The Connected Construction Professional Series: IT Roles

If you’re a construction IT professional, your day-to-day challenges and responsibilities are sprawling, with a hand in nearly every aspect of running the business—regardless of whether the business uses a construction software suite.

The burgeoning role of the construction technology professional—or “contech” for the cool kids—showcases IT’s importance to today’s contractors. It’s no wonder they’re among the most in-demand tech jobs in construction, and often one of the most important roles in the organization—defending your systems from bad guys and ensuring daily technology-related activities run without issue.

As a construction IT professional, the job goes far beyond everyday technology, although IT leaders certainly still manage the deployment and usage of electronics and help employees with any technical issues. That usually includes soft technologies like email, phone, internet and wireless networks on work premises, as well as physical technologies like computers, mobile devices and security cameras—along with managing the data associated with each device.

For those contractors that have transitioned their systems to a construction software suite, IT professionals are the folks that you’ll see working to implement connected construction solutions like Trimble Construction One across a business. IT will help maintain and update those systems—as well as whatever other software the contractors are using—for different parts of the business.

They’re the people making sure that HR can access employee data when they need it, or workers in the field are able to access real-time information when they need it. Permissions, administrator and security settings, and liaison work with software vendors will often fall under IT’s purview.

The difficult, complex, and time-consuming work that faces most construction IT professionals has helped spur technology adoption across many departments, but most businesses still don’t operate out of a single, connected suite of construction solutions.

To further expand IT’s strength in your business, contractors need a connected, cloud-based platform that has these key features:

• Everyone in your organization is utilizing the same set of standardized, real-time data—and that data is securely reaching the right people, including extended project stakeholders, when and where they need it (which helps ensure that everyone in your company is working with up-to-date, accurate information)
• Working within the interface is easy and intuitive, with process automation capabilities that help make work for others in the organization even easier
• Self-serve and collaborative abilities that allow different users to source their own data and reporting needs, removing IT from the equation and freeing them to work on other critical tasks
• The latest security features to protect user, system, and contract/project data that, once lost or corrupted, could create major financial distress for the business
• Not sweating over server maintenance, data backups, or major software changes because the platform is scalable and allows you to easily implement the latest updates and technologies, as well as surface innovations of your own

For everyone across the organization—and especially for construction IT workers—Trimble Construction One is the connected construction suite to help put your teams over the top. It’s a platform that drives productivity, efficiency, and accuracy at each phase of the construction project lifecycle. Leveraging cloud data and automated workflow capabilities, Trimble Construction One ties together all facets of each project, from estimating and bidding through workforce management to project closeout and delivery, in one collaborative working environment.

For IT professionals in particular, this means acting as the gatekeeper and quarterback of a truly connected construction environment that brings real-time, shared data to daily operations. Trimble Construction One helps bring together the entire organization, as well as extended project holders, into the fold.

Watch what a true connected construction environment could deliver for your organization: