MES IT Leader Spotlight: Daniel Giurgiuman, Director Of Technology And Vendor Management
MES IT Leader Spotlight is a series featuring midmarket IT leaders – their backstory, their biggest successes and challenges, their day-to-day roles, and even advice for their peers. In this edition, the spotlight is on Daniel Giurgiuman, director of technology and vendor management, at Talisen Construction Corp.
This MES IT Leader spotlight focuses on Daniel Giurgiuman, director of technology and vendor management, at Talisen Construction, a New York-based construction firm.
In this interview, Giurgiuman shares his journey from engineer to IT leader, the biggest tech challenges for those in the construction industry, and his thoughts on AI’s impact in his industry.
Can you share a bit about your background?
I graduated from NYU [New York University] with an engineering background in mechanical engineering ... I really wanted to stay in New York, so I just started looking at different industries. Came across Talisen Construction, been here ever since, going almost a decade now.
I found Talisen, got in with an entry-level role. Initially, I was more on the estimating side of things ... that was my track for about the first two years. Became an assistant project manager.
Construction saw a huge boom in software as a service, or just software in general ... It's been a big boom ... we went from nobody using anything like building information modeling or virtual reality or AI camera systems or just project management software to seeing a huge increase in popularity of existing products [like] Autodesk and Procore.
I jumped in on IT to help, and that kind of shifted me from the project management track in construction towards more of the business side of things.
I took on managing all the IT overhead: our managed services, service providers, VOIP, our email systems — whether it was hosted Exchange, then 365 — porting [our] VOIP and [dealing with] third-party VARs [Value Added Resellers].
What are some of the tech challenges unique to the construction industry?
When I first assumed the role, everybody had the local server, and the superintendents would try to connect with a VPN. It worked, but it was a little bit of a mess, it was just a lot of IT overhead. Throughout the years, you've seen a lot of cloud-based systems starting to become much more popular.
We're growing more and more — superintendents and lots of data. It's like five terabytes of data, doing the hard drives and RAID and making sure all the stuff is secure. And [then it was] let's go. Let's move to the cloud. Let's blow this stuff up.
There's some old construction tech that we still have to use because it's really good, even though it is a little bit old, and that lives in the closet still. But ... then we took all our file share stuff, and we put it into a platform called Egnyte, which is doing a lot.
Shout out to Egnyte, in terms of making it so easy on IT pros, like when it comes to data protection, archival policies, data retention policies, so much easier than other products out there, let alone doing it yourself.
We still have a VPN, but it's for a very specific, tailored subset of users.
Many of the IT leaders we speak with are still running a hybrid cloud/on-premise IT infrastructure. Is that the case with your IT operations?
The only thing we have on premise is our accounting software that's specific to construction called Sage100 Contractor. Very good software; has everything we need at the right price point, it just does not make sense to swap it out for cloud software just yet.
We had everything pretty well set up before, with virtualization and cybersecurity. But everybody else is pretty much full cloud at this point.
Do you see AI playing a significant role in tech within the construction industry?
I mean, it’s going to be everywhere, right?
It’s helped me a lot — whether it's development or just learning stuff. So yes, it's a big thing. It's hugely hyped and talked about in the construction industry. So you'll see products like Togal AI, that was one of the first that I saw in construction. You have the estimating side of things where you do your takeoffs and measuring, square footages, counts, all sorts of different things on the construction drawing. So that's one area where we're seeing a lot of innovation, a lot of different companies that provide that type of software, whether it's standalone or part of a greater system, it’ll just automatically scan the drawings for you and help give you square footages and linear footages, or auto counting things for you, like show a symbol for a lighting fixture and it just counts all those symbols.
Different platforms are building out more intelligent information retrieval. So instead of searching for just keywords and getting your hits, it'll look through your documents and your folders and files and give you more written out responses for what you're looking for.
I've integrated AI into some of the software that we've built out. I've connected OpenAI's GPT to multiple points in our app. We have a homegrown subcontract application that handles workflow for our company, handles generating drafts, uploading files, and [you can] copy and paste a whole Excel sheet of quantitative takeoffs from a construction drawing, throw them in there, and then AI will take care of the rest and generate a nice, neat scope of work for [those] contract, subcontract documents.
What are you most proud of in your tech career?
I’m most proud of the software engineering stuff. It's kind of cool starting from zero, and then basically building out an entire development pipeline with a few others.
[Also having things] properly documented ... using legitimate software of engineering practices.
If I just leave and get hit by the proverbial bus, as they say, my IT support guy can just jump in there with little to no software experience, just knowing where things are. Here's your GitHub repository. Here's the integration, here's the documentation for what these files do. Sometimes people go a little too crazy on documentation, because it's like, listen, no matter how much documentation I'm going to write, I can’t teach somebody to code through documentation, (although now probably with GPT and other AI tools maybe you can) but the whole premise is that if the proverbial bus [hits me] Dan, anybody who has a little bit of prowess can jump in and know where things are and how to fix things or redevelop things, or whatever the need may be.