The office is not where the work happens
Construction is one of the few industries where most of the workforce is never at a desk, and where the physical environment is actively hostile to equipment. IT built around a head office and extended reluctantly to site tends to be worked around rather than used.
The practical test is whether a site supervisor with dusty hands, standing in a demountable with patchy coverage, can open the current drawing on the first attempt. If not, they will use the printed copy in the ute, and the printed copy is a revision behind.
Site connectivity
New sites do not have fixed internet, and getting one provisioned usually takes longer than the early stage of the project.
Mobile broadband with an external antenna is the standard answer, and the variable worth checking is coverage — it differs meaningfully across South-East Queensland, and finding out on mobilisation day is the wrong time. We check before the site opens.
For longer projects and poorer coverage there are better options at higher cost, and that becomes a project budget decision rather than an IT one.
Document control is the expensive one
The most costly IT failure in construction is not an outage. It is someone building from a superseded revision, and the invoice arrives as rework.
That is a document control problem, and it is caused by distribution: drawings emailed as attachments, saved to devices, printed and pinned up. Every one of those copies is frozen at the moment it was made.
The fix is a single source that people access rather than copy — Procore, Aconex or a well-structured SharePoint library with real revision control. The technology matters less than the behaviour, and the behaviour only changes if opening the current document is genuinely easier than using the old one.
Hardware specified for the conditions
Site offices destroy standard office equipment faster than anyone budgets for. Dust, heat, vibration and being dropped are ordinary conditions rather than accidents.
Over a three-year view, rugged hardware for genuinely field-based staff usually costs less than replacing standard machines repeatedly, plus the downtime while a supervisor waits for a replacement. For staff who are mostly in a vehicle and occasionally on site, standard business-grade equipment is often the right call. It is worth specifying honestly rather than applying one standard across the business.
Head contractors are asking about security
On government and tier-one work, supply chain security questionnaires have become routine. Questions about MFA, backup, patching and incident response, with prequalification attached to the answers.
An Essential Eight assessment is generally the proportionate response — it produces documented evidence you can hand over, and the underlying control work is worth doing regardless.