Three companies have teamed up to dive into Big Data to learn why construction industry productivity remains so persistently low.

Efforts to improve lagging construction productivity have largely failed, notably in the U.S., but skills shortages and increasing constraints on migration likely will inflate pay and force productivity improvements across the globe, according to a recent construction-industry survey and forecast by the McKinsey Global Institute.

ENR sat down with Martin Fischer, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facilities Engineering, to get his assessment of gains being made for increasing construction productivity through virtual design and construction.