CREATING QUALITY DATA OPPORTUNITIES
Marek Suchocki talks to Civil Engineering Surveyor
Before taking over as CICES president in September later this year, Civil Engineering Surveyor sat down with Marek Suchocki, senior vice-president and head of industry associations at Autodesk, to talk about trends, advancement in digital technology, it’s adoption, open source and the value of data standards in industry.
My role is to lead our industry associations strategy, which is how we engage with professional institutions such as CICES, membership organisations where companies rather than individuals might be members and standards bodies. This is a global role with a focus on North America and Europe that is understandably hard to get your arms around as we have over 300 organisations on my long list. Therefore, prioritisation is very important, building relationships key and sourcing colleagues able to dedicate time to engage takes effort.
I would say that there are three main trends we are seeing. Firstly, businesses are prioritising sustainability, AI is on everyone’s minds being perceived as both an opportunity and a threat and, finally, attracting and retaining top talent.
The market is quite tough for many organisations. We have geopolitical challenges that are making forecasting and investment decisions difficult, we are still emerging from the impacts of COVID and Brexit and technology change is happening at an unseen pace that together are making business resilience and winning work front-of-mind issues.
I would say that there are three main trends we are seeing. Firstly, businesses are prioritising sustainability, AI is on everyone’s minds being perceived as both an opportunity and a threat and, finally, attracting and retaining top talent.
I have been in the construction industry since the late 1980s and one thing that has always frustrated me is the pace of technology adoption and limited commitment to training. When I led the research and innovation programme at Atkins in the ‘00s, we pioneered new solutions and leveraged readily available market technologies that would still be seen as advanced today, so access to technology is not the problem. I see adoption in our industry is always held back by traditional contractual requirements, all parties being too busy to adjust, training being seen as a cost centre rather than investment in people and a risk-averse culture that is afraid of change.
Despite the pace of technology adoption being slower than in adjacent industries, it is happening across all disciplines and services of the construction sector. Digital capabilities are now a must-have for nearly all participants. This is very true for civil engineering surveying whether that is in commercial management or geospatial domains. Nearly all roles require knowledge of digital software or advanced hardware to undertake work and collaborate with other parties. It is critical that we assess and educate on good practice to uphold standards and ensure our members are role models for technology adoption across their organisations and projects.
We frequently assign blame or criticism to technical interoperability challenges. While historically there was some merit due to lack of technical maturity or available solutions, I would argue this has diminished in recent years with most problems being down to a lack of technology use planning.
Digital capabilities are now a must-have for nearly all participants. This is very true for civil engineering surveying, whether that is in commercial management or geospatial domains.
For example, within the ISO 19650 series of standards there are recommendations to adopt conventions, plan and test technologies, and data exchanges before committing to them on a project. This is regrettably rarely done, and instead, people just implement the tools they have at hand and assume others will cope. Moreover, files shared across these tools are usually in incompatible formats, inconsistent naming schemes or missing classifications.
However, many interoperability issues can be overcome from the outset by taking the time to engage in project team discussions about required deliverables, available solutions, naming conventions and clear roles and responsibilities. This ensures that everyone is on the same page regarding when and with what technologies to use.
Open source can be a loaded idea that is often misunderstood. For instance, open source refers to a software concept allowing the free sharing and modification of code for distributed development. It does offer some benefits, not least of which might be free access to some software but comes with challenges such as a lack of incentive to invest as there may be no revenue stream for developers. For users there may also be an absence of support and maintenance capability putting risk on implementation in business-critical scenarios.
Open data is where data is freely available for use and distribution that is frequently championed from a public sector perspective to improve decision making.
Open data is where data is freely available for use and distribution that is frequently championed from a public sector perspective to improve decision making by having access to more of the right information at the right time, providing potential for social and economic benefits. The maintenance of such data if used in business decisions is therefore vital to ensure it is current, accurate and not contravening any data protection obligations.
For our industry sector we also have open standards, such as the industry foundation classes (IFC) data model from buildingSMART to enable consistent workflows. The development of IFC and associated standards relies on engagement from industry practitioners to ensure suitability, coverage and accuracy. As this is typically a volunteer effort delivered through international cooperation it can take a long time to develop and will only address parts of the built environment, whereas commercial investment can be achieved in much shorter time scale and leverage current and emerging capabilities.
Open standards are very valuable in defining industry norms, i.e. what good looks like, and providing a neutral foundation for information sharing without the complexity of proprietary data that may only be valuable during, say, an engineering design or analysis rather than when sharing an output to give to a receiving party.
The development of industry foundation classes and associated standards relies on engagement from industry practitioners to ensure suitability, coverage and accuracy.
Making technology accessible has always been a key tenet for me, having engaged parties aware of solution existence, understanding what it means for them and providing the training or guidance for its use. It is not adopting technology for technology’s sake but rather to improve or ease a process and outputs.
Awareness and education are perhaps the key determinants to gain adoption. These might be achieved through greater investment from technology vendors or developers working in combination with industry associations, which is one of my ambitions in my role at Autodesk. I am also intending to focus on this as a key objective when I become president at CICES next year.
Digital offers perhaps the greatest opportunity to attract new entrants into our industry. Young people are digital natives readily leveraging technologies, social media, streaming services and other emerging capabilities such as AI. If we can embrace technology innovation in our industry we can attract and inspire new talent to help plan, design, construct and manage a better and more sustainable built environment. Relying on old ways of working, traditional contractual procedures and analogue working is unacceptable and would only lead to a reduction in an already limited workforce.
Young people are digital natives readily leveraging technologies, social media, streaming services and other emerging capabilities such as AI.
Having been involved in developing information management procedures and standards for over 20 years, I am confident we are making good progress that will lead to improved behaviours and practices in the near term.
Defining standards takes time, but implementing and refining them is an even longer process. We are seeing increasing adoption of ISO 19650 in projects and in many countries as an example of where good practice makes sense, even if it can seem complicated.
As we revise such standards to make them easier to implement then the processes will become the new normal and offer a foundation for creating quality data that can open new opportunities, such as training AI or machine learning algorithms on what good looks like.
Having this quality data foundation will no doubt enable new services, technology innovations, improve productivity, achieve better outcomes and hopefully give greater confidence that our planned and constructed assets are building a better world. For me, the future of digital construction is somewhat inevitable and extremely positive.