McCarthy Building Companies — Q&A with VP Emerging Technology
Technology is an important part of any organization’s transformation, but it’s the people and culture around the technology that make all the difference. At McCarthy Building Companies, Dave Burns is defining the next generation of processes and frameworks for how his organization will implement new & emerging technologies in their construction business.
Always ahead of trends in our industry, Dave’s watched as tech stacks in construction have gone from heavy ERP systems to much lighter-weight approaches using modern software architecture. In this conversation, we talk about those trends. We also explore how technology’s role in construction organizations has evolved and what the next frontier looks like.
You were involved in early digital transformation initiatives at Mortenson and then at McCarthy, managing implementation of construction ERP systems and more traditional IT solutions. What’s different now compared to those early days in construction tech and what’s been the biggest change in the way that you view construction technology, particularly at large organizations like McCarthy?
What’s progressed, clearly and at a pretty rapid pace, is all of the enabling technologies: cloud-based platforms, software as a service, mobile’s reach in the field — you can even fast forward to reality capture, IoT, field sensors, and robotics.
We take a set of problems and look at technology opportunities, but the lens from a technology standpoint used to be pretty limited. And now it’s like, okay, there’s a lot more dimensions in which to see how technology can benefit the construction industry, both in the office where it always lived and now in the field.
Another big change has been the roles that you see that are focused on construction technology. It used to be just IT. That was the group that had the budget and experience to really push technology, build technology, and make technology available. But at McCarthy, we had a field solutions group fairly early on. These were folks within IT or maybe directly adjacent to IT that were focused more on the operational tech stack.
The last dimension is just the number of solutions available. Technology is finding a way to apply itself on top of more and more processes. Whether it’s your HR department or your communications team or business development, all these different groups are raising new opportunities, saying: “I have this process or this challenge that I’ve generally had for a long time. But now I see this tool that’s going to streamline it and make my world easier.” Or at least supposedly it is. And so there’s just a lot more opportunities out there on top of what we’re already doing.
A lot of what you’ve said gels with my own experience and advice in construction innovation, which is that the industry needs to shift away from this top-down approach and towards a more bottom-up approach of pinpointing individuals dispersed around field teams who are influential in improving adoption of digital tools, and that engaging those individuals will be the next frontier in moving the needle in construction. What are your thoughts on that?
Absolutely. And where it’s going from a technology perspective is even more interesting. There are some reports out around the concept of a “citizen technologist” which says that by around 2024, a majority of technology producers — producers, not consumers — within an organization will live outside of IT.
At McCarthy, we’re seeing early momentum around what could be called a citizen data analyst: someone in the business who’s mining, consuming, analyzing, and reporting out data for a specific business need.
I think that’s exactly it. More broadly, there’s a lot of technology trends swirling around construction that will impact our industry in one way or another. How does McCarthy approach emerging technology and how do you ensure it finds the right fit in the organization?
The fast-moving environment around technology and its role in construction is really important to get a handle on. We have a dedicated focus there to understand what’s going on in the market of technology solutions, understand where our business is going, and understand how those two will intersect.
It can take the form of seeing a trend with a solution that’s already clearly delivering value. We see it with our clients. We see it with our competitors. And so we need to engage and understand how it might benefit us as well.
But it’s really about exposing ourselves to and learning from emerging technologies while also recognizing that perhaps what we’re looking at doesn’t have an immediate short term return on investment — and yet, we still need to learn and start to understand what these emerging trends are and where we might place our chips moving forward.
So how does that work in practice at McCarthy?
The primary way in which I try to organize our teams around attacking opportunities is to start by asking, “Okay, we have this really well known and well understood problem. But we may not necessarily know what the solutions are that are going to satisfy or address the problem.”
Now, that might not necessarily require a technology path, but we still have the ability to bring emerging tech to the table and provide an answer on what the market is saying about solutions trying to address the problem.
Then there’s almost the inverse of that where you’ve got all these solutions out there, and you’ve not honed in on a problem internally. In those instances, we’re typically teeing up the emerging tech team to run lead by trying to fully understand the solution and then through strong business partnerships at all levels of the organization, understand who might ultimately benefit from it.
So there’s a lot of different ways that these things come at us, whether it’s problem-based or solutions-based.
My work is in helping large construction companies build innovation & technology with an understanding of the people side of the business. Give us a sense of your vision and strategy for emerging technology implementation, especially in the context of the industry’s dispersed field-based workforce and how we can work with our craft to deliver lasting change.
We have a strategic focus on craft in much the same way that we have a strategic focus on innovation as a company. Craft as it pertains to digital or technology innovation is, I’d say, still emerging in terms of all of the opportunities that are out there.
We’re still at a foundational level in terms of really understanding and finding those bright spots within the field teams and understanding what made a certain adoption a success in terms of how that persona leverages technology to deliver value for the project.
To me, it all goes back to what you were saying about emerging tech not being this big central incubator. I think you said it, like 5 to 10 percent of the company needs to be actively engaged and relationships built with the people that are ultimately either raising the problems or really interested in the solutions. The energy of those relationships and where it ultimately leads is what’s important.
Nate Fuller is Managing Director of Placer Construction Solutions, advising leadership teams to transform their organizations in ways that improve performance and agility at the field level.
He provides construction companies with a field assessment that delivers transformative information about their field operations and is proven to accelerate innovation & technology adoption for Top ENR contractors.
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