Technology Adoption and Implementation at HOK

Close to three years ago, AECbytes published a case study of the technology implementation at the firm, GHAFARI Associates. This was the time when BIM (building information modeling) was still in the early adoption phase, making GHAFARI stand out as one of the few firms who were not only implementing it successfully within a single discipline, but also in a highly integrated, multi-disciplinary fashion. Since then, the use of BIM has continued to grow to the point where its deployment in AEC firms is almost taken for granted—it would be hard to find a leading AEC firm today that is not using BIM, although the scope and scale of the implementation can vary significantly. At the same time, we are also seeing the increasing use of newer technologies for tasks such as analysis, project planning, project management, internal and external collaboration, design review and coordination, estimating, visualization and communication, and so on.

While many of these technologies and their implementation continue to be presented and discussed by AEC professionals at conferences such as AIA TAP, Autodesk University, and Bentley’s BE conference, providing the industry with valuable snippets of information, this does seem like a good time to re-visit the issue of technology adoption and study how it is being applied across a firm as a whole. And what better firm to start this with than one of the top ranking architectural firms in the world, HOK? AECbytes readers will already be familiar with the Viewpoint article “buildingSMART (get over it)” by Mario Guttman, Senior Vice President and Firmwide CAD Director of HOK, that was published in August 2005. This was the time when HOK had just started transitioning from ADT to Revit and the IAI (International Alliance for Interoperability) had coined the term buildingSMART to refer to its interoperability mission. Patrick MacLeamy, CEO of HOK, is well known in the AEC industry as one of the foremost champions of interoperability and he continues to be the Chairperson of the Executive Committee of the IAI. He is also the author of the “MacLeamy curve,” which he first presented at the General Session on BIM at the AIA 2005 National Convention and which has, since then, been part of most presentations on BIM and AEC technology that I have seen.

Let’s take a look at what technologies are currently being implemented in HOK, how the firm plans out its technology adoption, and what buildingSMART really means to HOK.

Overview of HOK

HOK was founded in 1955 by George Hellmuth, Gyo Obata and George Kassabaum, and has grown to become a firm of over 2,500 employees across 24 offices located in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.  Recent industry rankings include #1 Architectural/Engineering Firm by Engineering News-Record in April 2008, #2 Architectural Firm by Building Design (UK) in January 2008, and #2 Interior Design Practice by Interior Design in January 2008. The firm’s services include architecture, engineering, and interior design, as well as landscape architecture and urban design. It also offers strategic planning and construction services, thus encompassing the entire lifecycle of a project. It has worked in nearly every market sector across the world, including commercial, residential, health care, entertainment, retail, hospitality, education, government, corporate, aviation, and transportation. Some of the firm’s recent projects are illustrated in Figure 1.

How Technology is Managed and Implemented

The technology implementation at HOK is managed by a distinct entity called ATG (Advanced Technology Group) that is headed by the CIO of the firm. It is the ATG that oversees the technology implementation across all the offices of HOK. It has three main divisions for the varied range of technologies that are implemented—IT, CAD/BIM, and Knowledge Management—with dedicated personnel for each. ATG would like to have at least one person for each of these three divisions in each of its 24 offices; it has most of these roles filled, but not all. The total strength of the ATG is currently around 80 people, which it sees as a good number for supporting HOK’s total employee count of over 2500 people.

With technology becoming much more pervasive and a common component of every desktop, the ATG is finding that it needs to redefine itself and its mission. It no longer needs to spend as much time supporting the rest of the firm as it used to, as many of the designers, project managers, and other staff are quick to catch on to the technologies and don’t need the constant hand-holding that was required in the past. The ATG is therefore attempting to take on a more strategic role where it can take a step back, evaluate all current and emerging technologies, and define a clear implementation plan, with a precise understanding of the benefits and challenges of each technology and how it fits into the overall scheme at HOK. Managing change effectively is critical, and the ATG seeks to find a balance between older and newer technologies, so as to avoid changes that are too drastic and can affect the firm’s productivity. The ATG is also turning its focus increasingly towards customer service and support, which is important given that the client now sees and interacts a lot more with the technology being used in a firm. In general, the move is towards being more customer-focused rather than technology-focused.

One of the biggest challenges for the ATG has been to implement a single global technology infrastructure across all the offices of HOK with a single global support team. This was important for a firm like HOK that has grown rapidly both by acquisitions and organically, and letting the individual offices continue to work and implement technology independently would have become an operational nightmare. Having a centralized technology plan not only allows the technology deployment to be more effective and efficient, it also allows for some level of uniformity and standardization across all the offices. This is becoming increasingly critical as projects are getting more global and are often worked on by teams from multiple offices. A case in point is the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) project in Saudi Arabia (see Figure 2), being built as an international, graduate-level research university dedicated to inspiring a new age of scientific achievement. More than six of HOK’s offices contributed to this project, and the close integration and tight collaboration that this required would have been extremely difficult to achieve if the offices were not working on a common technology platform. Having a common set of tools and standards also makes training and support a lot easier.

BIM Implementation

BIM continues to be one of the most important technologies at HOK, and the focus of the ATG has been to make sure that it is implemented really well. The firm started to move from ADT (Autodesk Architectural Desktop, now called AutoCAD Architecture)—to Revit in 2005 and all of its new projects are now being done in Revit. Some of the older projects that were started in the pre-Revit days continue to be done in ADT or AutoCAD, depending upon which application was used for it. In all, almost 2/3rds of the firm’s projects are now in Revit. Even though HOK was using ADT in very advanced ways, using the model-based concept and with a large amount of custom programming—see for example, its Royal London Hospital project which won the 2007 AIA TAP BIM award in the “Support for Human Use and Innovative Program Requirements Using BIM” category—it made the decision to switch to Revit recognizing that it was more intuitive, more powerful, and had the potential to be a better application for implementing BIM than ADT.

As architectural design is the major discipline practiced by HOK, Revit Architecture is the central BIM application. The firm also does some amount of engineering work in two of its offices, for which it is using Revit Structure and AutoCAD MEP (formerly called Autodesk Building Systems). The eventual goal is to move towards the Revit platform for the MEP engineering as well. For the other offices, engineering is done by external consultants, all using BIM, and the models are freely shared between them. If they are using Revit, the collaboration is much easier; otherwise, models are shared in 3D DWG format (as AutoCAD solids). An example of HOK’s BIM implementation on a project is shown in Figure 3. The use of BIM is allowing design issues to be found and resolved much earlier on compared to the earlier drawing-based process. It is also allowing cost estimating to be done at a very early stage, enabling both the clients and designers to make critical decisions early on in the project. 

HOK now sees BIM as a normal part of its practice rather than something that it needs to market independently and sell as a competitive advantage. Thus, it is continuing to market its design expertise rather than its BIM expertise. From its perspective, there is no question of charging more for doing BIM, as has often been debated in professional circles, unless the client is asking for a specific BIM-based deliverable such as a model for facilities management. The firm is committed to using BIM to be able to work more efficiently and accurately, and the added value that this provides to the client is more of a bonus rather than an extra service for which they should paying more. In fact, clients have now come to expect the use of BIM on their projects, and part of what the ATG does from a BIM implementation standpoint is to help the clients better understand BIM and how it works.

The main challenge that HOK is facing with its BIM implementation is the sharing of Revit models across the WAN due to their large file sizes. The solution that Revit currently offers for this problem—breaking down a large model into smaller sub-models that can then be collated together by linking—remains somewhat problematic, as it requires the modeling work to be pre-divided among the project teams. It does not allow for a more flexible and fluid scenario where any team member is free to apply their expertise to any part of the design. HOK has implemented various remote computing solutions, such as those offered by Citrix, HP, and Microsoft, as well as home-brewed ones, to deal with this problem, but none of these has proved to be fully effective in solving the problem. The big question here is whether the solution to efficient sharing of large BIM models will emerge from the AEC industry—perhaps by Autodesk, given that the file size problem is primarily with Revit—or whether we will have to wait for solutions to this to emerge from other design domains or the general computing industry. The model server technology, where the entire project is stored and accessed from a central location, does seem to have potential, but Revit does not run on a model server, so that option cannot be explored.

