Building firm pushes services onto the web

Taylor Woodrow will tailor communications to a mobile workforce

Construction giant Taylor Woodrow has transferred its communications infrastructure onto the web-based Google Apps platform.

Google will host email, documents, a calendar function, a web site design tool and a chat application.

The service is paid for at a rate of $50 (£25) per user, per year with 25 GB of storage per person.

Google has also provided Taylor Woodrow with an internal search function, allowing employees to search silos of information on the intranet in the same way as the internet.

The move means the construction company will tailor its communications to an increasingly mobile and diffuse workforce of 1,800 staff, with expected savings of about £1m per year, said Rob Ramsay, Taylor Woodrow’s director of IT. “The system gives us better connection to mobile and home workers who can access these functions from anywhere,” he said.

Taylor Woodrow has 200 staff working in mobile vans, an employee base distributed over 60 different locations and almost 100 staff based in client’s offices, all needing secure access to communication functions.

Pushing services “into the cloud” also enables the firm’s workers to collaborate more effectively on projects by sharing documents and information online from anywhere through the Google Docs and Google Sites products.

Ramsay said the consumerisation of business IT was a process the company embraced.

“The work-life boundaries are becoming blurred by mobile and home working, and companies will increasingly have to embrace this change,” he said.

One Google Site was used to train more than 1,000 users prior to going live, mitigating the risk of transferring services.

Dale Vile, analyst with Freeform Dynamics, said that big organisations are more likely to go for cloud-based services. “Larger organisations that have a service-delivery view of their IT are more inclined to look at these options,” he said.