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The year ahead is looking like it will once again be, as the saying goes “interesting times.”
Being competitive, efficient, and operating lean are always best practices in the construction business, but it looks increasingly like 2023 may make them absolute necessities. Margins may be even tighter, supply chain and staffing challenges continue, and non-residential construction is expected to see a downtick with recessionary spending.
What is predicted to increase, and with good reason, are construction industry digitization efforts. Construction companies have a wealth of data already being collected and stored. You have it, but what are you doing with it?
You can collect all the information in the world, but if it sits in storage collecting virtual dust, it’s no better than if you didn’t have it.
With good analysis of this data, business leaders can glean insights that help them make smarter decisions. And during a challenging period, smarter decisions can make or break companies.
With that in mind, we thought it would be important to discuss one of the biggest issues holding construction companies back: garbage data.
Taking out the garbage
Garbage data is inaccurate or unusable (and sometimes literally “junk”). It can include data that can’t be accessed, but it tends to mean data that can’t be trusted. From it, we get the term in computer science: garbage in, garbage out.
The first thing you need to do to make greater use of data in your business, and see a return from your many digitization investments, is to clean it up and make it trustworthy.
This requires a new mindset as much as — or maybe more than — any technology tools. First, you must accept that not all the answers are in your data, and that’s OK. The construction industry is full of uncontrollable variables and situations that simply cannot be predicted.
Some business leaders will use the lack of having all answers as a reason to avoid taking advantage of their data. But isn’t it better to know everything you can? Isn’t the business then better prepared for what it can never predict?
4 steps to better data hygiene
To take advantage of your data, it must be accurate and free from flaws, and that includes being timely enough to make use of it. Data is not accurate if it’s giving you a picture relevant for 2022 in 2023.
Four steps to cleaning up your data, and getting your data hygiene game on point are:
- Audit – Take stock of your current situation. Find any issues in the data collection processes preventing information from getting to the people who need to see it in a timely way.
- Standardize – Create consistency in your reporting processes across the organization, in a way that works with its goals and current processes.
- Deduplicate – Use automation to reduce duplicated efforts, and at the same time reduce human error.
- Verify – Make sure what you’ve done works. Test that the data is now more reliable and accurate.
These steps conducted over a continual cycle with regular audits, and iterative improvements, lead to good data hygiene. And that gives you the trust you need to have in your data to rely on it to help make better decisions — the sort of decisions that will help the company tackle 2023 and come out stronger.
Learn more about improving your data hygiene, and what to do once you have clean, timely, trustworthy data, check out our eBook, Garbage In Garbage Out: The Importance of Clean Data.
Find out how Briq helps you achieve more with the wealth of data your organization collects, and the role it plays in keeping data and the processes around it standardized, accessible, timely, and clean, visit briq.com/demo and try us out.
