Lithko Contracting
Year founded: 1992
Top executive: Rob Strobel, CEO
Website: lithko.com
Company description: Lithko Contracting is the nation’s second-largest concrete contractor with 17 locations across the United States.
Who are the team members being recognized? Ryan Hale, CIO, along with Nick Finney, Tommy George, Wes Holland, Greg Jones, Mike McDermott, Tyler Neeb, TJ Norris and Matt Rower.
What’s a challenge that your team helped resolve? My team has been focused on driving the digital transformation across Lithko Contracting – replacing manual, paper or excel-based processes that have driven the company for our 25-year history. Our initial focuses were the digitization of our time and quantity capturing process and our safety observation process – two processes that are the life blood of Lithko.
What was innovative about this approach? To deliver our digital transformation, we started with the end-user in mind. We went to see how they were performing their work, what pain points they were experiencing, and discussing how a more productive solution could aid them. From there, we found the technology that could solve this pain point. I am not sure this approach was necessarily innovative, but I do believe that far too often a new technology is identified and rolled out without necessarily having a glaring pain point that it is solving. This approach often yields a solution that is not readily adopted by the end-users or less effective.
How does your company recruit and retain tech talent? We don’t have a large internal IT department, but instead we rely on developing and maintaining third-party partnerships to provide a large amount of our IT support. For those that we do recruit and hire, retaining them is of top priority and starts making them feel like they are a valued contributor in a cohesive team environment that feels more like a family than a job. \
