Why the construction industry needs to break down its data siloes

No mat­ter whether your com­pa­ny offers jan­i­to­r­i­al ser­vices or sells soft­ware, when you set up a busi­ness you’re bound to have your fin­gers in most pies. You’ve got to find cus­tomers. You’ve got to mar­ket the busi­ness. And you’ve got to deliv­er your ser­vice or prod­uct.

You may have to set up a sup­ply chain, as well as send invoic­es, chase pay­ments and many oth­er tasks. Even­tu­al­ly, if you do all of these things suc­cess­ful­ly, the busi­ness will start to grow. Soon enough it will con­sist of two peo­ple, then five, then 10, then 100. And as this hap­pens, all the dif­fer­ent func­tions that used to be under your con­trol are dif­fused. 

This leads to increas­ing spe­cial­i­sa­tion and the use of mul­ti­ple soft­ware sys­tems. All the data that used to be con­tained in one area of the busi­ness falls into dif­fer­ent hands. But at some point, if the busi­ness is to con­tin­ue mov­ing for­ward, this data — and the process­es it sup­ports — needs to be uni­fied so that your sys­tems and peo­ple can work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly. 

Why is this impor­tant? Because when your sys­tems and peo­ple are speak­ing the same lan­guage, you can draw well-informed con­clu­sions from your data and take mean­ing­ful actions. At a basic lev­el, this is what inter­op­er­abil­i­ty offers any busi­ness. But if you’re part of the con­struc­tion or engi­neer­ing sec­tor, it’s par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant. 

Every sin­gle project, from a res­i­den­tial house to a sky­scraper, involves a huge num­ber of com­pa­nies. There are con­trac­tors, sub-con­trac­tors, sole traders, mate­r­i­al sup­pli­ers, archi­tects, engi­neers, plan­ning con­sul­tants — the list goes on. All of them face their own set of chal­lenges. But some­how, by hook or by crook, you need to bring them togeth­er to deliv­er the project. 

With­out inter­op­er­abil­i­ty and a sin­gle ver­sion of the truth, you can eas­i­ly end up with peo­ple at cross pur­pos­es, which leads to argu­ments and wast­ed time. How­ev­er, many soft­ware ven­dors still believe it’s in their best inter­ests to lock in as much of the data cap­tured from cus­tomers as pos­si­ble. In my view, this is short­sight­ed. Obvi­ous­ly, it’s not desir­able for these com­pa­nies’ cus­tomers. But it’s also not desir­able for the con­struc­tion indus­try as a whole. 

When infor­ma­tion is trapped in silos, it makes that sin­gle source of truth almost impos­si­ble to achieve – and with­out this, mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion and delays are all but inevitable. It also feeds the lit­i­ga­tion that plagues the con­struc­tion indus­try because it makes it dif­fi­cult to estab­lish what was agreed with whom and when; whether this agree­ment was abid­ed by; and what that means in terms of change orders and con­tract vari­a­tions.

By facil­i­tat­ing the free flow of infor­ma­tion, busi­ness­es can enable the inter­op­er­abil­i­ty of peo­ple and process­es, which address­es many of the issues men­tioned above. Open­ing up your data in this way can be a scary step to take. But it’s the right step to take.

Peo­ple are the most impor­tant part of the suc­cess of any soft­ware solu­tion. If you cul­ti­vate a sense of trans­paren­cy and safe­ty with­in an organ­i­sa­tion, a sense that every­one’s inter­ests are aligned and that there are shared goals and visions, this ties peo­ple togeth­er. And if peo­ple feel bond­ed to one anoth­er and the val­ues of the organ­i­sa­tion, they feel empow­ered to col­late and share the data that will ben­e­fit oth­er stake­hold­ers in a project.

This is all part and par­cel of a long-term part­ner­ing approach to con­struc­tion projects, which ulti­mate­ly leads to high­er qual­i­ty prod­ucts. And no mat­ter what tech­nolo­gies come along in future, the open approach to data will ensure that inter­op­er­abil­i­ty remains at the heart of them.