Another big challenge for HOK, as it is for other AEC firms as well, is hiring and tracking talent, particularly in the area of BIM. Even though BIM has now been around for a few years, it is still difficult finding people that are good with BIM. And while fresh graduates are certainly more computer savvy and quick to pick up new technologies, BIM represents a new professional challenge. In the past, fresh graduates typically spent their first few years drafting, and in the process slowly learning how a building is put together. But with BIM, they need to know how to put a building together before they can use it properly, so there really is no extended period of apprenticeship and learning as there used to be in the past. Thus, while architectural schools might be extending their curriculum to cover BIM, this might not really solve the talent problem for the AEC industry in the near term.

Other Key Technologies

In addition to the Revit suite for BIM and AutoCAD Architecture for older projects, HOK is using and exploring a large number of design applications, as listed in the spreadsheet shown in Figure 4. All of these are divided into various categories such as Standard, Approved, Research, and so on, an explanation of which is also shown in Figure 4. As you can see, the approach to technology adoption is very systematic, which is one of the key objectives and tasks of the ATG. Applications have to go through several stages of exploration, research, and approval before they become part of the standard set of applications that is deployed across the firm. The design and visualizations applications that have already achieved this status at HOK should come as no surprise, as they are among the most popular ones in architectural practice—SketchUp, 3dsMax, and Adobe’s Creative Suite comprising Photoshop and Illustrator. It was interesting  to also find SketchBook Pro on this list (see a brief overview of this application in AECbytes Tips and Tricks); it seems to have filled the gap that was left behind from the discontinuation of Autodesk Architectural Studio, an application that many at HOK greatly appreciated.

NavisWorks is used extensively, not only for combining linked models and being able to view the whole project much more easily and efficiently than in Revit, but also for allowing non-experts to visualize and explore the model. In addition to using NavisWorks for internal collaboration, it is also used for external collaboration, allowing all disciplinary models to be brought together for design coordination and clash detection.

For energy analysis, no application has made the “Standard” list yet, but Ecotect has been approved, and IES and Green Building Studio are being explored as well. That said, most of the energy analysis at HOK is still handled by outside consultants. In HOK’s perspective, the connection between BIM and sustainable design is still difficult. The BIM model serves as a place for storing and evaluating decisions, but it is often not suitable for use by the analytical tool and needs to be simplified or recreated.  In addition, there are a lot of assumptions that go into energy analysis, which really need specialized knowledge and expertise. Also, many of the decisions that go into designing sustainable buildings are very qualitative and need to be balanced out with other decisions about the building. Therefore, claiming that a technology like BIM can enable sustainable design oversimplifies the problem and is misleading to a large extent.

On the other hand, the ability of BIM to enable cost analysis early on is extremely useful for enabling critical decisions about the project to be made sooner. HOK has an in-house construction services group, which uses the quantitative data extracted from the Revit models to do preliminary cost analysis for its projects. The firm has recently started dabbling in Innovaya’s Visual Estimating application to see if that helps to make the cost estimating process more efficient. HOK does not, however, do detailed cost analysis, as that would require the creation of a highly structured Revit model, the kind a contractor would typically create.

HOK relies primarily on Revit’s ODBC export to capture the model data for most of its analyses, except in cases where the analysis tool is directly integrated with Revit. This is true, for example, with Trelligence Affinity, the programming and space planning application that is directly integrated with Revit, allowing for program analysis—getting the spatial data from the Revit model to validate the design. Given that strategic planning is an important part of HOK’s services, it is taking a serious look at Affinity to see how it could be helpful.

Apart from design tools, other key applications that are used at HOK include Deltek for financials and Newforma Project Center, which is deployed firm-wide for project information management, including email management. HOK is hoping that the ongoing maturation of the CA (contract administration) tools in the recent and future releases of Newforma (described in my review) can ultimately replace the custom ones it had developed in-house. Given the distributed, global presence of the firm and the increasing multi-office work on projects, real-time collaboration is critical, for which the technologies being deployed include Cisco’s TelePresence and PolyVision’s THUNDER.

