Help Your Organization “Level Up” in the New Year With This Strategic Outlook
As 2024 comes to a close, everyone’s eyes begin to turn to the year ahead. With all of the continued hype around AI and a few lesser trends, 2025 promises to be an eventful year in Tech. And planning to make the most of it requires awareness, not of the trees but of the forest. Your IT department has been transforming over the last five years to become the agile and responsive team your organization needs. This process continues apace but, to best align with the direction and pace of the enterprise, IT needs to be aware of the primary trends in construction AND in tech. That’s the only way to effectively identify the right ideas, bring them into the organization, and prioritize them for successful execution.
BCG endeavors to provide IT leadership in Construction a window into the current IT Trends in Construction with a valuable webinar series, this year’s session begins on Dec. 10 at 2:00 p.m. EST. You can learn more or register here.
The initial webinar will cover governance, restructuring IT, and shifting ERP platforms. Future sessions will discuss AI, IT Transformation, Security, Process Improvement, IT Alignment, and other important topics. IT should be leading within the organization and the only way to do that is to have a broad perspective and some insight into the near future.
Here is an introduction to the three trends we’ll cover in this webinar:
Trend No. 1: Implementing Governance Frameworks to Enhance Decision-Making
Making last minute changes on a build site without following proper safeguards can lead to costly issues if the change doesn’t comply with building and safety codes, lacks the appropriate permits, and diverges from the architectural vision. Yet, when it comes to IT systems and processes, far too many decisions are made in an unstructured and disorganized fashion. In 2025, more construction firms are applying the same level of care they show on their build sites to their IT systems, processes, and decision-making. They’ll accomplish this by implementing a governance framework.
Without governance, different departments may choose and implement disparate and unapproved technical solutions, making it difficult to have visibility into initiatives, budgets, and security risks across the company. With proper governance in place, all requests for technology or process changes funnel through the appropriate governing body – the most common of which include a committee, approval team, or the executive leadership team. A good governance framework reduces security risks, improves decision-making, and eliminates “Shadow IT” by ensuring all initiatives have ROI justification, management approval, and prioritization.
Rather than functioning as red tape, the predictability and standardization of a governance framework allows the organization to operate efficiently, manage change optimally, and empower IT and process teams to become more agile as priorities evolve.
Trend No. 2: Upgrading ERP Systems to Streamline Operations
In 2025, the commercial construction industry is streamlining their operations and business processes including project management, change order management, payroll, labor, scheduling, estimating, and forecasting by upgrading their legacy software systems to the modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
For firms that resist modernization, their IT departments are forced to purchase, manage, and maintain point solutions for each process. These point solutions are not always integrated well, which means data may be updated in one place but not in another, increasing the chances of conflicting information and reducing the confidence in business decisions.
However, companies that prioritize ERP adoption have more responsive IT teams who quickly and securely develop integrations, establish data and analytics strategy, and support the firm’s records management policies. The results are better business processes, optimized operations, and increased productivity.
Trend No. 3: Evolving IT Departments Beyond the Help Desk
Historically, construction firms’ IT departments have been focused on tactical responsibilities including help desks, infrastructure, provisioning, and break/fix, and have been slow to evolve their structure and capacity. Because firms have depended on outdated, legacy IT systems that require more support to maintain, IT departments have overstaffed with in-house or third-party contractors specializing in certain areas.
But as the IT infrastructure continues to transition to data centers and cloud computing, we’ve seen a pretty big shift occur over the past five years. In this short amount of time, the commercial construction industry has transitioned from using outdated networking hardware to implementing enhanced application software and enterprise architecture. Network engineers have been replaced by business analysts, data experts, and integration and security specialists.
In 2025, it’s imperative to restructure and staff your IT to better support the increased demands of the organization for increased security, governance, integrations, vendor management, hosting, and strategy.
To get further trend insights and actionable strategies you can put into place to improve your 2025 IT outcomes, be sure to sign up for the Burger Consulting Group Q4 Webinar on Dec. 10 at 2:00 p.m. EST.
Register here: