Why construction still hasn't cracked digital

21 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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1:15

In this talk, William Doyle MRICS reflects on the construction industry's progress toward digital transformation, noting that while adoption has increased, a critical gap remains in handling structured versus unstructured data. He contrasts the relatively straightforward management of QSH (Quality, Safety, Health) records—typically mutually exclusive and easy to file and retrieve—with the far more complex commercial record-keeping that integrates Work Breakdown Structures (WBS), Cost Breakdown Structures (CBS), standard methods of measurement, program activities, and cost component schedules. Doyle highlights that certain use cases, such as compensation assessments, may require pulling data from hundreds of records but only a small fraction of each, demanding rapid, fine‑grained extraction capabilities that go beyond simple form builders or basic digitisation. The core argument is that true digital maturity in construction must support sophisticated, high‑speed data extraction across heterogeneous record types, not just the digitisation of static forms.

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I think the construction industry has definitely leapt the curve, um, the last couple of decades in embracing digital, but we haven't quite got there, uh, and there's still some more work to do. And I think there's a bit more to do particularly around understanding the difference between structured and unstructured data. Um, and, you know, take records for example. We're very good at QSH records on the whole, um, but they typically don't require quite the same level of structure. They tend to be mutually exclusive records. So I do a concrete test, I file it away in in a sensible repository, and when I want to check it, I can, I can retrieve it and I'll consume all of it and then put it back in the file. Um, commercial record keeping is different, you know, uh, bringing the, the WBS, the CBS, the standard method of measurement, the program activities, the schedule of cost components, all these different bits together, reasons for stood time. It might be the case that for a given use case of a compensation assessment, we might want to draw on a couple of hundred records but only sort of 8 or 9% of each of them. So and quickly. So that ability to do things rapidly takes us to a place well beyond form builders or, or, um, or digitization of an electronic form. It needs more than that.