What Should a Construction Company Ask an IT Provider?
Every IT provider that pitches a construction company talks about the office. The office is the easy part. The hard part is a trailer on a slab with no internet, twenty minutes from anything, on the morning the inspector is due.
What should a construction company ask an IT provider before hiring them?
Ask what happens when the job site network fails at 6am, whether travel and on-site dispatch are billed separately, who handles connectivity at a new site and how far ahead they need notice, and how field staff reach drawings when there is no signal. The answers separate providers who understand construction from those who support offices.
The question that reveals everything
Ask: a job site loses connectivity at 6am on a pour day. What actually happens?
A provider who says they will escalate through the ticketing system has answered honestly, and the answer is no. A provider who understands construction will ask you questions back — is this a trailer or a permanent office, is there a wired line or is it cellular, how many people, does the site have power. That instinct is the difference.
Be fair about it in both directions, though. Nobody can restore a cellular outage in a field. What a good provider can do is design the site so a single failure does not stop the crew: a second path, offline access to the drawings that matter today, and a phone number that still works when the data does not.
The rest of the questions
Is travel and on-site work included, or billed separately?
This is where construction agreements go wrong more often than any other industry, because your sites move and an office-shaped contract assumes they do not. Ask specifically: routine site visits, emergency dispatch, travel time, and setup at a new location. Get the list, not the reassurance.
How much notice do you need to set up a new site?
If the answer is a week and you sometimes mobilise in two days, you have found a real incompatibility before signing rather than after. Ask what they need from you and when.
What do field staff do when there is no signal?
Most field apps assume the field is connected. That assumption is why crews quietly stop using them and the office ends up re-keying everything from photographs and text messages. Ask how the provider handles offline access to drawings and daily reports, and whether they have actually watched a foreman try to use the system on a bad day.
Where does the money leave the business?
Through email, not through the project management system. Payment redirection fraud works the same way in construction as it does in real estate: a convincing message, changed bank details, a payment that cannot be recalled. Ask what the provider does about it — multi-factor authentication with no exception for owners, someone watching for mailbox rules created quietly, and a verbal callback rule for any change of banking details. A spam filter is not an answer to this question.
How do you test backups?
Not run — test. Ask how often a restore is actually performed, whether you are told the result, and whether the estimating files and job-cost history are in scope. Those are the records that would be hardest to reconstruct and the easiest to leave out.
What happens when a project manager leaves?
Site access, the shared trailer login, the plan-room portal, and the phone that still has company email on it. The checklist we wrote for medical practices transfers with almost no changes, and the shared-login problem is worse in construction because sites are set up in a hurry.
One thing worth budgeting that usually is not
Connectivity as a line item. A hotspot, a trailer router with an external antenna, or satellite where there is genuinely nothing — priced into the job rather than expensed in a panic during week one. It is a small number relative to a crew standing around, and it is the single most reliable way to stop the office chasing paperwork that never arrived.
The same infrastructure carries job site cameras, which is worth knowing before you pay to install it twice.
What we would say about ourselves
We are a small IT company in Haines City working across Polk and Osceola. We do planned work well and we are honest about response: most of what we do is remote and scheduled, and if you need someone standing on a site within the hour, we are not the right fit. We would rather say that on the first call than after you sign.
Managed support runs $125 to $299 per user per month, and there is a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you would just like a second opinion on an agreement someone else has put in front of you, we are glad to read it.
Related reading: Procore vs Buildertrend vs JobTread.
The same question, other industries
Each of these covers the questions that matter in that specific business, rather than the generic list.
