I live in a Google World but I work in a Pre-Google One

Take a moment and look back in time with me—just a few years. Do you remember how you used to go about searching for information on a new topic? If you are like me, you went to the library, searched through a paper card catalogue, and frequently found that the books you wanted weren't in the library's collection. You then filled out an inter-library loan request that allowed you to search more libraries. You waited two weeks, and when the books you requested finally arrived, you found out that they didn't quite answer your needs. You had no choice but to start the process all over again.

If you recognize that look back in time, it is a memory of a pre-Google world—a time when library information was inaccessible and essentially hidden because it was disconnected.

Today when doing a similar search, we go to an Internet browser and type in a word or phrase and immediately hundreds of articles, books, and opinions are available to browse. If required, we can often drill down into that information by contacting the author, all within minutes of starting a search. What an amazing change in just a few years!

I live in a Google World.

I work for a general contractor. On a work table in my office are the preliminary paper plans for a $100 million dollar hospital wing. They are typical 2D drawings—large paper sheets with symbols on the pages that direct you to other sheets of paper with still more symbols, and still more re-directions. Specifications' books with information associated with the drawings are nearby. If you were to step outside my office, you would see many others within my firm turning other large plan sheets like the ones on my desk, or you would see them looking in manuals, rolling measuring devices, digitizing points, and transferring extracted estimating and constructing information into software. If you could see outside my firm, thousands of others like me and my co-workers are turning other large sheets of paper, attempting to connect disconnected construction details. Beyond our offices in dozens of job trailers, rolled out on the floors of buildings, or atop large tool boxes are still more sheets of paper, as others grapple with converting 2D disconnected information into 3D in their heads before being able to produce 3D for real.

All of these paper layers of disconnected information perused by thousands of people everyday are accepted inefficiencies within my industry. It is such a familiar system that it is difficult to imagine it any other way, and even if you do recognize the inefficiency, you know that to squeeze the inefficiency out of a system of 2D disconnected information would be very difficult. The disconnected inefficiencies are justified by comfort with familiar skill sets; the practicality of tight software, training and hardware budgets; and by our sensible aversion to the inherent risk of adopting something new and untried. These inefficiencies are entwined in traditional contract types, business practices, and errors and omission policies. But these inefficient disconnections come at a steep and uncalculated cost to our clients.

I live in a Google World but I work in a pre-Google world of disconnected construction information.

Up until recently, there really hasn't been much of an alternative to the disconnection and inefficiency in my work world. But the new phenomenon of Building Information Modeling (BIM) has the potential of moving us a step closer towards the goal of connecting more construction information in a better way, and of allowing users to harvest valuable construction data more easily. BIM may even be a tipping point software allowing firms to rapidly capture more market share by delivering a better and less costly product to our clients, by offering new services, and by being able to answer hitherto unanswerable questions.

A world of fully connected 3D construction information is still a way off, but its approach seems to be accelerating. As the database estimating developer for my firm, I have frequently bored my co-workers over the past years with visions of how the 2D design data that we receive will someday payout a whole host of ancillary and valuable data in 3D. "Someday," I've said, "the lines in a CAD drawing will carry a lot more information than just a color and line type." "Someday, we will link CAD objects directly to estimating assemblies." "Someday, the drawing will be the estimating database." "Someday, all of this will be connected." They have always listened politely—if not completely—but recently they have started to listen longer and more closely. They now stop to ask questions.

My guess is that BIM's connectedness will help to create a better continuum of processes, and because it will help it will be widely adopted. Right now, BIM makes builders somewhat less designer dependent—by allowing us to build upon the designer's 2D drawings and then extract typically unavailable information. BIM creates an opportunity for us to provide new services and to answer novel questions. BIM has the potential to help envision things like the sequence of construction events, or the relationship of water tables to foundations, or even the flight paths of emergency helicopters through a matrix of tower cranes—all these are tasks that my own firm has done with BIM. It opens a window to views that are not typically available from the information that is currently provided by design. BIM can help us speed production and reduce waste in the field. BIM may help to further commoditize the construction process by changing the content of bid packages and the strategies of bidding. It will challenge the design community to provide information that typically isn't being generated using traditional drawings.

It is probably only human to want Incremental Change. Incremental Change is obvious. It is paced. It is predictable. It plays nicely with schedules and budgets. Disruptive Change, on the other hand, is difficult to see at first and sets its own unpredictable timetable and is indifferent to budgets and tradition. Disruptive Change demands attention and when it eventually becomes dominant, it sees no point in taking prisoners. Will BIM follow a path of pleasant and predictable Incremental Change or will BIM be a wild and Disruptive Technology—one so powerful that it will indifferently rip slow changing firms up by their roots and discard them? Only time will tell, but my guess is that any technology that can better connect construction data, like Google has connected other data, will be simultaneously jarring and highly efficient.

If our business lives weren't complicated enough, in attempting to understand and navigate through a new technology like BIM, we also need to simultaneously keep our eyes on other related technologies that when married to BIM will play a critical role in accelerating new construction processes. The world is now awash in fiber optics cables. These cables spider web their way across the globe and are said to be used to only 5% of their massive capacity. They sell at bargain rates that will likely drop further because of technological advances. Distance, languages, transfer times, and H-1Bs—the historic barriers to tapping into less expensive and excellent talent—are now less important because of these cables. Complex design data can now be generated at a reduced cost and transferred easily, and only tariffs or Luddite upheavals will reduce the transfer of work through these conduits from traditional locations to others. The speed of the transfers of complex design data will only be spurred on by a relentless push for innovation at reduced cost.

Beyond BIM and a glut of fiber optics capacity, there is still more to watch. What are the next Gehrys thinking and from which corners of the world will they emerge? What do the designers that now send kids racing through first-person-shooter games like Counter Strike, or massive-multi-player-on-line-role-playing-game environments like SecondLife, have to offer to the design and construction community? How will mining Google Earth satellite data, or integrating laser-cloud technology, or radio frequency identification tags, fit into a New-View-AEC-World? I don't know the answers to these questions but we will likely want to harvest everything that these and other technologies have to offer.

I work in a Pre-Google World—but not for much longer.

This essay was influenced by the following books:

• One World Ready or Not. William Greider, Simon and Schuster, 1997.
• The Innovator's Dilemma. Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School Press, 1997.
• The Tipping Point. Malcom Gladwell, Little, Brown and Company, 2000.
• The Deviant's Advantage. Ryan Mathews and Watt Wacker, Crown Business, 2002.
• China, Inc. Ted C. Fishman, Scribner, 2005.
• The World is Flat. Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

About the Author

Tom Sweeney is a member of J.H. Findorff and Son Inc.'s Preconstruction Department, focusing on Timberline Estimating, BIM, and emerging construction trends. J. H. Findorff and Son Inc.is a self-performing general contractor with offices in Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The firm has been in continuous operation since 1890. Findorff is currently ranked 265 on Engineering News Record's Top 400 Contractors. Tom can be reached at tsweeney@findorff.com.

Note: The views expressed in Viewpoint articles are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect those of AECbytes. Also, no advertising or sponsorship is accepted for Viewpoint articles.

Viewpoints > Issue #16 > Printer-friendly format