Recall that one of three groups of HOK’s ATG is Knowledge Management (KM), which we in the AEC industry are starting to see an emerging need for. It was only recently that AECbytes published the Viewpoint article, “A Case for Knowledge Management in the AEC Industry” by Doris Pulsifer of SOM, another leading firm in AEC. At HOK, KM is all about moving from an unstructured to a structured way of organizing information, so that it is easily accessible when needed. The information that needs to be structured is not just project data, but also design knowledge and expertise, best practices, critical design decisions about projects and why they were made, and other historical data. In addition to being a useful reference for design, KM is also critical to provide the necessary business intelligence to a firm’s leaders for better decision-making. So far, HOK has been using a variety of solutions for different aspects of KM, including a SQL server, Microsoft Sharepoint and PerformancePoint, Newforma Project Center, and even design solutions such as Revit and Trelligence Affinity. But, as was the case with model sharing, no solution has emerged that can handle most of the KM requirements. Given the lack of a satisfactory commercially available KM solution, HOK is deploying its in-house development resources to develop its own solutions. In fact, most of its internal development is now focused on the KM piece.

BuildingSMART at HOK

In 2005, the IAI (International Alliance for Interoperability), developer of the open-standard IFC file format, launched a major re-branding initiative by referring to IFC-enabled BIM interoperability as buildingSMART. This was because the notion of IFC-based interoperability was not making much headway into actual AEC practice, despite increasing discussions of interoperability in AEC technology forums, as well as critical endorsements from the GSA mandating the use of IFC-based BIM. The buildingSMART Alliance is now a formal organization under NIBS (National Institute of Building Sciences) and is continuing to work on open interoperability and full lifecycle implementation of building information models.

HOK is very interested in industry advancement towards interoperability, and is strongly committed to the buildingSMART Alliance and their goals. In the meantime, it is finding that the lack of interoperability due to proprietary data formats is not always an impediment. Models are shared in native Revit format—if the consultants are also using it—or in the form of AutoCAD solids. The use of NavisWorks, which can bring models of so many different file formats together, also seems to have mitigated the interoperability problem to a certain extent. However, HOK is concerned that too much reliance on proprietary solutions may be limiting in the future, and still strongly supports the need for interoperability and open data standards.

In addition to the industry use of the term, buildingSMART at HOK has an additional meaning that applies to promoting the use of BIM within the firm, so that people can work smarter and more efficiently. As such, BIM implementation is a challenge, and is more so in large firms such as HOK, with over 2500 employees. In addition to BIM, Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) is the other main component of buildingSMART. Even though BIM and IPD have been addressed by different constituencies so far—with BIM being promoted by the technology leaders and IPD being promoted by business leaders—HOK believes that they will eventually converge, as shown in Figure 5.

Conclusions

A few years ago, HOK made the commitment to BIM and embarked upon the goal of becoming a full Revit firm within 3 years. While the firm has not fully realized that goal yet, it is well on its way there with Revit being used on 2/3rds of its projects. This is impressive, given the size of the firm and the number of locations across the world it is distributed.  It was also interesting to find that HOK does not consider simply using BIM as a differentiator, but is instead focused on implementing BIM well, and finds that to be its competitive advantage from a technological standpoint. The firm continues to remain very client-oriented, focused on understanding and meeting the client’s requirements from a project rather than pursuing its own agenda and developing a signature style. This is also reflected in its use of BIM, which is focused on the needs of the client and on the specific requirements of the project rather than in exploring unusual forms and designing offbeat architecture. This has allowed HOK to avoid some of the difficulties that many architectural firms have had with using BIM to support the design of organic building forms. Now that the firm has established a widespread internal expertise with BIM, it is able to support these more progressive designs as well.

HOK is looking ahead to IPD enabled by BIM, and sees major changes in the architectural profession, including lots of consolidation. It hopes that the new technological changes will bring more science into the process of designing and constructing a building, and lead to a more systematic way of project delivery.

It was interesting to get a real and candid picture of the technology implementation at HOK, without all the marketing hype that usually accompanies vendors’ accounts of how their solutions are being used by firms. Hopefully, this insight into how HOK approaches and manages its technology implementation, and the kind and range of solutions it is using, will be helpful to other AEC firms, both large and small, as they move forward with their technology plans.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Ken Young, Senior VP and CIO, and Mario Guttman, Senior VP and Firmwide CAD Director, for taking the time to talk with me about technology implementation at HOK, and for providing me with some resources that I could use. I would also like to thank Miles Walker, VP and Firmwide CAD Manager, for supplying some of the illustrations used in this article.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

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