Oct 28 2008

BIM, the project information cloud and an AEC ‘Cluetrain’

Sometimes one’s reading and writing can throw up some fortunate coincidences. Take this morning, for example.

All three strands, in different ways, argue that Building Information Modelling (BIM), on its own, will not solve some of the fundamental collaboration challenges involved in delivering projects in the built environment.

BIM and mitigating risk

In her article, Susan reviews research findings from a Newforma-funded research project undertaken by Bruce Jenkins of Spar Point Research, entitled “Mitigating Risk in AEC Project Execution: Perspectives from Principals, Counsel and Insurers” during which Jenkins interviewed 11 people. The risk-averse nature of the construction industry is clearly described:

“Fear of liability and strong aversion to risk exposure were cited as the primary cause of the industry’s declining productivity. Lack of communication between different parties involved in projects has been ensured by the compartmentalizing of responsibility. The maintenance of business processes and project execution processes that further isolation between the different parties has become the norm as it allows each party to shift accountability to others in the asset-creation value chain. This situation, in which fear is wagging the dog’s tail, so to speak, has characterized the industry and fragmented the value chain, which in turn causes more things to go wrong in the end.”

The study’s research then suggests that a greater exposure to liability could in fact reduce the likelihood and severity of problems on projects, as, instead of avoiding liability and shifting risk, professionals look at controlling risk. Human aspects of project delivery were found to be critical to avoiding errors and omissions:

“a corporate approach and culture that valued “training and sensitizing” their employees to identifying risk and then staying on task with a process – rapid detection of a project going off track, and quick and targeted response to remedy the situation. In a nutshell – project execution.”

While tools such as BIM are said to address project execution issues, the study identified:

“uncertainty as to whether project execution can be addressed by digital technologies, while at the same time, respondents shared a strong sense of the need for these solutions and have definite ideas about what they should be able to accomplish”.

It is clear that there are people and process issues that need to be addressed as well as technology to support better collaboration (regular readers will know that this is a recurring theme in this blog – eg: Another good BIM viewpoint and People, processes and technology and the afore-mentioned 13 December 2007 post).

Interviewees suggested that BIM and other better automated tools will make it easier for AEC firms and clients to resolve their differences or avoid their having conflicts in the first place, highlighted untenable contracts as an issue, and criticised existing risk management practices (“finger-pointing [is] more attractive than problem-solving,” said one). One principal (Rich Nitzsche of Perkins+Will) said the single most important factor in reducing risk in AEC projects is:

“Transparent communications between all parties. A clear rendering of risk & reward, shared risk and benefit, and the elimination of adversarial roles is essential in achieving this. It sounds utopian, but it’s the sort of ideal that will embrace design assist, interdisciplinary coordination and other positive behaviors, one that will put a high premium on problem solving and none on blamecasting.” [my emphasis]

Lawyer Chris Noble felt BIM and other better automated tools had to be integrated with other improvements:

“It appears that this will be a very helpful factor, especially if these technological developments are accompanied by more collaborative and productive project delivery structures and procedures.”

Digital architectural collaboration

In his excellent post, David Harrison says he recently gave a presentation at Victoria University on his PhD work on digital architectural collaboration. He says that “whilst BIM is an excellent productivity tool it does not address many of the industry’s collaboration issues – in fact in many respects it compounds them”, before describing BIM as a “significant yet problematic collaboration technology” (I love his slide “BIM is not a golden bullet”). For example, David references the 2007 McGraw Hill SmartMarket report (see my 27 October 2007 post Software incompatibility bar to interoperability) to highlight how BIM does not address industry issues about use and re-use of data, and, I dare say, he probably has the same people and process issues identified above in mind too.

Rather than delve down into how we might address these problems, he outlines the need for an overriding set of digital collaboration principles, developing “Seven principles of the Project Information Cloud” (an allusion perhaps to current debates about ‘cloud computing’):

1. Simplicity

2. Ubiquity

3. Decentralisation

4. Modular design

5. Information awareness

6. Context sensitivity

7. Evolutionary semantics

Through application of these principles, David hopes we can evolve a collaborative vocabulary and establish Project Information Clouds within architectural projects: “These unbounded information clouds will link significant amounts of projects data into intelligent, loosely joined, knowledge-bases.”

In this context, I found myself thinking, once again, about BIMaaS (see my 26 August 2008 post AEC’s Software-plus-Services player to deliver BIMaaS? – which also links to a previous article by David) and CADaaS, and the utopian (? – that word again) notion of a building model being constructed from information held across an immense constellation of different hyperlinked sources.

This brings me neatly to atomicBIM….

atomicBIM

This has nothing to do with the nuclear industry; rather it is a suggestion, in an article entitled atomicBIM: Splitting Data to Unleash BIM’s Power, from John Tobin (author of the Proto-building article I wrote about in May 2008) that instead of creating ever larger, difficult-to-access BIM models, we should be conceptualising and structuring the BIM environment for quick and easy access:

“We could imagine an arrangement where BIM is comprised of many tiny pieces of data. We can call this atomicBIM—that is, BIM in small, discrete pieces of data. An atomized information structure would provide granularity and rapid access so that subsets of BIM information could be more easily accessed without a massive download.”

For John, such an atomicBIM approach requires that atoms of the BIM remain intact as they are passed from application to application, and that there will be authoring software and an integrative setting:

“Authoring software will populate a BIM environment with atoms, or add discipline-specific information to those atoms. … ultimately BIM authoring is unlikely to be the sole preserve of architects, engineers and other building designers; it will expand to include property managers, financiers, estimators, suppliers, procurers—in fact, anyone whose day-to-day job deals with the built environment.”

On the integration environment, John says:

“It is likely that the BIM “model” most people will interact with will be a static repository of atoms rather than a live interactive design environment. Each participant’s interactive BIM authoring software will produce or add atoms of data, placing them into this static context; the BIM environment will be the “ether” which manages those atoms.  … In an ideal arrangement, atoms will be able to be continuously “checked out” of the BIM repository, and authored anew with updated information.”

The foremost candidate to manage “BIM atoms” is, of course, the Industry Foundation Class (IFC) standard promoted by BuildingSMART (formerly IAI). The IFC is no longer a way of overcoming problems of poor interoperability, it has become a powerful means to manage geometric and associated data in a uniform way. The integration environment (the “ether”) is also being developed; some approaches build on the IFC approach, aggregating different models, while ‘model server’ environments tend towards centralised databases (John mentions Oracle in this context) that can be accessed by multiple team members.

Looking more long-term, John says atomicBIM will streamline BIM workflow:

  • “Extracting slices of data and processing them in any numbers of authoring applications
  • Enabling the use of thin-client devices for lean, efficient access to large datasets
  • Easing interoperability and aggregation of data from multiple sources.”

However, he is under no illusion about the scale of the technical challenge. “What is needed is a reassessment of our vision for the eventual BIM model,” he says, before continuing:

“… transitioning to a granular form of BIM will be a wrenching, but important re-alignment for the evolution of BIM. … Though our current BIM solutions have served us well in the last decade, they may not be setting us up for future success.  In particular, they have not created scalable, open or granular access to the information we create during design activities. The concept of atomicBIM will help us structure that information in a much more manageable way.” (my emphasis)

(Update (5 November 2008): I just came across Matt’s Dezignstuff blog posting about CAD in the Cloud. He, and his commenters, make the valid point about the scale of the processing power and bandwidth required to run what we currently understand as CAD applications, but then Matt discusses “distributed computing” – another concept that could be applied to the idea of atomicBIM.)

Interoperability between systems

Finally, in his email to me, Gustavo reiterated David’s theme of poor interoperability between systems and succinctly re-affirming why project team members still need to look at people and process issues (eg: contracts) rather than just technology. He writes:

“I’m still looking for the holy grail of collaboration between all these systems. Hardly a day goes by without me having to mediate in a project where one of the parties in the contract wants us to use their system and they can’t understand why we wouldn’t want to do it.”

