Involvement of Technology in Construction Arena

What are some of the trends and challenges in the construction space and how is your company moving forward catering to them?

The construction industry is behind the times. It is one of the slow industries to embrace and adopt technologies as it moves forward. A recent study ranked construction industry to be second last, with agriculture holding the last position as an industry that is geared up for disruption. Actually, there is no disruption in the construction industry. One of the challenges the industry faces is, understanding that it is typically a low margin business and technology needs to add value on day one. The value added should be worth it, by assisting us in performing our core job and product. Sometimes decisions are made where investment is not done due to delayed return on investment. Besides that, the industry faces the challenge that the technology companies tend to not focus on the actual work side of construction. As there are pieces of construction, finance, legal, accounting and human resources common across all businesses, the construction industry looks for solutions in these areas and partnering with key and market leaders. In order to be a market leader in technology in the construction zone, the IT leadership and companies have to figure out what construction industry means to their business and work focusing on those areas. If a new company wants to set its footprint on innovating with technology in a bank, it will have a ton of companies already paved the path in how banks can utilize technology and digitize their business. Due to the non-existence of such companies with expertise in the construction industry and non willingness of top leaders in technology to invest in helping construction companies figure out to pave their path, we have to do it ourselves. Even Gartner’s global visualization tool doesn’t see construction as a vertical to spend time on and top leaders in technology do not invest in helping construction companies and figure that out.

Shifting to the benefits in the construction industry, I feel the opportunities are all ours. We have the ability to move forward and the liberty for experimentation in a marketplace that is completely untested and untried. This forms an exciting journey for a CIO like me who wants to make a difference in the industry as it turns into a possibility.

Granite is moving forward by focusing on setting a technology strategy which is our differentiator. The strategy revolves around understanding the pieces of our business where technology can help. We are looking at it both from a company as well as operational perspective. The strategy is not just something on our back end but that could be a potential game changer by creating strategic advantage for greater profit inflow for us.

What is the checklist that you follow to identify the best suitable partner?

For us, in Granite construction it is not about the partner but the problem we are trying to solve. So, when we think about solution providers, we get back to our strategic plan and think about solutions. While choosing a partner, we foresee our roadmap and analyze the problems. For instance, we are a year to our five year data strategy which focuses on capitalizing data. We want to take this data strategy move beyond just operational reporting and move forward into predictive analytics and transform the organization into a database decision making organization. This movement can aid us in safety and execution and operational excellence in executing these projects.

In order to execute the data strategy, we need to expose the data to start building real time mobile dashboards and operational safety dashboards. So we engaged with Microsoft and power BI platform to expose that data and with Dell Boomi as a middleware to provide us with the required movement and integrations to quickly create innovations with our platforms and systems. Ultimately we find the best in class providers of solutions for the problems we focus on.

Are there any new initiatives and technology enablement you would like to add for the recent projects pertaining to IT or technology adoption?

The implementation of the data strategy and platforms is already seeing success. It enabled us to partner with some of our key customers, for example, the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT). We quickly created an E ticketing solution beneficial for both UDOT and us in terms of efficiency in time and cost and increased safety. Also, we are currently in the process of partnering with another strategic initiative around trucking. With this initiative, we will be able to share data, with our service providers in a fast and efficient manner like never before and set a multiyear strategy providing new capabilities to Granite. Among the game changing initiatives that we are on right now, the first is how we can connect and interact with not only internal systems but also external systems for which the positive results are already being seen.

What according to you needs to change in the construction space to bring about a technology make over?

The factor that can drive change is uniting as a construction industry to demand the technology providers to start paying attention to us. This is a multi trillion dollar industry in terms of revenue spent every year and open for opportunities in technology to help the industry. In order to gain traction of the providers we have to exhibit the presence of the opportunity and willingness to work with technology partners. For instance, some of my peers in the construction industry have partnered with Microsoft and IOT developers and created creative and innovative solutions that are game changers for that company. So, the larger construction companies have to band together and speak with a single voice to drive more interest from the technology providers to partner with us and continue to drive technology in this business segment.