How to Turn Big Data Into A Strategic Business Advantage

What Is Big Data?

• Sensors
• Drones
• Wearables
• Global positioning systems
• Email
• Transactions
• Financials
• Design plans
• Weather data

Leveraging Big Data to Your Advantage

When it comes to leveraging big data to your advantage, Reggie Arichabala, co-founder of startup Riskcast, says, “It’s critical that you begin with the right foundational data for the analytic problem at hand. Oftentimes, data builds upon itself, and so ensuring that you have the correct strategy for capturing that data, in the correct order, is critical to success.”

Using big data to gain insights about your organization presents an interesting array of challenges that include, but aren’t limited to:

1. It takes the right talent, tools, and processes. Big data presents unique challenges for the E&C industry, and many organizations are either unprepared for or overwhelmed by the magnitude of information. Understanding which data can be useful and how it translates into business intelligence, for example, requires strategic planning and a clear understanding of your organization’s overall goals and vision. Once you have a clear direction of what you want and need from your data, then you can begin to extract meaningful insights to help guide your organization. And while a data analytics plat-form can greatly improve business performance, those results won’t come overnight. By having a clear understanding of the time frame and rollout process, you can more easily manage expectations during this transition.
2. Collecting and analyzing it can be a challenging task, especially if you don’t know your end goal. Many firms struggle to understand how big data can be used to improve performance or processes. While getting the right tools may be as simple as buying a software program, finding the right people is a more difficult task. To successfully gain insights from your data, assemble a team that not only has a background working within the built environment and understands the life cycle of project work but also has strong research and analytical skills to best leverage your data to improve business performance. Companies that don’t invest in the right people often experience disappointing failures and are slow to realize a return on their investment. One new role to explore within the E&C industry is the “construction technologist.” This position combines industry knowledge with a background in research analytics to drive performance and generate strategic business insights.
3. Within the E&C industry, many data sources are heavily siloed or stored in disparate places. Recent research showed that 30% of companies are using applications that don’t integrate with one another.4 This happens when data is stored on different systems, including desktops, phones, tablets, servers, hard drives and in the cloud. Unstructured data can also be captured from materials such as blueprints, timecards, emails, and PDFs, leaving 49% of firms to transfer data between applications manually. A recent construction technology report indicated that over 83% of construction workers rate mobile capabilities, such as the use of phones and tablets, as important. This suggests that as technological capabilities advance in the E&C industry, we’ll continue to see greater implementation of various data sources from devices such as wearables, augmented or virtual reality, or new software applications.

Data as a Strategic Business Advantage

Developing a good data strategy helps you get the most out of your data by laying the necessary groundwork and putting all the pieces in place, ensuring that the information is both available and usable. Dustin Devan, CEO of Building Connected, explains, “With 10,000 projects a month going through BuildingConnected, we are amassing data about the construction market at an incredible rate. Our data intelligence gives us deep insight into developments in the construction market and economy. This helps inform product decisions and strategic vision for the company. Additionally, our quickly growing data set ensures we can build one-of-a-kind machine learning solutions that separate ourselves from the competition.”

Similarly, contractors and other stakeholders in the E&C industry should consider the value that their data can provide not only to better run their businesses but also to improve project outcomes. Information is held within your technology solutions; developing a plan for managing that data leads to harvesting that information and developing associated actions and initiatives. As you leverage data as a strategic advantage, consider the following steps:

1. Determine what it is you are trying to achieve. Articulate your data strategy goals and explain the envisioned future state. Take the time to determine what key performance indicators or metrics and insights you would like to have in order to meet business objectives.
2. Identify various information sources in the business and on projects. Sometimes these sources are within a company’s technology stack, and sometimes they are external sources. This may uncover limitations or challenges related to data ownership and intellectual property (IP). In such instances, be careful not to violate IP laws. One way to do this is to include a data sharing agreement in all your contracts.
3. After you identify the various information sources, assess data fidelity and data accuracy as well as consistency of data flow. In other words, you want to ensure that the data captured is the correct type of information and that it meets a stipulated level of accuracy. Consistency of data flow means that the frequency and size of data are significant enough to be part of your analytics.
4. Consider developing data protocols and adopting solutions to aggregate, restructure and securely store your data to create the proverbial “single source” of truth. This single source summarizes the most technically challenging aspects of your data strategy.
5. Continue by creating data integrations that allow unidirectional, bidirectional or omnidirectional data flow to feed into systems across the data stack.
6. Establish corporate governance and business rules for interacting with information systems and the data itself.
7. After all this, you have created a significant competitive advantage by reducing multiple instances of data entry (thus improving data accuracy and access to information that is more reliable and current than that of your competitors). Through intentional management of your information systems and data, you’ll be able to more easily pursue business intelligence tools and advanced technology solutions.
8. Lastly, accept that this is a living data model that requires ongoing nurturing to manage technical integrations and data management. The plan also requires continuous effort and adjustment to ensure that it keeps meeting your business’s needs.

Breaking Through the Barriers

Intimidating for many companies—and especially those that are just beginning to wake up to its value—big data can’t be ignored any longer. Cumulatively, we’re generating roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day—a number that’s on track to grow over the coming years. The organizations that take the time to gather the data, analyze it and turn it into actionable insights will gain a competitive advantage. The ones that bury their heads in the sand and hope it goes away will be quickly left behind.

Using the recommendations in this article, E&C companies can more effectively leverage their big data without having to make a big investment in labor, equipment or devices. Its use is becoming commonplace among organizations that want to outperform their peers and rise to the top in their industries. In most industries, existing competitors and new entrants alike will use the strategies resulting from the analyzed data to compete, innovate and capture value. Finally, big data helps E&C organizations ferret out new growth opportunities, leverage new resources and optimize processes in unprecedented ways.

For the complete white paper on big data, please see “Big Data = Big Questions for the Engineering and Construction Industry.”