While industry practitioners remain focused on working within existing approaches to technologies, structures and processes we will not see a ‘great leap forward’ of the kind envisaged when the BIM concept first began to emerge. What I think is needed is a grand vision – perhaps a development of the principles proposed by David Harrison and John Tobin, maybe with a pinch of Web 2.0 thinking and a healthy measure of ideas from the sustainability movement – and the emergence of, in effect, a new ClueTrain Manifesto* for the AEC or built environment world (this manifesto idea also cropped up in discussions before and during the day at the recent Be2camp 2008 in London).

(* Cluetrain co-author David Weinberger also wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joined – linked in David Harrison’s idea of ‘intelligent, loosely joined, knowledge-bases’. You can see a quick ClueTrain Review here from Michael Specht – thank to Mel for the link.)

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/10/bim-the-project-information-cloud-and-an-aec-cluetrain/

Oct 24 2008

Windows to go cloudy?

According to an article by Richard Waters in the Financial Times (Microsoft looks to cloud to open new windows – registration may be required), Microsoft may finally be ready to take a big leap into the world of cloud computing. He says the wraps are set to be taken off at a conference that the company is throwing for software developers in Los Angeles that starts on Monday.

Microsoft needs to set out a compelling vision to allay concerns among investors and customers that it’s falling behind its rivals in this space, including IBM Blue Cloud, Amazon EC2, Rackspace and Google. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has promised an “operating system that runs in the internet” – something he dubbed “Windows Cloud”.

It is an overdue move, as cloud computing services are already beginning to make inroads into the corporate IT world, Richard reports:

About 4 per cent of IT budgets are currently spent on the business applications, infrastructure software, servers and storage technologies that support cloud computing, according to IDC.

But by 2012, with the share up to 9 per cent, spending on this new approach to technology will account for a quarter of the annual growth in technology spending, making it an important new market for the entire industry.

Update (28 October): “It’s a transformation of our software. It’s a transformation of our strategy,” said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, yesterday when he previewed “Windows Azure“, the company’s new ‘cloud computing’ service, at the Professional Developers conference in Los Angeles (see: Internet.com news report; BBC’s Microsoft to battle in the clouds). There is little doubt that Microsoft has the financial muscle to build the huge data centres required to run applications in the cloud, but it still has some way to go to catch up with its rivals – a point that SaaS blogger Phil Wainewright makes in his commentary: Windows Azure: Microsoft mainstreams the cloud.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/10/windows-to-go-cloudy/

Oct 22 2008

A SaaS code of conduct?

Phil Wainewright, one of my favourite SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) bloggers, wonders whether it’s Time for a SaaS code of conduct. He mentions another recent Gmail outage, and makes the valid point that SaaS outages tend to get much more publicity than internal corporate Microsoft Exchange outages (and “Microsoft only warranties the CD the software comes on. There’s no guarantee the software itself will actually work.”). But the different delivery methods mean that SaaS customers have completely different expectations.

When (that’s a when, not an if) things go wrong, SaaS vendors need to respond quickly to their customers, Phil says. Customers should not be lulled into a false sense of security (‘it won’t fall over; if it does, only rarely’), and when the inevitable happens, they need to be kept properly informed and reassured. He proposes a five-point code of conduct. The key points are reproduced below, with my own commentary based on experiences at [my employer] BIW Technologies:

  • Spell out exactly what the contract does and doesn’t deliver – The BIW contract includes a Service Level Agreement that specifies the functionality of the BIW platform, gives monthly uptime commitments, and prescribes the levels of help desk support, information back-ups, utilisation monitoring and management, security provisions, and training, deployment and consultancy support.
  • Give customers a clear plan for when things do go wrong – BIW maintains its production environment in a specialist managed hosting facility that is separate to the ones used to host its corporate website and to manage email communications. In the event of a major outage, therefore, the company can quickly provide alternative sources for information in the rare event that the BIW system suddenly becomes inaccessible. Disaster recovery plans are shared with customers so that they know how BIW will return the service to active status, and how communications will be maintained.
  • Report live service level metrics – BIW constantly monitors its capacity statistics and captures and analyses figures weekly to predict growth trends. It hasn’t yet gone as far as Phil recommends in providing real-time data to its customers about their usage of its system, but this may just be a matter of time.
  • Have a customer insurance plan in place – Phil reckons the SaaS industry needs a properly funded plan that allows for an orderly transfer of their data and processes to a new home. There isn’t one for the industry as a whole yet, but BIW’s contingency arrangements include both a software escrow agreement and a contingency scheme whereby its managed hosting provider, Attenda, will continue to provide the BIW service for at least a further two months in the unlikely event of BIW folding.
  • Let customers leave whenever they like – BIW customers are not tied into long-term contracts. They tend to pay monthly or quarterly subscriptions for the delivery of specified levels of service, with rights to terminate the agreement and move their data elsewhere if they wish, subject to similar lengths of notice. Moreover, any moves would also be facilitated by BIW’s provision of customers’ project data in a recognised industry standard format (XML). Fortunately, such moves are very rare as for BIW – like many SaaS businesses – the key ‘S’ is not Software but Service: BIW knows that it needs to maintain high levels of service to retain its customers’ loyalty and limit ‘churn’.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/10/a-saas-code-of-conduct/

Oct 20 2008

CJ Twitters

No doubt inspired by their attendance at Be2camp 10 days ago (OK, I can be optimistic!), the good folk at UK construction trade mag Contract Journal are now on Twitter. Moreover, @contractjournal – laudibly – has so far resisted the temptation to simply splurge out a write-only feed of hourly, sporadically updated news links (like rival UK weekly New Civil Engineer – see previous post).

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/10/cj-twitters/

Oct 17 2008

Business and Web 2.0

An article in Information Age, Web 2.0 adoption faces workplace challenges (online here), says that while Web 2.0 technologies continue to penetrate the enterprise (see graph), many companies are encountering difficulties when trying to implement the disparate technology sets.

A McKinsey survey of 1988 executives suggests that tools such as wikis, blogs and social networks are increasingly being taken seriously and applied to complex business processes, but some organisations are struggling to tease value from them.

Earlier this year, the same publication published an article, Social networking within the enterprise, that highlighted how social media, with their easy information-sharing and powerful community features, proved popular when many knowledge management and collaboration projects had failed.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/10/business-and-web-20/

Oct 17 2008

Beware of the trolls

In the internet sense of the word, a troll, according to Wikipedia, is “someone who posts controversial and irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.” I have just decided to stop using the Building magazine discussion forums due to the noxious comments of two recently over-productive contributors.

The Building forum guidelines ask contributors not to “post any material which is knowingly false, inaccurate, abusive, hateful, harassing, sexually orientated, threatening or invasive of a person’s privacy, or any other material which may violate any applicable laws.” However, the value of a discussion forum quickly diminishes if contributors are allowed to repeatedly post provocative, poorly argued, illogical material, and – when they can’t sustain a debate – resort to crude stereotyping and name-calling.

Update (21 October 2008) – Phil Clark has written about the problem, Forums, Moderating and Tone, and the issues it throws up for him as a journalist in considering content-moderation.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/10/beware-of-the-trolls/

Oct 15 2008

SMEs under-estimate connectivity issues of SaaS adoption

A survey of over 270 small/medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by EasyNet Connect (see PDF) shows that, while many are ready to embrace Software-as-a-Service, they are often ignoring connectivity and security issues:

One in four respondents plan to move to cloud-based services or applications within two years, with around half (47%) expected to do so within five years. But, whilst respondents were quick to point out the business benefits of cloud computing, including cost savings (35.2%) and increased remote and flexible working (34%), few said they had planned to re-evaluate their Internet connectivity.

Just one in ten said they had a formal strategy that included consideration of Internet connectivity issues. Only 12% said they planned on increasing their Internet bandwidth to account for possible higher traffic levels, 13% said they would explore business continuity measures to safeguard their connection and only 9.2% said that they would put in place more stringent security measures.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/10/smes-under-estimate-connectivity-issues-of-saas-adoption/

Oct 13 2008

The new ‘extranet’ battleground

In the past couple of months, there has been a sudden explosion in the number of construction collaboration vendors offering process management solutions.

