This is the author’s fifth and final posting summarizing a series of six Autodesk project delivery workshops that explored the relationship between emergent digital collaboration technologies and the AECO sector. The workshops were held worldwide over 18 months in 2018 and 2019.
Over the course of six Autodesk workshops on project delivery, more than 100 architects, engineers, builders and clients from around the world systematically unpacked the challenges and opportunities of technology-enabled design, construction, and building operation. They work in an unevenly digitized market filled with disparate solutions that reflect the disaggregation of the industry itself, and with an abundance of digital data that is rarely used—particularly across disciplines and silos. This transactional incompatibility, where data suited for a specific use is hard to exchange, makes achieving trust between processes and relying on digital exchange difficult.
The causes of these challenges run the gambit from a bewildering array of systems and software, incompatible business models across the supply chain, and a misalignment of goals and expectations among co-dependent players on projects. These symptoms arise from the acceleration of technology vendors deploying solutions faster than they can be absorbed and a lack of standards with which everyone can agree to use the resulting data. Prioritizing the avoidance of risk—and sidestepping ambiguous decision-making by clients—means that necessary conceptual and operational links in the supply chain are missing.
An array of possible solutions might be the balm for these ills. These could take the form of single data environments where information is trustable, digital performance agreements that augment traditional contracts, and new risk standards. But what might the world of trustable, digital delivery look like?
The ideas that emerged from workshop participants can be synthesized in three themes: technical integration, procedural flexibility, and cultural alignment. When considered together, these themes coalesce to create trustable processes and information.
Technical integration is the first step toward this goal. The internet is a good example of a desired end state of seamless tools and data. It is populated with a vast array of data types, interaction protocols, interfaces, and workflows. Yet somehow, through HTTP, indexing, and other underlying platforms, disparate—and untrained—users can find what they want.
Of course, designing and building is far more complex than, say, ordering laundry detergent online or requesting a ride to the train station—or is it? In both cases, invisible technology intermediates simple user interfaces to complex transactions with data structured in a way that is hardly apparent to the end user.
What if AECO data had the same protocols for creation, deployment, and use? Consumers don’t really care about the formats of the information—price, specifications, even images—that the manufacturer provided to Amazon when they made their order, nor do they need to understand how Lyft’s platform arbitrates ride requests, driver availability, or traffic conditions. The data is seamless, indexed, and simple to use.
The work processes of building will always be particular to specific, responsible parties in the delivery of a project—designers, builders, users—but those workflows both generate and consume data along the way. In that sense, workflows must both adapt to the particular responsibilities of one party, and able to consolidate logically with dependent procedures for others. For example, as an architect develops a building’s structural system using an abstract, schematic version of steel framing, her structural engineer is simultaneously sizing that frame and her fabricator is evaluating it for cost and construction logic. Each process relies on—but is independent from—the other, much like the factors arbitrated by a ride-sharing platform. The integration of these factors depends on standards and protocols that exist in support of this interdependence.
But none of these aspirations for the tools and processes of delivery are meaningful, much less possible, without a change in the underlying culture of the building sector itself.
As was once described to me years ago by John “J.T.” Taylor (then a doctoral candidate at Stanford University, now a professor and the associate chair for graduate programs and research innovation at Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering) early in his career, the construction supply chain has evolved to “sub-optimization to the point of failure.” The objectives of a project rarely align with those of the parties who deliver it. Similarly, the resulting rewards are unrelated. Lowest cost selection, risk avoidance, thin margins, and fragile business platforms prevail.
An industry aligned around building effectively—and being rewarded well for doing so—would necessarily work from refactored, digitally integrated, transparent project delivery models based on a new reliance on information. Data environments that can engender that trust are accessible, secure, and, most importantly, transparent.
The workshop participants were cautiously optimistic about this projective future. As a self-selected group of technology enthusiasts, they saw the possibilities of a digitally improved supply chain and hoped progress would accelerate as the industry embraces new ways of creating and sharing information. They encouraged Autodesk to continue pressing ahead on data platforms that achieve these goals.
It remains to be seen whether technology providers, ranging from AEC stalwarts such as Autodesk and Trimble to bigger players like Google, can create such places for AEC customers to work, and thereby catalyze industry change in much the same way that early concepts of integrated project delivery emerged from the informational transparency of emergent BIM. Or perhaps the exigencies of modern construction—cost and schedule pressures, labor shortages, climate change—will inspire the industry to organize and collectively demand such solutions from the vendors, with the best solution winning the prize as an industry standard.
Digitally integrated project delivery methods do not guarantee nirvana. But the building industry, so long hamstrung, might bend toward efficiency, effectiveness, and maybe even greater profitability. A new generation of designers and builders could anticipate trust in information and a work process that produces an industry that was responsible, productive, respected, and dare I say, fun. We can only hope.
From the three workshop summary diagrams, the author concludes that information is a vector for trust. It is necessary to align goals, risk objectives, and ultimately value delivered to projects. Therefore, information systems that support project delivery must achieve these ends to engender team, firm, project, and industry success. (See the original flowchart by the author here.)
