Decision-making

What’s good for the bottom line can no longer be at the expense of end-user adoption. Drawing parallels with the recent Wall Street Journal article regarding the Business Roundtable’s recent change to their ideal that “corporate decision-making should revolve around what is best for shareholders”: That sentiment needs to be echoed by the construction industry when it comes to the introduction and adoption of technologies, according to Singh. “Managing a job is hard enough,” says the former field engineer. “Leveraging a tool that doesn’t help you manage that job effectively is not worthwhile. We’ve seen this shift happen, where now the focus is on the user first. Whatever’s good for that user is going to be good for the project, and if it’s good for the project, it’s going to be good for the company and the bottom line.”

“Superintendents, foreman, and field engineers, they probably amount close to 50%-60% of that population of companies. For them to be essentially strangled with tools that don’t meet their needs and are not personalized to their workflows, it’s challenging.” – Stan Singh, Raken Director of Product Management

Getting technology buy-in from the field means allowing the field to properly be involved in the process of acquiring technology. That may seem pretty self-explanatory, but there is still a process to executing that properly, according to Singh. “One of the steps that you can do to make sure that you have participation from your end users and selecting technology—not just the field but also the people in the office. They get burdened with archaic tools as well, so it’s important to go through a 10-step process in the technology presentation and kind of work through that process to really shift the focus to that ‘user-project-company level’ in lieu of ‘company-project-user-level.’”