Changing Landscape of the New Normal in AEC

Dr. Nelson Ogunshakin, CEO of FIDIC, hosted the first of a series of webinars arranged by FIDIC’s committees, entitled FIDIC Covid-19 Webinar Series 2021 – Working in the New Normal. The webinars focus on a wider range of topics of interest to Member Associations and companies within the consultancy.

The Nightingale hospital in Harrogate will revert to its original use as a convention centre

FIDIC stepped up to lead the global response to the unprecedented challenges faced by the architecture and construction industries.

Recent news suggests that companies will reduce their offices or office space in city centers in the new normal. The question posed to panelists was, how much do you think? By what percentage?

“Many people say we don’t need the office anymore, we can work from home,” said Dr. Ogunshakin.

Those on the panel included:

Mike Haigh, Executive Chair, Mott MacDonald;  Pierre Verzat, CEO, SYSTRA; Mark Coates Bentley Systems, Director Strategic Industry Engagement, Bill Howard, FIDIC President; Stephen Brobst, CTO, Teradata Corporation; Robin Greenleaf, CEO, Architectural Engineers, Inc.;  and Alan McNamara, Founder, iContract Technologies.

“While we have had IT and machine learning for awhile now, we’ve had to work this way at an accelerated rate and have a real opportunity to reduce costs with infrastructure needs. In the state of the world report we’ve been working on, it reveals only 2/3 of population people will live in cities. That last question Nelson put is an indicator, if people are used to working without commuting, will that impact what drives people toward an urban environment?”

“Is this an opportunity or threat?” asked Dr. Ogunshakin. “People travel less, work from home, work more savvily, there is a change in the engineering landscape. Fewer may want to live in the city, so then what about train or highway systems? And is Amazon taking over the retail market?”

Some key messages include:

• The economic effects of Covid 19 far outweigh the last economic crisis and are estimated to cost between $1-2 trillion.
• Investment profiles of financiers and governments will change and are likely to shift towards housing, healthcare and the environment.
• Infrastructure in the short term and even the medium and long term will need to account for the risk of pandemics or adjust to conditions.
• Collaboration and working together as an industry is more important than ever.

Mike Haigh of Mott MacDonald introduced his company, a well-known worldwide engineering management development consultancy, focusing on energy and water infrastructure.

“I do think there are two sides to the question, 1) how do we operate? And what landscape do we operate in? When it comes to how we operate, I don’t recognize new normal really, massive disruption in some places, more than others. We have demonstrated we can be more agile as designers. It’s good if we have a pandemic that we didn’t have it ten years ago. 2) How we operate as consultants: I do believe we are fundamentally a team-based industry, we work together, we solve problems not just by having meetings, but we will continue to be an office based industry. We will become more agile, we are going to be more agile, not move from offices. There’s also the well-being aspect. The first six months of the pandemic we continued productively, people’s well-being was affected, they needed to be with colleagues, younger professionals needed interface with their seniors for skills development. So the new normal wont’ be as extreme as some thought.

We hope that we have noticed we can all change much quicker, like with vaccines, like construction of the Nightingale Hospital in London, we’ve been able to do things people said we couldn’t do. What will be the new norm for landscape, that will change. People say pandemics are great accelerators.  The decarbonization of infrastructure, is our industry fit to deliver on decarbonization? We can solve many of those problems with today’s technology, but do we have structure to do that? Can we bring together all the digital knowledge we have in order to deliver the green solutions? I’m not sure we can.

To build back greener, we can’t do that with the current transactional interfaces we’ve got. As long as we’re all separate in our separate silos we cannot deliver.

There is a lot more attention being given to climate change. The voice of our communities – politicians are listening to communities. If you’re spending billions on infrastructure then don’t just do it to create jobs, do it to create greater broader societal impact. These voices have become louder, part of build greener debate. We are on the cusp of new normal as many countries have signed up for net zero. If our governments are going to deliver on net zero, because in the infrastructure world we emit a lot of greenhouse gases, we are part of the solution to come to net zero. We have projects around the world that have the ability to deliver on this decarbonization agenda or not. For me COP 26 becomes a tipping point. Around carbon we already have skills we can bring to bear in industry. We have an opportunity now – one of the legacies of Covid is that decarbonization will be part of that legacy.”

