Industry Disruption

Kick in the Door: It’s Time to Digitise

Visualise technology being used at Construct//Disrupt in June

Change is coming

The government has mandated that all of its projects employ BIM by 2016. Yet according to the Software Advice BuyerView Survey, a company that helps buyers connect with construction software vendors, 52% of us still rely on pen and paper for our daily operations. So how do we initiate the move from tradition to disruption? Firstly, we need to identify what we are moving towards.

What is BIM?

The UK Government defines BIM as “a collaborative way of working, underpinned by the digital technologies which unlock more efficient methods of designing, creating and maintaining our assets”. In essence, BIM encompasses so much more than just digitising current processes – that’s the means but is not the end. Improving and increasing collaboration and the sharing of data is the endgame of BIM, which can be facilitated with effective construction software. Big Data has revolutionised so many other spheres – why not ours?

Real savings in real time

BIM’s core focus is to improve our industry. Despite this, more than half of us still cling to traditional pen and paper use in order to get work done. We are not only creating more work for ourselves, we are also wasting time, money, and valuable resources. According to the U.K. government, £804m was saved in 2013 and 2014 largely due to the use of BIM on projects. Digital Built Britain is real and has tangible savings for the firms that realise this. How do we convince those that have not yet digitised that the benefits far outweigh the costs? How do we cross the chasm into the twenty-first century?

Adopting innovation

In a world where technology has made it possible to share information and data at the click of a button, the industry cannot afford to remain stagnant. Construction is at an impasse; digitise or risk being left behind. The question now is how do we move along the Technology Adoption Curve, to diffuse new innovations and ways of working across organisations?

As with any change, there will be resisting forces. The Software Advice survey found that one of the biggest barriers to the investment in construction software is the perceived learning curve for users. Mindlessly digitising is not the point; engaging and empowering individuals at all levels of the organisation and the supply chain is.

This emphasises the importance of the roles of BIM managers, coordinators and champions. The industry needs them to foreground user-friendly technologies and empower individuals to work more efficiently and collaboratively. Ground-up adoption of new technologies is key to the diffusion of innovation and BIM managers have a key part to play in this.

What does all this mean for me?

The construction industry is evolving. Technology has given us the ability to reach heights we could have never imagined thirty years ago. By 2016 all public sector projects will use BIM. Positive change is coming, but only with the collaboration of people can we hope to truly advance as an industry. It falls to BIM managers, coordinators, and thought-leading engineers and architects to drive this change. Innovation is on the horizon, the time to implement is now.

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We’d like to thank everyone who came to our first Startup Construction event last week, in association with The Bartlett School of Architecture and Capital Enterprise. The feedback we’ve had has been phenomenal. Please keep it coming!

We were incredibly fortunate to get Prof. Tim Broyd, Chair of Built Environment Foresight at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Vice President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, to MC the event despite his insanely busy schedule.

Prof. Broyd kicked off the evening with a fascinating introduction about the need to innovate the construction industry. He gave an overview of the major trends that effect the construction industry. He talked about the growing population, the ageing workforce (particularly in construction), the rate at which we are using the worlds resources, the need for more cost effectiveness during economic hardship, the ageing infrastructure in Britain and finally, the increase in computer connectivity- with mobile to mobile data flow on computers growing at 90% per year cumulative.

The introduction was fitting considering all the startups that presented are doing amazing things to deal with some of these problems.

Jozef Dobos, CEO of 3D repo, provided a visual feast with his 3D modelling software that offers version control- especially exciting given the new BIM standards that are being drawn up as we speak.

Heba Bevan from the University of Cambridge showcased a new form of tunnel sensor that feeds data about leaks, cracks, temperature and pressure impacts, is set to drastically change maintenance in tunnels and could save millions.

Matthew Holloway from Q-Bot has designed an actual robot that can detect where heat losses in buildings are occurring and fix them. Watching his presentation was literally like watching an 80s movie vision of the future, but unlike Back to the Future, Q-Bot is the real deal!

If you think that’s cool, Laurence Kemball-Cook’s presentation would blow your mind. His company, Pavegen Systems have developed flooring technology that converts kinetic energy from footsteps into electricity. He asked all of us to get up and jump on the count of three and told us that the energy generated from just that one jump could power a street lamp for a whole night.

Following on from Laurence was Alex Green from HandsHQ, a company that has made the laborious process of filling out Health and Safety forms easy. Those of you in the construction industry know that Health and Safety is number one priority on-site and anything that makes it quicker and easier to do can only be a good thing.

Finally, our very own Alex Siljanovski took to the stand to tell the audience about BaseStone. He talked about the mission to capture data lost between the site and the office, so that whenever something happens on-site (say a problem gets snagged or a drawing marked up) the data gets saved and can be analysed. “The big hairy audacious goal”, said Alex, “is to reduce abortive work to 0.”

The evening ended with a not-so-healthy amount of beer being drunk, whilst we all watched England live up to reputation and get slaughtered by Uruguay.

At least people went away feeling there is hope for the future of tech innovation in the Built Environment, if not for English football.