A&E: Which emerging tech have the greatest impact?

In architecture and engineering (A&E), technology plays a crucial role in solving the challenges organisations face. But there are many technologies out there, and many different ways to deploy and use them across the business.

We’ve seen the variety in digital approaches firsthand in our recent Deltek Clarity A&E Industry Report. For decades we’ve run the survey in the United States. But now, we’ve extended the benchmark report into the EMEA and APAC regions – so you can see the key digital trends shaping firms around the world.

So, what trends are having the biggest digital impact on the industry? And how are firms overcoming their technology challenges to ensure these new solutions are being used effectively? In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the results.

The technology trends shaping A&E firms across the world

To find out what emerging technology trends are most prevalent in A&E, we asked survey respondents to rank how well they understood different emerging technologies, and how important each was to their business. Here’s what they said:

Table 1 - IoT, Geolocation and Big Data are the Most Important Technologies for A&E Firms.

The Internet of Things and geo location ranked highest for importance. In general, there’s a strong correlation between the trends ranked as most important and those respondents reported a high understanding of.

This correlation can be understood from either direction. Firms might be ranking trends as important because they understand them better, or they could understand them better because they’re more important and used frequently.

Either way, some technologies clearly are having more of an impact in the here and now. But emerging technologies don’t always deliver impact on their own – they need to be desired by owners, adopted by users and deployed effectively to fulfil their potential.

How are firms overcoming challenges and getting value from digital solutions?

In this year’s Deltek Clarity report, firms identified their top challenges as finding time to nurture client relationships, coordinating business development and operations teams, and finding the right teaming partners. Technology plays a part in solving these challenges, but only if it’s carefully deployed and managed, and adopted across the business.

To understand these challenges, and how firms are solving them, we asked Deltek Clarity Survey respondents about their top initiatives for addressing technology challenges in the next three years:

Table 2 - Top Initiatives for addressing Technology challenges in the next three years.

While we see respondents pursuing a wide array of initiatives almost equally, the results show a common theme across the companies surveyed. It’s clear that people come first, with the most common initiatives revolving around finding the right subject matter experts and project champions within the business, or bringing them in from elsewhere.

The message here is clear: while emerging technologies can help firms build competitive advantage, they also need the right people to support digital transformation and adoption. Without the right talent behind the tech, the benefits it can deliver are limited.

How does your firm’s approach compare?

Leveraging emerging technology trends is pivotal in helping A&E firms around the world overcome their most pressing challenges. And while popular technologies, like IoT and geo location, offer new digital ways to work, they also need the right people and processes supporting them to deliver maximum value.

In this blog, we’ve touched on just a few of the technology trends and initiatives shaping the A&E industry. But in the Deltek Clarity EMEA and APAC Report, we touch on many more trends impacting A&E, and benchmark firms from around the world.

To learn more about which technologies and techniques your peers are adopting, and to see how your firm compares to global and regional benchmarks, download the Deltek Clarity A&E Industry Report for EMEA and APAC.

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