i concur, james. construction has always been about big data, although maybe this fact has not been generally understood by the very people in the industry enough to appreciate the value of effectively capturing and processing such data in order to better manage projects.

in a typical project, there are about 6,000 plus activities, 23,000 plus relationships, 26,000 plus steps, 6,000 plus costs, 3,700 plus 世界杯时间比赛时间 . do these figures don’t qualify as big data?

so how do we know if we are dealing with big data? what kind of data? what are these data? how big a set of data needs to be before we can call it big data?

i took some courses on advanced excel and r in order to use them on my data from my project. and i can tell you that my data from construction were much more substantial and were a lot more than the data collected from medical surveys and market dynamics that were used in excel (mostly pivot tables) and r.

excel pivot tables and r language are very useful when presenting and analyzing construction data for the purposes of forecasting and comparing budgets and actuals.

just like in the market or medical field, the stakeholders do not sift through the data. what they want to see are colorful graphs and illustrations that tell them whether they are losing money or getting delayed

construction has been dealing with big data ever since. people just don’t want to call them big data.