Bill Brennan, a COO of Skanska, said at the conference that at his company, younger workers were “chomping at the bit” to take responsibility for championing iPads out in the field on jobsites.

One such champion is Jacob Hafensteiner with Suffolk Construction, Boston. “I work full time as a project manager, but have to sometimes travel to other jobsites just to help implement the use of the iPad,” says Hafensteiner, whose company recently bought an iPad for every employee—950 total.

Many in the audience asked if this added responsibility should come with a pay raise or a title change.

Corren Collura, CIO of Suffolk, highlighted how her company has introduced some of the necessary training.

“We've done a lot of “lunch and learns,” where we bring workers in, have lunch and familiarize them with the basics of using the iPad,” says Suffolk's Collura.

Ready to Adopt More Support

“The biggest problem I have is telling people they need to wait” to use the technology so we can get support in place, says Andy Deschenes, BIM manager for construction management firm Consigli, headquartered in Milford, Mass. “It's a good problem to have,” he says. The firm is also using some standard approaches to rolling out the new technology in order to keep their support costs down. “You have to build a repeatable process and standardize templates on a project rollout,” he says.

Meanwhile, new construction apps and services continue to flood the marketplace and jobsites. Some of them are supported. Some are not.

Mike Stacy, a licensing executive for Zones, an Auburn, Wash.-based provider of IT licensing services, says he spends a lot of time helping firms keep track of company-owned assets on the jobsite to manage their own risks of using unlicensed software on jobs. For example, a jobsite might be using iPads, but other workers could be using PC-based tablets or other devices on the job. Licensing can get complicated