STOCKLEY: We found that some very similar acquisitions leave organizations cultureless. They don't intend to, but all organizations have to, any time there is that much change, re-sort themselves. I think the systems do play an amazing role in giving the organization a way. If nothing else, I don't think it gives them culture, it gives them a way to communicate and a way to talk. I think ultimately people have to re-establish culture. I don't think systems or technology can.

RAMLETH: We are not really doing a lot of mergers on a corporation level, but we do
the equivalent all the time. A great portion of our projects are joint ventures, and when you have a joint venture, it is really a temporary merger of a temporary enterprise. We are all in an industry that is extremely competitive. We have all profit margins that are down there, competing with the grocery stores, and we cannot allow the cost of too much democracy into the IT side of it. There are other things that drive our businesses. We are parts of it, but we are not the key driver. Therefore, we should be a risk avoider and not a risk attractor to these projects.

WOLGEMUTH: To a large degree, the tailoring of the "what" has gone away because it is expensive, but the delivery of the "how" is really up to us, and that's part of where you blend process along with the technology, because technology no longer is sort of the ultimate deliverable. It's the "how" that gets us there, that tells the organization about the culture.

GULAS: I just find the discussion about culture really fascinating. I don't see IT driving much culture. I think it drives processes and discipline. When we talk about culture and people working together, we talk about it in terms of knowledge transfer. How do you transfer the right knowledge so it can be applied to the client at the local level? IT helps in the collaboration, but it doesn't change the culture.

BROGAN: To take that one step further, how about collaborating temporarily with
other companies? This is a constant challenge. Here comes a new project; here come 20 consultants, maybe 30; here comes 15 different versions of Microstation, AutoCAD, Revit, CAD software and again very disparate data sets and mentalities. How do you bring all of those together?

KERSHAW: That's where we look to professional societies like the AIA and the ASCE, to establish standards that we can all subscribe to.
RUBIN: How do you be more collaborative with each other and clients when there
is this whole push for security?

RAMLETH: Security is an intrusion and what comes from the external of that has some form of evil flavor around it. And as to the security around privacy and identity management, when you go into these temporary enterprises, you have to understand what is private to each of those parties. I have a few thousand people sitting on my network that are not our employees. Many of them are actually employees of my competitors. You talk about being nervous about security. I think we have good system, but one little blip there and I'm the goalie again. I think we as an industry have to really take on security on the broadest basis, really as a group.

STOCKLEY: Security and collaboration have no correlation. I think collaboration is a funding issue.

THOMPSON: It's funny you sat me at this table with these two (Ramleth and Stockley). They procure our services on the far end and we also use Skanska as a pretty major subcontractor, and we do collaborative technology with both of them. There is a trust factor that has to go into these relationships when you're dealing with security. At the end of the day, it is about trust and a lot of times you get trust through contractual means.

RUBIN: You work for different owners, you may have different IT requirements that you have to deal with. Owners may be putting other security requirements on you. How much is that changing; is it getting tougher to deal with these days?

STOCKLEY: Today there are more tools. I don't know whether that makes it easier or not.

PUGLISI: It's also an order of magnitude, more attacks, an increase in the sophisticated type. I don't know that the owners are driving us, or the industry is necessarily driving us, but certainly legislation is driving us. With Sarbanes-Oxley holding us accountable for the integrity of the data coming from systems, the spotlight is now shining on the integrity of the security around those systems. Certainly, that's the one that has landed on my doorstep.

AUTHELET: From our standpoint, it would be easy to lock down the entire environment. We could at any time decide that we are going to decide on every single person that is going to hit your mail. We are going to get rid of this whole thing. No filtering. You are going to decide who can get it in. No one in the world can get in unless they have your ID. One of these days, folks, we are going to do that.

ANDERSON: We are seriously talking about that right now. We are talking now about locking down the entire environment and up to this point, we have been fairly lenient. It's just an avalanche of spam, people hitting our networks. We may create a list of people that you can only receive e-mail from. It is your address book basically, and Web sites, you can only go to a certain number of Web sites. Obviously, we have security in all sorts of other ways.