Construction Is the World's Second Least Digitised Industry. Here's the Cost.
McKinsey called it out. Australian builders are living it. And the gap between those who adapt and those who don't is widening every single month.
Ask most Australian builders what their biggest problems are and you'll hear the same answers: rising costs, labour shortages, thin margins. Rarely do you hear: the way we manage information. But according to McKinsey, that's exactly where construction is falling furthest behind every other industry on earth.
The McKinsey Global Institute's digitisation index placed construction second from the bottom across all major industries globally, only agriculture ranked lower. And unlike agriculture, where physical, seasonal work genuinely limits digital adoption, construction's problem is almost entirely self-inflicted.
Projects are still managed across disconnected spreadsheets, WhatsApp threads, and paper-based forms. Estimating is done manually, with no live connection to supplier pricing. Admin tasks are duplicated across systems that don't talk to each other. And the builder, the one person who should be focused on delivering the job, ends up as the unofficial IT manager, data-entry clerk, and admin coordinator all at once.
What the gap actually costs
- Hours lost every week per builder to manual admin and data re-entry.
- More variation disputes when documentation is paper-based.
- A large share of construction rework caused by poor information management.
Using multiple disconnected systems to manage projects is a major issue, slow technology adoption leads to laborious admin tasks prone to error, and builders wear every cost of that inefficiency.
— McKinsey Global Institute
The good news? This isn't a technology problem. Australian construction management software, estimating platforms and project tools have never been better or more accessible. The real gap is having the time and the right people to run them, which is exactly where the right support changes everything.
