Mobile digitisation is growing at an exponential pace making application development and deployment more convenient than ever. To remain competitive, the construction industry must align with ongoing trends and embrace the mobile digitisation revolution on an organisation-wide basis.
The Nature of Mobile Digitisation in the Construction Industry
As per the Roland Berger study, an increase in the productivity of the construction sector is desirable, since there was only a 4{ed162fdde9fdc472551df9f31f04601345edf7e4eff6ea93114402690d8fa616} improvement during the past ten years, implying that these companies were far from being competitive. Even with the widespread availability of sophisticated mobile applications, only 3{ed162fdde9fdc472551df9f31f04601345edf7e4eff6ea93114402690d8fa616} construction industry players realise that digitisation is important.
Digitisation can affect companies regarding improving access to stakeholders including customers and suppliers, ensuring optimal data usage, enhancing automation, and promoting better connectivity.
Digital applications create endless possibilities regarding saving costs, focusing on logistics, optimising the supply chain, and making economical storage possible.
Contributions by Next-Gen Visual Builders
Contemporary visual builders for mobile applications enable a wide range of capabilities regarding front-end features, back-end capability, data processing ability and workflow management aspects. Construction industry players can instantly take advantage of drag and drop UI editing features, with full support for modules, optimal navigation structuring, customisable properties, single-click publish, and testing on real devices. Visual business data binding with embedded maps and graphs from multiple data sources, support for complex logic and workflows and convenient app distribution empower construction businesses.
A Note about Democratising App Creation
Democratising the mobile development process is desirable since it enables employee empowerment across the organisation for true business transformation and innovation. Mobile apps which are in line with the expectations of users regarding simplicity and create code automation environments which make it possible to achieve ideas.
Democratisation makes it possible to transform a vision into a running app for iPhone or Android, which can be designed instantly, and although not production-ready, is available on the app store, and can be a magnet for stakeholders and investors.
The Future – Bimodal IT regarding Gartner’s Vision
Gartner proposes a combination of traditional and modern IT practices in the realm of enterprise IT, which it calls Bimodal IT. As per Gartner proposal, future IT organisations will operate through two flavours, one based on the traditional IT approach for efficiency and stability, and the other based on an agile, experimental organisation, for least time-to-market and rapid evolution in a tightly aligned business space.
Bimodal IT can accelerate delivery of business apps. The characteristics of the two modes are designed to support different types of business projects targeted towards different business goals, from disruptive innovation to stability and maintenance. These different modes are available to cater to the differing needs of projects regarding requirements for business involvement, the requirement for frequency of updates, and faster turnaround times.
Two separate delivery methods which are in coherence with each other enable the advantages of predictability on one end of the spectrum, and exploratory approach on the other end. Simply put, there is a plethora of technological expertise available, and the present market is tuned to offer digitisation at its best to the construction sector. Construction businesses following a combination of traditional and modern business models are in the best place to decide the practices in mobile digitisation that will suit them best and take them to the next level.
References
https://dzone.com/articles/app-development-should-be-democratized
The democratization of app building has created a new paradigm
http://www.cio.com/article/2875803/cio-role/what-gartner-s-bimodal-it-model-means-to-enterprise-cios.html
Bimodal IT and Remodeling Traditional IT for Greater Agility
http://e.huawei.com/us/publications/global/ict_insights/201701051027/analyst-corner/201701060859