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David Evans and Associates Inc.
Revenue: $100 million
Tech Exec: John W. O'Brien, Director of Information Services
Business Colleague: William H. Amadon, CFO
Working Together: One year
IT/Business Challenge: Managing 15% annual growth while switching from a Novell network operating system to Microsoft
Upshot: Close alignment of IT and business helps the company stay true to its values.
Portland, Ore., is a city celebrated for its urban planning; the major metropolis has risen alongside the Willamette River within sight of the snow-capped Cascade Mountains, yet it hasn't swallowed the countryside with pell-mell sprawl. So it seems fitting that the headquarters of David Evans and Associates Inc. (DEA) stands alongside the river, overlooking both a waterfront industrial area and Mount Hood.
Founded in 1976 as a two-person land development firm, DEA has grown into a nationally recognized consulting engineering company with 900 employees (22 in IT) and 18 offices in five states. The employee-owned firm combines the talents of architects, engineers, planners and surveyors to tackle everything from commuter light rail to wetlands restoration projects. As the company has attained success, it has confronted the challenge of managing growth while preserving its values. According to the mission statement of DEA, the company's core goal is to improve quality of life while demonstrating stewardship of constructed and natural environments. In practice, this means hiring enough skilled employees to keep up with growth and who also fit with company culture.
On the technical side, the company is switching its network operating system from Novell to Microsoft, which will require creating an Active Directory (AD) structure separate from the NetWare infrastructure, copying existing files and databases to the AD environment, testing and porting the workstations to the new system, and then removing the NetWare environment after a six-month overlap to ensure that nothing gets lost in the migration.
John W. O'Brien, director of information services, and CFO William H. Amadon recently discussed how they tackle those problems.
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