ConTech Execby Stentorian Research
Episodes · · 46 min

Be First To Be Third

with Steve Jones

Show notes

The conversation.

Steve Jones started studying BIM in 2005, back when five people would give you ten definitions of it. Twenty years later he's still doing the same job: finding out what contractors, owners, and designers are actually doing, and what's actually working.

His verdict on two decades of construction tech promises is not what you'd expect. The vendors weren't the problem. The industry doesn't want to be reinvented — it wants to be better in about 10,000 specific ways. What got underestimated was how hard organizational change is when every project is a temporary organization stitched together from firms with different contracts, incentives, and digital maturity.

We cover the Procore study on expertise, the change order research showing only 7% of GCs rate themselves very effective at managing T&M work, why 38% of projects run over schedule while only low-20s run over cost, and what separates owners who think tech means software from owners who think tech means better information.

Steve Jones is Senior Director, Industry Insights Research at Dodge Construction Network. Free research at construction.com.

#ConstructionTech #ConstructionManagement #ProjectControls #ConstructionIndustry #Preconstruction

Chapters

Jump in.

Each chapter opens the video at that moment on YouTube.

  1. Intro
  2. Dodge Momentum Index, starts trending up, and mid-size data centers chasing power
  3. Twenty years of predictions: did BIM overpromise?
  4. The part everybody underestimated: organizational change
  5. Killer use case: how Navisworks and spatial coordination made BIM take off
  6. Everybody wants to be first, to be third
  7. From binary adoption to maturity of implementation
  8. The training step companies skip
  9. The Procore expertise study: the shallow end of the pool
  10. Keeping underwriter-funded research neutral
  11. Change orders: only 7% of GCs rate themselves very effective on T&M
  12. Conference room ideas vs. job site ideas
  13. The ClearStory study: 14 hours a week for a three-person team
  14. Is the schedule a fiction?
  15. The schedule as a living hypothesis
  16. 38% over schedule vs. low 20s over cost
  17. Value engineering is neither
  18. The educated owner who's also a more demanding owner
  19. The NIBS data-centric owner report
  20. Owners making decisions on two-week-old information
  21. What owners should take away going into 2026
  22. How the GSA mandated BIM (and the judge who walked seven blocks)
  23. AR goggles, reality capture, and real use cases
  24. Prompt craft: make the model critique your prompt first
  25. Technology isn't the differentiator. Decisions are.
Real people. Real work. Real talk.

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