When Proactive Is Not Enough

Most IT teams call it a win when they stop reacting and start planning. Giannerini agrees that matters — but he does not think it is enough. His goal is predictive IT operations: a team that gets ahead of problems before they show up. That approach drives how his team works, talks to the business, and sets priorities.

Giannerini runs information and systems security at Baker Construction. Baker operates in more than 25 states with nearly 10,000 employees, over 900 job sites, and 80-plus offices. It is a large operation with tight margins. Every technology dollar has to earn its place. For Giannerini, predictive IT is how his team does that.

Turning Invisible Work Into Business Outcomes

One of the core challenges Giannerini names is that technology often succeeds invisibly. When networks run cleanly, when security holds, when cloud optimization quietly returns money to the business — none of it generates a ticket or a thank you. His response has been to make that work visible through deliberate storytelling to business leadership.

He has presented to internal teams on the full technology foot print Baker Construction manages: over 200 firewall instances, 400 million security observations in a ten-day window triaged down to 34 actionable alerts. He quantified a mobility services optimization initiative that reduced Verizon costs by $300,000 in a single year, with a three year projection of $1.3 million in savings returned directly to the business units that carry the bill.

“This is not IT money. The Verizon bill is allocated to the business units. So this is literally money back from an IT initiative to the business. They simply had no idea we were doing all of that behind the scenes.”

— Juliano Giannerini, Director of Information and Systems Security, Baker Construction

The Architecture Behind the Shift

Reaching a predictive operations posture required more than planning. When Giannerini joined Baker Construction, the team was fully reactive — constant unplanned work prevented any meaningful execution against a long-term roadmap. The first step was stopping the bleeding. That meant consolidating more than 20 internet service providers into a single internet service aggregator with 24/7 proactive monitoring, eliminating the recurring operational drain of calling individual carriers during every outage.

With that foundation in place, the team focused on cutting waste. That meant reducing cloud costs, streamlining mobile contracts, and making smarter architecture choices. Fewer vendors means fewer contracts, fewer skill gaps, and less administrative overhead.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

• The reactive-to-proactive-to-predictive maturity framework and what each stage requires in practice
• How to build a business case for IT investment using ROI, margin impact, and cost reduction language
• Why consolidating internet service providers was the base move that made everything else possible
• The risk of point solutions and how a broader technology view prevents long-term cost aggregation
• What two decades across oil and gas and construction taught one IT leader about efficiency as a survival discipline

Listen to the full episode to hear Juliano Giannerini explain how Baker Construction’s IT function moved from reactive firefighting to a predictive operation — and what it took to earn a genuine seat at the business table. Subscribe to Go Beyond the Connection on your preferred podcast platform for new episodes across the Digital Jobsite series and beyond.