Developing software applications that solve real-world problems requires getting to know your market space. For software companies this typically involves aggregating data from a number of sources including customers, support personnel, enhancement requests, sales staff, and post-mortems from consulting engagements. While there is no doubt that normal requirements gathering techniques help, there is no better way to understand your customers’ needs than to “walk a mile in their shoes.” When working with companies in the AEC industry, getting a firsthand glimpse into how your software is being used can be an eye-opening and memorable experience.

Recently Robie Lewis and I had the opportunity to tag along with the lead Quality Examiner at an oil sands refinery construction site near Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta (Canada). At this facility, enormous reactors and miles of piping are used to process oil sands rich with bitumen into a wide range of synthetic crude oils. The construction project is part of an overall plant expansion designed to double the capacity of the facility. Luckily for us, our visit was on a sunny, warm day in July. I understand that this area of Canada can see temperatures as low as -40 degrees during the winter – BURRR!

In visiting the site, we were warned ahead of time that certified steel-toe boots were required, along with various other safety gear. Before being permitted on to the job site, a safety orientation program/test was administered which is mandatory for all visitors to the facility. The safety orientation program depicted the various dangers we would encounter. The reality of man vs BIG machine was very intimidating. Imagine staring straight up from the base of a 150 ft tall reactor which resembled one of NASA’s solid rocket boosters while a crane not 15 feet away is hoisting a 20-ton structure in the air.

Spending time with the Quality Examiners on the job site wearing their steel-toe boots, hard hats, safety goggles, and a fluorescent safety vest brought to life how they perform their inspection roles while interacting with a document control process. Taking the time to understanding the people, the process, and the environment is important when implementing valuable solutions. I know the information gathered from this experience will improve the overall solution for this customer and will undoubtedly influence future Document Locator implementations.

Photo: Robie and I suiting up for our tour of the construction site.

We heard from Ed Fry (Chevron) this morning. He talked about the challenges of managing the development and operation of large, long-lived capital projects. Here are some interesting numbers to think about:

• Chevron currently has 5-10 petabytes of information stored for their existing capital projects. Because of the high current rate of capital development and development process changes (like BIM) resulting in more data being generated, Chevron will double that amount of information in the next two years.
• Each project averages over 100k documents accumulated from activities across the globe. During project development, Chevron is under contractual obligation to respond to external inquiries within 10 days.
• Ed emphasized that regulations and efficient business practices demand consistency in specifications, business processes, and document workflow across all projects to preserve a record of who made what decision, why, and when. It reminded me of some of the implementation work we are doing with larger ColumbiaSoft customers like Burns & McDonnell, who seem to have the same vision.

Here’s an interesting idea that also came up: At the moment an owner decides that a new facility is needed, AEC actually becomes an impediment to the owner’s business. In other words, the faster the owner can get the facility, the better. So the question that AEC firms should be considering is, what is the value to the owner of reducing that impediment, and how can they share in that value? Ed gave the example of the contractor that repaired highway structures damaged in the 2007 California tanker fire. Caltrans estimated cost of repairs at “less than $20M,” but they got a bid of about $900k from C.C. Myers. That bid got the job and C.C. Myers made an extra $5M in early completion bonuses by working around the clock and finishing in less than half of the originally estimated time. In other words, they figured out the value and how to share in it.

Random notes:

• Lots of talk today about ISO 15926, which is the data integration standard initiative for FIATECH. Here’s how FIATECH describes the standard: “ISO 15926 is an International Standard for the representation of lifecycle information for process plants, including oil and gas production facility. This is specified by a generic, conceptual data model that is suitable as the basis for implementation in a shared database or data warehouse.” Wikipedia adds this comment: “This title is regarded too narrow by the present ISO 15926 developers. Having developed a generic data model and Reference Data Library for process plants it turned out that this subject is already so wide, that actually any state information may be modelled with it.” This standard enables a data model for the entire lifecycle of a complex facility, including all its components, so that the owner/operator has complete information at handover. Use of a standard data model also enables sharing, transfer, and migration of data among software systems. This obviously has potential application to document management systems, especially during the operation and maintenance (O&M) phases of a facility.
• I also caught a talk by Bruno Berti on “Visibility and Efficiency across the Project Lifecycle.” Bruno is Sr. Director of Product Management at Meridian Systems. Bruno talked about the need to extend information accumulated in the design and build phases in a useful way through the O&M phase. Later, I talked with Bruno 1:1 about how we are extending Document Locator into Prolog Manager to ensure that all documents related to a Prolog record are correctly linked and available. Since ColumbiaSoft will be exhibiting jointly with The Cram Group at the Meridian user conference in May, Bruno requested a demo of Document Locator and the Prolog Integration Module. I’m looking forward to getting his reaction.

Day 1 at FIATECH, and I thought the most interesting session was by Barry LePatner, who focused on “How to fix America’s broken construction industry.” As you can tell, LePatner argues that Construction is uniquely broken among U.S. industries, and is essentially continuing to do business the same way and with the same technology as 100 years ago. Here are some “factoids” from LePatner that caught my ear:

• In 2007, $1.7T in new construction was contracted, representing 5% of GDP and 10M workers.
• 92% of those workers are in firms smaller than 20 people.
• The U.S. will need to go from 400B sq ft to 827B sq ft of buildings by 2030.
• In that same period, the rest of the world will build 23 completely new cities with over 10M people each – and the U.S. will be competing in the same world market for material and skilled labor.
• A recent meta-study found that 50% of all construction labor in the U.S. is wasted – mostly due to scheduling inefficiencies. This amounts to $120B in waste per year.
• All other industries in the U.S. have increased productivity by an average of 250% since 1964 – Construction has decreased productivity by 25%.
• Across industries, investment in IT returns 3-5 times the increase in productivity as does investment in machinery alone.

LePatner is arguing that this state of affairs cannot continue, and that a combination of new contracting methods and new technology will be required to consolidate and transform construction firms into an efficient and profitable national-scale industry. Some of that technology will be on the design side (like BIM), but improved collaboration has the potential to dramatically improve productivity at the job site.

If you want to read more, LePatner has written a number of articles and a new book on this subject: “Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets.”

Another of our customers has successfully used Document Locator to power document management within an intranet environment… we issued a release on how HITT Contracting Gets Organized just the other day. Actually, much of the credit goes to our partner The Cram Group for getting HITT up and running. Now, HITT’s 700+ employees are using their intranet to share and collaborate in an organized way, with document management at the core of information control. So many companies face difficulties sharing information using email, shared folders, and FTP. Intranets are one way to help improve the situation, but they alone don’t necessarily put information under proper management. Intranets are like rooms… spaces where people can meet, share and exchange information, while document management adds a layer of control over information with versioning, notifications, approvals, workflow and more.

One of our customers at a large engineering firm used the term “User Belligerent” recently in a talk he gave, speaking about how difficult some software is to use. I couldn’t agree more.

It seems so many software companies fall into the mistaken belief that their product is so great, so useful, that it doesn’t matter how challenging or complicated it is for the end-user. But, in the end, end-users usually have the last say. If the product is “user belligerent”, end-users will simply not use it. Or, if they do use it, they will not use it well. So the moral of the story is: when comparing products and determining all the key requirements, at the end of the day… ask yourself if the choice you’re about to make is “user belligerent”.