  • On 21 August, Aconex announced “a major upgrade to its Workflows module, which supports advanced document management in large or complex project environments”. The features apparently include “a wizard that allows users to quickly customize their workflows, a graphical builder for workflows templates and improved searching capability across workflows and their associated documents”.
  • A news release dated 6 September (but I’m sure published more recently) says Asite has delivered an upgraded online forms module to develop “a full-featured contract management module”. The forms support features such as rules, conditional formatting, calculated fields and multi-page forms, and by linking these forms to data stored in the Asite platform, complex workflows can be constructed on demand.
  • Last week, Business Collaborator announced the launch of BC5.2, the latest version of its project collaboration tool that “offers improved workflow management and interactions”.
  • And industry gossip suggests 4Projects is also hard at work developing its own process management solution.

Been there, done that

All four appear to be following a track already well-trodden by [my employer] BIW Technologies, which released its first workflow engine solution more than five years ago, in March 2003. At the time, BIW thus became the first of what had hitherto been regarded as the ‘extranet’ providers to move beyond document collaboration into the management of core business processes – a step that helped consolidate its position as UK market leader.

BIW also recognised that a ‘one size fits all’ approach was inappropriate, as common processes such as requests for information (RFIs), instructions and transmittals often varied between different companies and projects. By incorporating high levels of configurability into its platform, BIW accommodated a potentially unlimited range of client- and user-defined process requirements. I would therefore argue that BC CEO Sanjeev Shah’s claim — “We differ from other software providers because we ensure that the systems we implement truly reflect our clients’ working patterns, meaning they don’t need to go through the costly exercise of re-engineering their processes” — is wrong. The BIW platform has been enabling teams to replicate their existing processes electronically for five years. Its consultants also have years of contract administration experience: delivering suites of forms and reports associated with particular contracts such as the NEC3, whether used in its original or a bespoke version.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/10/the-new-extranet-battleground/

Oct 08 2008

Junk the myths

For the past week or more, I have been carrying around a newspaper cutting from the 29 September edition of The Guardian: a Media Guardian article by Professor Jeff Jarvis of the City University of New York (and the buzzmachine.com blog). I’ve finally got round to reading it properly and it’s fantastic stuff. In the article, Let’s junk the myths and celebrate what we’ve got, Jeff says we should accept the limitations of the internet and adopt a ‘glass half full’ attitude. His list of allegations probably makes familiar reading:

  • There’s junk on the internet. True
  • Most people watch junk. True
  • Anyone can say anything on the internet. True
  • There are inaccuracies on the internet. True
  • Wikipedia has mistakes. True.
  • We need a seal of approval for internet content. False.
  • Bloggers aren’t journalists. True and false.
  • People are rude on the internet. True.
  • The internet has no ethics. True.

The full article is well worth reading. It makes it clear that so long as you are aware of the internet’s shortcomings, they are not a reason to abstain from it, rather they should be a challenge to help improve the quality and accuracy of what’s out there. It is something that will no doubt appeal to some of the participants at Friday’s Be2camp Web 2.0 event in London.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/10/junk-the-myths/

Oct 07 2008

@NCEmagazine over-Tweets

A few weeks ago, I noticed (Construction gets Twittering) that UK trade magazine New Civil Engineer had started using Twitter to send out news alerts. At first, it was blasting about a dozen every hour, on the hour, but it then slowed it down a bit – to just five an hour, every hour…. I got a comment from Emap’s Suzie Daniels saying it was a Twitterfeed problem and that a fix was about to be deployed.

Well, it hasn’t, and – tired of having my Twitter page filled with NCE-badged repetition – I have finally deleted @NCEmagazine from the list of Tweeters I follow (and I know several others have done the same). I did Tweet about it, but NCE won’t pick it up as it doesn’t follow anyone and so is oblivious to the people it is alienating (strangely, Emap stable-mate @CNPlus quickly overcame similar problems and has become a useful service to follow). Clearly, the NCE team need to realise that social media is about conversations, not (repeated) monologues! Perhaps an anecdote we can discuss at the Be2camp unconference in London on Friday?

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2008/10/ncemagazine-over-tweets/

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