Fool if you think you’re data-driven

The construction industry has become besotted with dashboards, and even SMEs often have dedicated Business Intelligence resources. Now that we've moved to much more connected tools and apps, we can pull any data out of any system and represent it in flashy, interactive charts. The challenge is that, in doing so, we risk getting stuck in the first phase of data analytics: Descriptive.

Descriptive analytics is the act of describing what has happened: how many people turned up on site, whether you are ahead of schedule, or how much you have spent. But it doesn’t attempt to explain why, what will happen next and, most importantly, what you should do about it.

To achieve these further steps (referred to as Diagnostic, Predictive, and Prescriptive analytics), we need to do more than just reconfigure the data: we need to understand what we’re recording and why, consolidate language, and so on. The good news is, it’s not as hard as it sounds. The first thing you can do is look at the data you produce and create better insights. For instance, link your programme data to public weather sources, or create a link between your cost breakdown structure and your activity codes.

Worse still, dashboards have removed the narrative and stage-gating of information. The senior leadership team, the project manager and the QS all see the same dashboard. We haven’t made it any easier for the QS to provide insight and filter the data for the project manager and, in turn, for the senior leadership team. That means we’re drowning people in data in the hope that we can fob off the risk of missing something important to the next level.

If this is ringing alarm bells in your head, you can hear Osment twice on day one of DCW. First, at a collaborative table talk, he will workshop ideas live and help attendees to make better use of their dashboards. In the second, on the Digital Transformation Stage, he will present with Andrew Norrie from Elecosoft about how to present data in more insightful ways.

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