Wayne Newitts is up to his ears in information, surrounded by data—his, his staff’s, his clients’. E-mails, text messages, meeting notes, white board jottings. All of it related to some aspect of what he does for a living, which is market software for Dexter + Chaney. What worries him is that he will lose some important gigabyte swimming around in the weeds, file it in the wrong place, delete it, or send it to someone he shouldn’t and not to someone who’s likely to fall off the cliff without it.
What the experts call “unstructured data,” the stuff that clutters our e-mail boxes and clogs are cell phones, is one of today’s major business challenges—not because the stuff is superfluous and gets in the way (think junk mail, etc.), but because we need it to do our jobs and far too often can’t find it when it’s critical.
“We mostly think about structured data—all the data fields in a company’s business management software database, for example, because it’s information that has a context and is immediately relevant,” explains Newitts. “But these days this is a small fraction of what flies back and forth within an organization and between organizations.”
Text messages and e-mails that aren’t attached to any application or not stored anywhere other than in somebody’s inbox now account for 98% of the data businesses depend on, a result of the fact that just about everyone everywhere is equipped with a data-enabled mobile device. Just yesterday, project managers were dragging laptops into the field to keep track of their projects and communicate with the office. iPads that could handle full-scale applications (which six years ago we hadn’t even heard of) have been followed by cell phones and apps. Compounding the problem is that the data we’ve faced with organizing and managing come at us from sometimes unpredictable directions. Just like the iPad six years ago—who would have thought we’d be seeing drones flying over job sites to verify job completion. “There’s is no way that companies are capturing all this information,” says Newitts. “Let alone using it.
“We’ve been talking about collaboration in construction for probably 10 years, that we need to share information more effectively. We’ve developed fancy file and document-sharing systems with interfaces and tools layered on top. Microsoft SharePoint and Dropbox are great, but they only capture structured data, the forms you know you have to fill out—change orders, invoices, plans and specs, material lists, etc.
“We’ve talked for years about making sure that contractors captured this structured data—that they’re processing all their invoices single entry, with no errors, as quickly as possible, processing change orders before they fall through the cracks. But contractors and the vendors who serve them have to realize that the success or failure of a project is more and more contingent on this unstructured data flying around.”
The answer? Complicated, says Newitts.
Big companies have big data with its algorithms and progression analyses, but the rest of us are essentially left to our own devices. Training? Iffy, says Newitts. “You can tell your project managers and field technicians that every time they send a text message, they need to forward it here or there so it gets logged in. But people constantly forget. At Dexter + Chaney, we’ve learned as we’ve rolled out mobile apps that it’s hard to rely on standing operating procedural rules to get people to use their mobile devices the way you want them to. You have to build it into the software. The challenge is that the more flexibility and choice you put into a software program, the more difficult it becomes to use. And you know what happens when you find yourself frustrated by a piece of software. You’re going to say, ‘Forget it—I’m sorry my battery ran out.’”
Another difficulty in trying to bring order to unstructured data via standard business practices is that process procedures often end at the front door as project managers take over and implement their own management system of choice. This is where things really get hairy, says Newitts. “Think of the way work really gets done on any construction job—all the phone calls, e-mails, text messages, meetings after work, writing on napkins at the bar. All those things ultimately make a project happen. The closer you get to the field to where the work is getting done, the more data gets generated.” This means personnel have less time to notice, characterize, and catalog it.
The closest thing on the horizon to what the big guys have is what Newitts calls manual manipulation of unstructured data to give it categorization and context under the auspices of a particular job. “Essentially it’s a compromise between spraying communications out there and praying that everybody pays attention and nobody drops any balls—which is never going to happen—and trying to impose structure.”
Newitts estimates that software providers like Dexter + Chaney and ViewPoint are probably about a year into providing tools to take unstructured data and at a minimum, categorize where it belongs within a company’s structured business model. “That’s step one. Step two is to give it additional context, to connect the dots, so when you pull up a job, you’re able to see all the data that’s relevant: ‘This e-mail is associated with this, which is associated with this change order, which is needed to drive this submittal that engineering….’”
“Once that’s accomplished, the next step is software that is more intelligent and predictive, so if you see certain keywords—a GPS tag associated with an event—you’ll know it’s most likely associated with some other communications about this or that phase of a job. And this will all happen more atomically.”
Construction management software companies are not the only ones working on solutions. A company called Notevault allows project managers to speak their job-related notes and enter photos and videos into their mobile device to produce a daily log update that’s transcribed and sent to project stakeholders as well as being stored in the Cloud. GPS tagging locates where notes are taken, which helps establish a context for the written PDF report that’s generated from the project manager’s verbal notes. It’s a step in the right direction, but the light’s still at the far end of the tunnel.
In the meantime, as things evolve, contractors would be wise to develop a discriminatory sense when it comes to technology. Does your organization really need that new communications gadget just because it’s available? Do you really need to load five different apps on everyone’s mobile device? Just because you can spray data around, should you?
Does everybody need to be in on everything, and in real time? Probably not, but we do it because we can. And because it’s far easier than sitting down and taking time to sort out who should get what and why. It’s long been the challenge to get everyone on a job sitethe information they need and keep the office updated. This makes it hard to resist the opportunity to bring everyone in on everything. “Information overload,” we call it, as if we have no control. But we’re only overloaded when the information we’re fielding has nothing to do with what we’re doing and we can’t get our hands on the stuff we need.
