lose or even compromise the entrepreneurial spirit and the connectivity to the local marketplace that the companies have.

RUBIN: So many people have come in to be integrators or watch the spending. How do you balance that with IT as an entrepreneurial area now in terms of trying to drive a new product line, a profit center?

PUGLISI: At first the reaction of the chief financial officer at one of our major companies was, "Get lost; we are perfectly happy with our mail system." Two years later, this individual quite literally put his arm around my shoulders and asked, "What else can you do for us?" You want to take away some of the pain. They don't make any money when they are working on fixing their mail system.

WOLGEMUTH: The problem is that while you want to feed the entrepreneurial spirit, you get the sense that you're feeding the black hole. What we need to be able to say is, we want to spent more money here and less here and have that make a difference, instead of throwing money into something that's way too broadly defined to actually impact the business.