GenieBelt’s Gari Nickson on a study that shows construction is ahead of other industries when it comes to information management – but there’s always room for improvement.
A construction company’s return on information – “how democratised its access is, how fast it moves, how quickly it can be updated and leveraged to generate value – will define that enterprise’s future” says a report commissioned by US-based online file-sharing services provider, box.com.
The report, The Information Economy: A study of Five Industries, describes a shift from an industrial to an information economy, in which information has become the “new currency of business”.
The report looked at the software, media and entertainment, construction, manufacturing, and financial services sectors. In each sector it compared various factors: decentralisation of information, mobility, frequency of collaboration, content creation, content consumption, and external collaboration. A total of 60 businesses, ranging from 100 to 1000 employees, were studied in each sector.
While there are some differences between the UK and US construction sectors (for a start: we are metric, they aren’t), we still deliver projects in broadly similar ways, and the report’s findings regarding construction businesses will make familiar reading to UK professionals. But the report’s particular value comes from benchmarking construction’s performance against that of other industries.
For instance, construction businesses are highly decentralised when it comes to information creation and dissemination. Projects are highly reliant on numerous individuals and teams within organisations: “Project plans and related documents touch multiple teams as information flows from offices to project sites,” says Box’s report, confirming ability to share project documents efficiently as a key factor affecting collaboration.
Industry scores
On external collaboration, it is also clear that construction companies are highly reliant on sharing work shared with outside parties. No other industry in the study comes close. Successful construction project delivery requires content to be shared with numerous external stakeholders.
Another key area where construction scores highly is mobility. Box’s Stephanie Hagio said: “We thought the software industry would be highest in terms of mobility, but we were floored when we saw the trends of construction.” The explanation was straightforward: “workers … may be in the field or factory with a smartphone or a tablet. Having the information where they are helps them be more productive.” This supports a 2013 US survey, by Constructech, which found 78% of general (ie: main) contractors now use a tablet on site, up from 26% in 2012.
What was particularly interesting to me was that not only did construction score highest on mobility, but IT scored the lowest. As a software and construction insider myself, this makes complete sense. Within construction, we are out on site actually using the software; in IT, we sit inside creating it for mobile use.
So, at different stages in the construction process, we can teach other industries a thing or two about managing information. We are adept at creating and managing information inside our businesses; we are expert at sharing this with external collaborators; and our mobile capability is ahead of many others. But we can’t be complacent.
Frequency of mobile content access
First, the industry’s performance on frequency of collaboration was just average. Working via online content platforms can help democratise and move information quicker, enabling greater productivity.
Second, Box’s findings are based on medium-large sized construction businesses, and the bulk of our industry’s output is reliant on small or medium-sized companies (SMEs). In the new ‘information economy’ they, too, will need to adopt collaborative tools if they are to remain competitive. As the report suggests, using “better information to make better, quicker decisions will only improve business performance.”
Some industry people seem to feel that because the industry’s methods have worked for centuries, they can’t be improved upon. I don’t share that view. Construction has shown itself to be an early adopter of some technologies (look how it took to the mobile telephone during the 1980s), but we, as an industry, have to move beyond paper-centric ways of working and become more information-centric.
At the high end, we are seeing this beginning to happen with building information modelling (BIM), but the vast majority of projects are still reliant on conventional information creation and distribution processes, and this will likely continue for some years. Businesses involved in these projects should be looking to expand their IT usage, and – given the current proliferation of online and mobile collaboration tools – they can increasingly do this at little or no cost to themselves. (At GenieBelt, we have put our money where our mouth is: we are offering the best app for building better. And it’s free, forever.)
Gari Nickson is a former chartered QS and now Chief Genie at GenieBelt: a collaboration app intended to make construction “better, easier and more fun”.
