In this segment, William Doyle MRICS reflects on the construction industry's uneven digital maturity. While the sector has made notable strides in adopting digital tools, a critical gap remains in handling structured versus unstructured data. He contrasts the relatively straightforward management of Quality‑Safety‑Health (QSH) records—typically mutually exclusive, easy to file, retrieve, and reuse—with the far more complex commercial record‑keeping that integrates Work Breakdown Structures (WBS), Cost Breakdown Structures (CBS), standard methods of measurement, program activities, schedules, and cost components. For tasks such as compensation assessments, practitioners may need to pull hundreds of records but only a small fraction of each, requiring rapid, selective data extraction. Doyle argues that simple electronic form builders or basic digitisation are insufficient; the industry needs tools that enable fast, granular access to specific data slices across large, heterogeneous record sets.
