Overcoming the inertia: building data maturity in construction projects with iHawk

Over the last decade, data has become the lifeblood of almost every global industry. Consequently improving data maturity has become a primary strategic imperative of many organizations. Companies that are successfully building their data maturity are gaining a significant edge over less data-mature organizations.

Construction projects can frequently run into the hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars to design, construct and handover, and the same again to operate and maintain the asset once operational. Despite this, the construction industry still lags well behind other industries such as manufacturing, finance and telecoms, in terms of data maturity.

What is asset data maturity and why is it important?

Asset data maturity describes how effectively an organization can create, manage and use data to make accurate and timely decisions about its assets and projects. With wide-reaching impacts across an organization, data maturity plays a critical role in capacity planning, efficiency and project resilience. In short, it gives companies strategic control over their entire operation, and is a key indicator of long-term success.

In construction, poor data maturity can have wide-ranging and costly implications, such as:

• Missing install records can lead to expensive rework
• Out of date asset registries lead to duplicate equipment purchases
• Contractor disputes become protracted due to a lack of an auditable data trail
• Handovers are slow and ineffective due to dispersed and incomplete information
• Real estate management requires on site visits, slowing down decision-making

Beyond the scale of individual projects, the implications of poor data maturity across the construction sector and wider built asset industry are substantial. As the single highest consumer of energy, and contributor to greenhouse gas emissions globally, an uptick in data maturity of the built asset industry would deliver a major positive impact on global productivity and sustainability.

Why data maturity remains a challenge in construction

Given the massive potential of addressing organizational data maturity, why is it that we have seen comparatively less progress in construction compared to other sectors?

Compared to other industries, the nature of construction means there is often considerable internal inertia that must be overcome:

• Cross-team, cross-discipline and cross-phase buy in can present a major hurdle
• Being a project-based industry means a lack of continuity, as partners, teams, contractors and locations change from one project to the next.
• Traditional or conservative company cultures can provide resistance to changing approaches
• A greater emphasis on defining final product than on full asset life cycle planning leads to informal processes and inconsistencies in process execution
• Siloed data pools and separate systems lead to complicated workflows, and resistance to any additional perceived complexity from new solutions
• Inherent internal bias against digital solutions based on cumbersome and heavy historic deployments
• Training teams on new systems can be perceived as a prohibitive expense

How does iHawk overcome these challenges?

iHawk provides seamless data democratization across teams, disciplines, geographies and project phases, in one simple platform. It acts as a single source of truth for projects, ensuring that every meeting, every conversation and every stakeholder is working from the same page, with the same data.

Rather than displacing existing solutions, iHawk’s open-API infrastructure means it pulls together data streams from across a project’s engineering stack, allowing for powerful tools such as equipment tracking, digital twins, schematics, cross-platform searches and comprehensive asset registries.

As a web-based platform, deployment of iHawk is fast, lightweight and project wide, and user onboarding is as simple as a SSO login. Better still, iHawk is intuitive and easy to use, meaning little to no training costs, so teams can focus on doing their job, based on the best data, without gaps or bottlenecks.

iHawk delivers the power of advanced data maturity, with none of the headaches of heavy solution deployment, and gives asset and project managers peace of mind, knowing that every stakeholder has the most up to date data they need, right at their fingertips. 

With iHawk, we’re helping to turn the tide on data maturity in the construction sector, as major players such as Shell and Bechtel realize the full power and potential of digitization, and commit more fully to data centricity.

To find out more about how iHawk can boost your organization’s data maturity, visit our Aerial Survey page, or contact our team.