Why 98% of AEC firms report successful IT rollouts but 67% still can't find their emails

The contradiction hiding inside AEC IT departments

Ideagen's 2024 State of Tech Adoption and Collaboration in AEC research surveyed 188 senior IT decision-makers across the sector. When asked whether their IT implementations had been successful, 98% said yes.

In the same research, 67% said emails are filed inefficiently across their organisation. 56% said end users find it difficult to locate documents and data. And 66% agreed their end users bend IT rules or ignore best practices to be more productive.

98% success. 67% inefficiency. Same respondents. Same survey.

That gap tells you everything about how the AEC industry measures IT success - and why the measurement is broken.

Why do IT leaders report success when the data says otherwise?

Most firms measure IT success by deployment. The system is live. Licences are active. Users are logging in. The project closes as delivered. But deployment and adoption are fundamentally different things.

SharePoint can be fully deployed across a firm and still have 67% of project emails sitting unfiled in personal inboxes. Teams can be live and active while the correspondence that explains the documents shared through it remains invisible to the platform. The IT project succeeded. The behaviour change it was supposed to drive didn't.

55% of the IT leaders surveyed said rule-bending is widespread across their organisation. Not isolated. Not occasional. Widespread.

The people with the most valuable emails are the least likely to file them

If the problem were limited to junior staff still learning the systems, it would be manageable. It isn't.

The same research found that directors (44%) and senior management (38%) are the most likely to bend IT rules. The people generating the most commercially sensitive project correspondence - client negotiations, design approvals, scope agreements, contract variations - are the ones least likely to follow filing policies.

This happens because the filing process adds friction to their work. An 8-10 click process to file an email to SharePoint isn't something a director billing at £150 an hour is going to do forty times a day. They'll do it for a week after a training session, then stop. The 58% of users who push back against new IT software aren't being difficult. They're being rational.

How do you close the gap between deployment and actual behaviour?

The firms that have closed this gap stopped measuring success by deployment and started measuring it by filing behaviour. And the only way to shift filing behaviour at scale is to remove the friction that makes non-compliance easier than compliance.

Ideagen Mail Manager works inside Outlook, prompts filing at the point of send and receive, and uses machine learning to suggest the correct project location. Filing is a single click. When the compliant action is also the easiest action, the 66% who bend rules have nothing to work around.

The 2024 research supports this: 59% of AEC organisations with email management solutions report higher satisfaction with their collaboration tools, compared to 41% without. The difference isn't the tools. It's whether the data is actually reaching them.

Ideagen Mail Manager supports over 50,000 users across 2,500+ firms worldwide.

Frequently asked questions

How can 98% of IT rollouts be successful if 67% of emails are filed inefficiently?

Most firms measure IT success by deployment - whether the system is live and people are logging in - rather than by whether the intended behaviour, like consistent filing, actually took hold. A system can be fully deployed while the data it was meant to capture still isn't reaching it.

Who is most likely to bend IT rules in AEC firms?

Ideagen's 2024 research found directors (44%) and senior management (38%) are the most likely to bend IT rules, not junior staff. They generate the most commercially sensitive correspondence and are also the least likely to follow filing policy.

Why do people bend IT rules if they know the policy?

Usually not because they don't care about compliance, but because the compliant action takes too much effort relative to getting on with their work. When filing requires several steps, people skip it under time pressure.

How do you fix rule-bending without more training?

By removing the friction that makes non-compliance easier than compliance. When the correct action - filing an email to the right project folder - takes one click and happens automatically, there's nothing left to work around.

Is shadow IT rule-bending unique to AEC?

No, but Ideagen's research is specific to the AEC sector, surveying 188 senior IT decision-makers across construction, engineering, and architecture firms.