The feedback we're getting from users is every indication that ground-up access to digital tools designed for fieldwork is not only hugely needed but has been long overdue. We think this is the culmination of several factors, including the digital journey that remote working forced many of us into, breaking down some perceived barriers and speeding up adoption. Simultaneously, we are seeing a significant number of people we might term 'digital natives' growing into senior roles across the sector. This will undoubtedly help shape a more digital future in the industry.
More important is recognising how far the technology has come. For so many years, the tools available to organisations operating in the built environment – from contractors to utility providers, developers to infrastructure bodies – were too costly, too difficult to scale across projects, or too focused (often exclusively) on office-based teams and not those on the ground doing the works.
Until recently, we were all trailing along, waiting for a tipping point of economic and legislative pressure to push digitisation to the front of every organisation operating in the built environment, not just the small, select group of Tier 1 contractors with the time and resources to implement large-scale digital solutions. That tipping point has certainly arrived. Putting the right digital tools in the hands of previously unserved site teams will allow organisations to smoothly align with everything from OpenBIM to the Building Safety Act - essential for survival and outperforming competition in the coming years.
We have been missing democratising access to digital tools. Empowering site teams from organisations of all sizes to take ownership and control of project data is a critical moment promising real change in how the sector captures, retains, manages, and defends data in construction. Today, as always, the market is stimulating digitisation, and data remains at the heart of that journey, answering the two critical pressures of the economy and legislative environment. Commercial defensibility and record-keeping are the two sides of the digital coin that most interest our client coupled with 'Bottom-up BIM' as we call it, is the watershed moment we've been waiting for.
