During the past decade, the construction industry increasingly has adopted new technologies and increased digitization, according to www.constructionequipmentguide.com. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 accelerated the pace of change as more people worked remotely, demand for remote collaboration tools grew and migration to cloud-based programs continued.
A recent webinar by global software company Egnyte, Ten Construction and Engineering Technology Trends to Watch in 2021, addressed some of the major innovations, trends and technology-related challenges facing the architecture, engineering and construction industries.
Highlights included the following:
- Advances in cloud computing have enabled companies to leverage large amounts of data generated on projects in new ways.
- Remote collaboration has been essential to keeping the industry running. Companies that were slow to adopt technology have been forced to keep up with changes and can see the effectiveness of being able to collaborate remotely.
- Data compatibility and interoperability among various technology platforms and software programs poses a significant challenge. The industry is struggling with how to store massive amounts of data generated by a project in a common data format that can be easily accessed during a project’s life cycle.
- Data security requires ongoing education for businesses. There is a common misconception that ransomware or cyberattacks are restricted to government entities or high-profile companies, but the construction industry also is at risk.
- More applications in design and modeling technologies are generating massive quantities of data, and how the data is obtained and managed is important.
- Increased automation offers the benefits of productivity growth on the job site, which may help offset the construction industry’s skilled labor shortage.
