Big Data and the Engineering and Construction industries
Big Data = Big Questions for the Engineering and Construction Industry
An extract from a white paper by Jay Snyder, Alyssa Menard and Natalie Spare, published by FMI, a leading management consulting and investment banking firm dedicated exclusively to engineering and construction, infrastructure and the built environment.
We’re producing more data than ever—roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, or just enough to fill 10 million blue ray discs (you remember those, right?). With so much data being created and the use of data analytics starting to gain traction in engineering and construction (E&C), understanding what big data is and how your organization can leverage it to improve business processes is becoming an increasingly critical aspect of doing business.
Despite challenges associated with managing and implementing big data processes, companies that don’t embrace the new norm of data-driven operations could lose traction in the market and become obsolete in the near future.
What Is Big Data?
The process of collecting large amounts of information and extracting useful insights through detailed analysis, big data in the E&C industry can be any information collected from sources
such as:
Sensors
Drones
Wearables
Global positioning systems
Email
Transactions
Financials
Design plans
Weather data
The list goes on…
Consider this: Some of the largest infrastructure projects require an average of 130 million emails, 55 million documents and 12 million workflows. With such vast amounts of data being captured from a multitude of sources, many firms can’t manage and process this much information, which is why right now 95.5% of all data captured goes unused in the E&C industry. Read more