The Digital Dryshack for March 15
Welcome to the Digital Dryshack, the first post under our new name, (in actuality post #40).
Hence the vol. 1, #1 title.
Pop quiz: See if you can find a term that doesn’t fit in with the others:
BIM. The Cloud. iPad. Android. Smart Phone. App Store. Construction.
Construction? Nope, the correct answer to that question is “None of the Above.”
Yep, our traditional, conservative, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” industry is under full-on, frontal attack by the relentless, irrepressible march of Technology. In case you didn’t notice, the solid underpinnings of the way our industry has done business for generations is passing quickly, right before our eyes. TME, The Military Engineer magazine, had an excellent article last month, “BIM meets the Cloud.” Its author aruged that BIM’s real potential reaches far beyond its well-known strengths of clash detection and visualization capabilities, all the way to multi-lingual global bid solicitation to facility lifecycle management. A lot of us are just getting used to the idea that we can see a building’s interior before it’s built. And along comes a guy who predicts bidding on a job on a set of digital plans posted on the Cloud, in multiple languages, while the facilities manager is looking at a 3-d model of an air handler, removing the cover, developing a phased maintenance plan, and ordering the correct filters and parts that he will need in its first five years of operation.
In ENR’s recent survey of our industry’s technology, respondents were most satisfied with their BIM tools, mobile apps, and new collaboration tools, in that order. And those 3 favorites are arguably only one. Shift the perspective a wee bit on those three favorite technologies: What it’s really telling us is that BIM’s mobility, its easy portability of its digital information, is promoting unprecedented collaboration! The biggest downside to the new techonologies’ efficiency noted in the survey is still the (in)compatibility of those various components. As that challenge is gradually overcome, so will the adoption of the new methodologies continue to overwhelm the old school. Adopt or get out of the way, lest the Ides of March claim your company as another victim. Tech marches on.