Stephen Brobst California CTO Terradata Corp. noted that his organization is “all about the data, help organizations use data to change the way they work and the analytics and decision making with the data.”

“Is there an industry we can look up to we can learn from?” asked Dr. Ogunshakin.

“When will we get back to normal?” asked Brobst. “The answer is never, the new normal is never normal. We have had disruptions: financial, digital, it’s unpleasant but it’s also opportunity. There’s a lot of industry research that shows the shift of industry fortunes comes out of these happenings. There are 60% more rising starts coming out of disruptions but 80% sinking ships also come out of disruptions. Companies do and do not have capabilities to strategize well. There is an urgent need for reallocation and capital and resources, we need to make a plan so we don’t have to be so reactive. I would argue making a plan is wrong because the unpredictable can’t be predicted, we need to be more agile instead.

Who are survivors and not the survivors, and look at not who has best plan, they are great when things go the way you want them to go. Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change, Steven Hawking said. Are you a brittle organization or resilient? Brittle organizations are top down command and control, are designed to avoid failure, they are highly optimized, in contrast resilient organizations are self-organizing in structure and organization, highly adaptive, they embrace change, they’re designed to learn from failure, not trying to avoid failure. Transportation will be highly disruptive. Those airlines that were focused on when are passengers going to start flying again didn’t do well. Those airlines who pivoted from carrying passengers to carrying cargo did very well. How fast can you change and what is the basis for that change and how prepared are you to do that quickly?

This is the difference between dynamic or reactive organization. We’ve seen technology come into play since Covid. Does it get cheaper or more expensive?

The per unit price goes down but we will use more of it. Who in this workshop didn’t invest in upgrading their internet bandwidth and connectivity etc.? We had to do it, and we’re using it more, and paying more for it, but the per unit price is going down. And that will continue to accelerate. Organizations will continue to shift from on premises to cloud deployment of technology. There will be less investment in capital expense and more operational expense — cap ex to opex so there will be a shift in technology spend. Operationally technology will become more efficient. We had the digital disruption 20 years ago, but I would argue this pandemic caused a digital transformation stress test. We have been talking about digital transformation for decades, now you had to do it because you have no choice. CEOs would ask: are you ready? It’s coming whether you’re ready or not. You’d better make the investment, and change.”

Pierre Verzat, CEO SYSTRA based in Paris, said his organization focuses on mass rail engineering, with offices in the UK, France, Brazil, the Middle East and North America. It is very much transport focused, following true system integration.

Dr. Dr. Ogunshakin posed the question: “Have we been good at working in an integrated manner? Are we getting better with Covid or more collaborated?”

“Clear Covid crisis impacts how we are progressing,” said Verzat. “We know we have to connect better people, be more efficient around the world, forcing us to connect. Was it more efficient, yes and no. As Mike stated, we are a team industry and we will maintain an office industry. It has shut down. Clients now accept you are only connected by video. It’s easier when you’re in the design phase to be in the office. And for the construction phase, we are using better connecting tools.

The future may see fewer people congregated in the same places, and the trend to push people from the large city to small city.

Robin Greenleaf, CEO of Architectural Engineers, Boston, described their organization as  an electrical, mechanical design firm, and they do a lot of work in transportation realm, as well as architecture and engineering of building services.

“In the U.S., Covid forced a lot of travel restrictions state to state and across the world the same way,” said Greenleaf. “We adapted to lack of travel quickly. Our clients, especially public sector procurance, are leaning toward picking local firms, because we have familiarity with local codes, and when we near construction someone has got to be near the site. But the flip side is, it really doesn’t matter right now where the design is happening, that’s been something that has been tricky to try to impart of our client. Coordination of the work and the collaboration across the team can happen virtually anywhere. The other thing I’m hearing is we had a first year of pandemic where everybody knows how to our work. After four or five months we realized this is going on longer than we thought it would. Now we are starting to emerge out the other side and I’m hearing conversations within my office that people are looking forward to going back to the office. So I think there is no clear answer to the questions of crossing boundaries. To some degree our work is always going to be mobile but there’s a huge opportunity to expand how we do our work before we get to construction.”

