Driving Change Through Digital Management
While 90% of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical enterprise asset, translating that into an effective digital management strategy is another thing altogether.
Demonstrating the opportunities and benefits to executives who sign off these strategic projects is key, especially in the construction industry where businesses should have data at the front of their thinking. You only have to look at the Hackitt report, Building a Safer Future, to see how a digital record of a building’s life cycle is going to be a fundamental step for how information should be recorded, maintained, and who has accountability for the production of that information.
Simply collecting data is not good enough. For one thing, there’s a stark contrast between the amount of data that exists and the amount of data that is actually used. A successful digital management strategy is concerned with how you categorize and organize information. It isn’t solely about the answers to the questions you hope that the data will give you.
One question anyone should ask at each step of the journey: How is data being managed? Then there is a challenge in the way people deal with the information received, for instance, are clients reviewing and approving the right versions? It is important to have a robust audit process to meet the client’s needs for security and governance.
It is important that clients understand what the end of a project looks like, what the steps are to achieve it and who is going to be involved. Often, there are many different people coming together: consultants, contractors, sometimes using different project outputs or producing different business intelligence. We, as digital transformation consultants, need to work with those teams in order to achieve our clients’ goals, especially as new projects begin, and new supply chain members come on board. The key to success is to work with our clients early on in the project inception phases to set the goal post early on.
A digital portal with e-learning modules can be extremely effective in supporting adoption. This enables the client to log in, as well as their supply chain, to view their respective dashboards with key performance indicators. The latter can understand what it is clients are expecting them to deliver and how they expect it to be delivered.
Digital transformation is, however, just one of the many things competing for investment, alongside health and safety, sustainability and other regulations coming in. It’s important to bear in mind what the problem is that you’re trying to solve. By spending time with key business stakeholders, you can get that vision articulated correctly, early on.
