Construction may just be ready for cloud computing. Picture © Oleg Doroshin | Dreamstime.com

There’s a quiet revolution going on in the construction sector, and it’s so quiet, it’s almost scary, since it is probably going to revolutionize the way construction firms work. There are always exceptions to every rule. There are always firms that move out in front of others in incorporating technology, but by many accounts, construction, as an industry, has been slow to adopt technological advances, especially information technology.

It’s no wonder. Builders want to build roads, bridges and structures. The tools they use for those things are the tools they want to work with everyday - nail guns, saws, pickup trucks, bulldozers and a wide variety of equipment that shapes three-dimensional items into new forms. Information technology is just not as exciting as a circular saw spinning through a 2 by 4. And, I suspect that for many people in construction, it also requires too much work and expense to get a return that is quickly useful.

A contractor building four houses a year wants to know what he will need to spend to build the floor plan his clients have their hearts set on. He doesn’t want to have to install a server, hook up computers to it, add software and then get everything working well together before he can begin doing the estimate. But yet, information technology for construction has always been a process of cobbling together software and hardware in the hopes that once everything was put together, it would work as well as the many different parts of a building once they’re all assembled - Not! Many construction pros, therefore, have simply made do with the simplest technology they could find. The 2008 Construction Financial Management Association technology survey found that more than 40 percent of contractors with revenues under $5 million were either using the most basic software for estimating - Microsoft Excel - or were not using any at all (can you say, “yellow legal pads”?).

But now, information technology used in construction is on the verge of becoming easy to use. Log into an account using a Web browser from anywhere you have an Internet connection and start estimating, or planning the project timeline, or managing customer communications. Share documents with the architect or engineer, and send the latest change order estimates to the owner for approval. You don’t buy any more software. You don’t install any more computers or servers. You don’t need a technology guru on staff, and you don’t have to wonder at 3 a.m. if the files relating to that big project bid package were backed up.

Is it perfect? Probably not. Will there be some limitations initially? Probably. Overall, will you just be able to get on with building? Most likely.

It’s a reasonable bet that cloud computing is going to make information technology become a slave to construction, instead of the other way around.