Mark Coates, Bentley Director Strategic Development described Bentley as a leading global provider of infrastructure solutions.

“The last 14 months digital adoption has continued to play a part in developing and maintaining assets,” said Coates. “There are three stages of delivering a project: design, delivery and maintenance technology are essential now and long term.”

Coates noted that the UK was moving forward with carbon reduction and took it seriously, but now it has just been accelerated. “Technology does have the ability to help with lifestyle. 4D planning can implement SYNCRHO for how deliveries have gone, and social distancing.  Going back to the asset managing side, carbon reduction will be a key player. The drive will come from the expanding ESG market. Everyone has said so far that is it a team game and we can’t have the data silo; we have to make data accessible. With advances in WIFI and 5G being rolled out, systems are working online and offline with the ability to access a lot more data more easily. Clients need to clearly define user outcomes  so engineers and technology developers can provide and answer to it, so when the project comes out of the design and construction period, there is a strong handover that makes things work a lot more smoothly. So when you do bolt on new ways of working in construction it bolts on easily because it knows where it fits inside the program.

Digital twins have been around at Bentley for about three or four years. Now we’re using a lot more data, and now it has met with great acceptance and plans are to roll them out in an 8-week period as opposed to the previous 12-month period. A system of systems, this will give power back to clients to make educated decisions, using both company asset information and industry information. Asset owners can reduce liability and enhance performance both for themselves, their ambassadors and their staff.

Covid gives us the ability to face a whole new set of data in this new way of working, that’s where the digital twin fits in very nicely and gives the foundation to actually drive us forward into that next digital revolution.”

Alan McNamara, Founder, iContract Technologies, provided the perspective of his organization, which is a commercial entity of his PhD research project at University of New South Wales. “We’re seeking to develop and validate the iContract concept and preparation for market launch,” said McNamara.

“It’s a digital contract with the sole purpose of managing Itself, it takes the terms of contract between all contract parties in a closed manner and allows digital transactions and information such as performance criteria and physical existence of materials onsite to verify payment for the supply chain once the parameters are met.

We’re three years into developing this, and hope to have proof of concept by end of year.”

Dr. Ogunshakin asked, “How will you input impact our construction industry?

“Digital efficiency, the digital twin has taken off,” said McNamara. “The construction landscape has grown massively as it catches up to other industries, and we’re rapidly making inroads in that.

While we have these fantastic sources of data from all these digital twins we’re still hitting this roadblock of the manual nature of information to the administration of contracts and the inevitable dispute resolution that happens with these. The iContract concept could bring automation to the contract formulation and negotiation process where you’ve got logistic resources information and alleviate that ambiguous nature of current contract and drafting, surely down to the logical nature of iContracts, which is a barrier. The concept can make the automation of specific workflows easier.”

Summary: Several important takeaways from these panelists: work from home is probably here to stay, working in silos is not effective, organizations must look inward to determine what kind of culture they are – brittle or resilient, and learn what skills they need to survive. Further, decarbonization will be a big issue of the near future, in part as the infrastructure industry contributes to the carbon footprint greatly. And the ubiquitous digital twins, once sort of a distant concept for many, finds its home in the data age, with its ability to be a system of systems, returning the power of data to the client.

Tags: 3D, 3D cities, AEC, architects, architecture, BIM, building, building design, building information modeling, CAD, collaboration, construction, covid-19, design, digital twin, engineering, engineers, facilities management, infrastructure, laser scanning, reality capture, visualization

Categories: 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11, 2D, 3D, AEC, AEC training, AECCafe, apps, architecture, Bentley Systems, BIM, building information modeling, collaboration, construction, construction project management, drones, engineering, field, field solutions, file sharing, greenhouse gas emissions, IES, IFC, Internet of Things, IoT, mobile, point clouds, project management, reality capture, simulation, sustainable design, virtual reality, visualization, Year In Infrastructure 2020

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