It was a busy week for the British construction industry! Three major events took place last week in the UK: BILT Europe, MIPIM UK and Digital Construction Week.
Having this edition of BILT Europe hosted in Edinburgh felt like a nice touch brought to the European construction field. You see, the UK was among the first countries to benefit from the technology in construction due to the government’s BIM mandates, which led to the early adoption of BIM (Building Information Modelling) across the country.
This year’s main topic was centered around adopting the right mindset and embracing technology in construction, which I find more than interesting.
Here are some of my top highlights from BILT Europe and Digital Construction Week!
Become An Early Adopter of Technology If You Want to Stay on Top
Adopt digital solutions now. Some might argue that you already lost the start line for this trend, but I say that now it’s better than later, or, even worse, never.
It’s better to adopt technology in early stages and get used to it, rather than catching up with the entire market when you don’t have any alternatives left.
A very interesting insight I’ve learnt from one of the sessions is how to introduce digital solutions to your team. Ironically, you should implement digital solutions in those teams that are highly performant, with your highest skilled colleagues.
The reason behind this is that you’ll probably find in them the most early adopters, because they are not afraid of change.These teams are already doing their job excellent and a digital solution will only make them even better, and let them focus on what really matters.
Introducing a digital solution to a low performing team, might feel like scolding and usually people in these teams fear that technology can replace their job. Show your team that even the best employees need and use digital solutions and the rest will follow.
Humans Create, Machines Execute
One of my favorite topic surrounding technology is related to human creativity.
While we, as humans, can create the most extraordinary machines to help do our jobs more efficiently, there is one thing machines won’t be able to do better than us: imagination.
As software developers, we teach machines to do a lot of work for us, which is reducing dead-time allocated for repetitive, dull tasks. While machines and algorithms will execute everything we teach them to, we can’t teach them creativity.
I truly believe in technology giving back our time and freedom to create and I’m excited to be part of the industry that can support this vision.
Sustainability Is the Future
If most of the points discussed here were more generic, this one is strictly related to the construction field.
I’m very excited to see the constant growing trend of active buildings more and more present at AEC events.
For those of us that bring innovative digital solutions to the AEC industry, these are exciting times. It means we have a new challenge to brainstorm upon. How can we support active building with our software development abilities? What are the main concerns surrounding this trend and how we can bring reassuring solutions for them?
The field of active buildings is full of opportunities!
Changing Mindsets, Business Models and Improve Productivity
This is my role and my team’s goal at Fabrit Global; constantly finding and developing solutions to help our clients improve their productivity.
Although the market of software development is on the rise, there is still a lot of things to do. Businesses are still losing plenty of time on repetitive activities, constant catching up with the technology instead of being ahead of it, or even worse, thinking that the old processes will still be fine for the modern era.
We need to raise awareness about the need of automation faster and adapt our business models. Technology will bring significant impact in everyone’s business, but change is good and brings an excellent competitive advantage, and better employee satisfaction.
So this is a call to action for all my fellow friends in the AEC field: let’s show people how technology can help and teach them how to embrace it.
Conclusion: Better Decisions, Faster
The race to gain more time is on! We want real-time data, efficient communication for all parties involved in the construction process and last, but not least, we want sustainable buildings.
We want to use all of these to help us make better decisions, faster.
And probably one of the most important highlights is to stop fearing technology and embrace it. The digital revolution is here and we have to take advantage of it and let it do the boring tasks for us so we can start creating and brainstorming again.
