Skanska's Chief Change Agent

Christopher Stockley, Skanska's senior VP and CIO, likes a challenge. His career in IT began more than a decade ago at ExecuTrain, a national training firm, but he soon jumped into construction. His first position in the industry was at a regional construction-management company in Birmingham, Ala. At the time, he recalls, there was little technology adoption in the field. "I was their first real technology employee, basically their first CIO," he says.

It wasn't long before Stockley saw how technology, especially collaborative tools, could help bring efficiencies to construction. A startup, called Constructware, had begun developing a Web-based tool for project and collaboration management, and Stockley, whose employer was a Constructware customer, joined the burgeoning software vendor.

Another Constructware customer was Skanska USA Building Inc., and in 2002, Stockley took a job there. Skanska was primarily a holding company for 20 construction firms, but that year, it began consolidating.

"I was actually brought in to help consolidate $4.5 [billion] to $5 billion worth of construction companies into a single company," he says. "It was the opportunity to build this huge infrastructure from scratch and to really transform it with efficiency that attracted me to Skanska." That's precisely why Stockley is proud of Skanska's growing wireless initiative. "Success on a small scale leads to just amazing things on a large scale," he says. Sure, it's challenging, but that's where Stockley likes to live. "I really enjoy helping to transform," he says, "and I like being a change agent for companies."

Illustration By Paul Watson

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