The Information Age – What You Don’t Know Can’t Hurt You?
The increasing rate of technology adoption and implementation is allowing for unprecedented amounts of data to be collected. What benefits will this information pose to business and are there any threats through not collecting information.
A report released by Gartner “Strategic Information Management for Competitive Advantage” lists many of the new types of information that are going to be processed and available for decisions makers in the coming years. Can companies make use of this emerging information, to improve their physical performance? Keys types of emerging information, identified by Gartner and important to the construction sector include:
Location Based Information: More and more the ability to locate and track human and physical resources through business operations, are being made available through the use of GPS or RFID enabled technology. Location based information such as pictures or films of the location can create environments of augmented reality and allow for exposure and improved knowledge of an area without ever having to visit the area.
Social Graph Information: The ability of being able to understand how everyone is connected or related to one another. Considering overhead: management, selling and administrative costs can be anywhere from 5-30% of a project’s costs, the ability to effectively manage and understand design/engineering and project teams could help increase the working efficiency as well as project profits. Gartner likens the power of this information, to do to the knowledge workers’ environment what Time and Motion study did for manufacturing the 50s. However there are still data ownership and privacy rights that need to be fleshed out. This is probably best to left to the technology industry, as they have a pretty good record at creating the appropriate standards.
Sustainability Information: It’s not all about tree hugging; there is business logic to consider, as worldwide, new markets continue to emerge and create a middle class, which will place more demand on the delivery of commercialized products, thereby increasing raw material prices. Doing more for less, or incorporating renewable processes will start to become more attractive as well as help improve profits and purchasing power in the face of inflation through rising input costs.
Overall the report claims that the next generation of technology will focus on information exploitation, building on the previous efforts of adopting and implementing technology into business processes.
Read the full press release from Gartner
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