What is the cost of poor data and information bottlenecks in construction?

Research from McKinsey, KPMG and Dodge consistently puts the cost of poor data and information bottlenecks in construction at 8–15% of total project value — making information failure one of the largest controllable risks on a construction programme.

The losses show up in several ways:

• Rework — errors caused by teams working off outdated drawings, superseded specifications or conflicting instructions that better information management would have prevented.
• Delay — decisions stalled while waiting for information to be retrieved, checked and distributed across systems that do not talk to each other.
• Duplicate data entry — the same data entered manually into multiple systems (schedule, cost, BIM, document management) creates inconsistency and consumes professional time.
• Claims and disputes — inadequate records of instructions, delays and their causes make claims harder to substantiate and disputes more expensive to resolve.
• Handover deficiencies — incomplete as-built and asset data delivered at practical completion requires the owner to commission expensive retrospective data collection.

The root cause in most cases is not that the data does not exist — it does, spread across a dozen systems — but that it cannot be accessed, joined and queried fast enough to inform decisions at the moment they are needed.

Data federation addresses this directly: instead of waiting for a data team to build a warehouse, Bildstak queries the live sources and joins them on the IFC GlobalID, so a question that would take a week of manual reconciliation takes seconds.