Builder or Information Manager?

A quarter of Australia’s construction industry isn’t in construction.

The headline is hard to believe, isn’t it?

But roughly a quarter of Australia’s construction workforce isn’t on the tools. They’re not pouring concrete, erecting steel, wiring switchboards or operating cranes.

They’re managing information. 

Drawings. Cost plans. Budgets. Site diaries. Safety checklists. Accounts payable. 

Master Builders’ data backs up my claim. Of the 1.36 million people employed in construction, 27% work in architecture studios, engineering firms and quantity surveying teams. Or they work as clerks, administrative assistants, sales managers. They don’t build buildings. They manage the information that enables the build.  It’s a crucial distinction.

That information moves through countless hands: from client to designer to cost planner to to contractor to certifier. The physical construction might happen on site, but most of the process happens in models and digital workflows. 

Or does it? 

PDFs and Paper Plans

As Consult Australia says in its recent Enabling Digital by Default paper: “Billions of dollars of infrastructure projects around Australia are still being delivered with paper plans, wet signatures and PDFs.”

So, here’s a thought experiment: What if more of us started seeing ourselves as information managers? What would change?

Would project handovers get easier? Would clashes be caught earlier? Would rework drop? Would delays shrink? Would we stop losing time and budget to missing or mismatched data? Would our tech stack more resemble companies who unashamedly are in information management…maybe like Google?  Would construction companies start operating a little more like tech companies? 

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about turning builders into software developers. I’ve seen what happens when construction companies try to build software in-house. It’s not the answer.

Mind the Mindset

So, what would an “information management company” look like? 

Like SHAPE. The SHAPE team didn’t just adopt Procore – they embedded it. Today, everything from tendering to safety observations runs through one central platform. They’ve automated key workflows, use AI to cross-check documents, and have 1,000-plus action plans live across the business. Among the results? A 15% drop in rework costs – not because of more software, but because the right information reached the right people at the right time.

SHAPE is not alone. Across Australia, construction’s tech spend has risen to 25% of total expenditure in 2025. 

But here’s the surprising take from someone who works for a construction software company: we don’t need more tools. We need a mindset shift. Because a big chunk of this industry already is in the business of managing information — we just haven’t started thinking like it yet.

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