Construction has been one of the last industries to adopt technology. That’s partly cultural—folks in the industry like to solve problems with their own ingenuity. Many firms are still family-owned and there’s still a lot of reverence for tradition. Finally, this is an industry with thin margins, where the first funding priorities are equipment and personnel.
But, it’s also partly because there hasn’t been a lot of technology built to meet the needs of the industry. Before smartphones, it was hard to bring technology to the field. Even then, you had to have a good Wi-Fi connection, which wasn’t consistently available, or an expensive data plan. And, a lot of early field capture technology was based on someone having to manually input data into a device. That was a non-starter; having superintendents manually entering data didn’t really provide much in the way of productivity gains, and made for a lot of unhappy superintendents.