Empower Project Owners With Improved Information Transparency

Joe Giegerich:

Hi everybody. Thank you for joining the ProjectReady podcast today. Very excited to have our guests Salla and Jeff on, who I will have themselves introduce themselves in a moment, to discuss the challenges of the owner. The owner pays for everything. The owner is on the legal hook if this built asset fails or is not compliant. There are particular challenges for the owner that the industry has to address because, for one, the owner needs their own systems and their own ways to deal with data and to reduce risk, but also you work with owners, right? You have to understand their pain in order to understand how you can serve them better, which is better for your business.

I have an adage that if you want to negotiate a contract with somebody, the first thing you do is understand their position. If you understand their position, it becomes much easier to then advocate for yourself. In similar kind, it’s the owner. Previous podcasts we did do touch on… All these things overlap, so we did a modular world, which is building the enterprise through a modular approach, which Salla was on. We’ve done AI garbage in and garbage out, which we had both Salla and Jeff, we had the fortune to have both of you on. With that, let me take a quick pause and if you guys would introduce yourselves.

Jeff Walter:

Go ahead, Salla.

Salla Eckhardt:

Thank you. Good morning everyone. Thank you Joe for having me and Jeff on the podcast as a guest again today. It’s super exciting to be talking about owners’ perspective in construction projects and owners’ representatives’ perspective as someone that is supporting owners achieve what they want to achieve with overall project team. Thank you for having me.

Jeff:

Good morning, everyone as well. Yes as well, thanks Joe for the invite and looking forward to this conversation. Hi everyone, Jeff Walter from AECOM. I’m a digital consulting lead for the Canada region here, sitting in Toronto, Canada. Yeah, the subject is really exciting, having worked with owners in the AEC industry from a number of different lenses, both from a design delivery perspective, but also from a consulting perspective, and we’re seeing lots of digital transformation happening at the owner level, so happy to get into a lot of the discussion and challenges around that.

Joe:

Then I realized I didn’t introduce myself or Shaili, who’s on the call today. I’m Joe Giegerich, I’m the founder and CEO of ProjectReady and Shaili is our head of development and, as I often put it, the mother of ProjectReady. All right, it’s true though. It’s funny because it’s true. Let’s take a step back for a moment and let’s discuss even what an owner is and I’ll take my take at it.

An owner is more than the person who owns the deed to the land. For me, as it relates to addressing owner challenges, it’s the program manager, the project manager often and the construction manager, they’re owner reps. The owner, for me, is a big O, it’s a bigger and more inclusive bucket, but then again there’s the actual owner, the municipality or the people who built the building. Let me put it out there to you guys. How do you define an owner? I know it sounds pedestrian, but…

Jeff:

Yeah, I guess there is definitely a few lenses to that and it can be different depending on the type of, I guess, infrastructure or buildings or places that are being delivered, whether that’s a public or a private owner scenario. But I guess, the owner in our perspective is the roll up to the top and, I guess, the responsibility from an overall budget and quality and delivery perspective. Then of course, I think really important steering, I guess, an overall governance and framework, from a digital perspective, just having a better experience for all the projects and programs within an owner portfolio. There’s definitely a lot of responsibility, I would say, on an owner shoulder and it means a lot, but they’re really the governance over how programs and projects roll out.

Salla:

Yeah, Jeff nailed it. I’ll summarize my perspective too. The owner is whoever party has accountability on the project, meaning that they have a financial stake to either lose or win with and that is the owner, someone that is investing money into the project and then taking the risk of it as well. Sometimes that ownership can be a very short term investment. Sometimes it’s a very long-term build to own type of ownership. But whoever is putting their money on the table, that’s the owner, that’s how I define an owner.

Joe:

That’s a very New York view that I can agree with. It’s who puts up the cash. That’s really what it comes down to.

Jeff:

Well, it is. I mean, that’s an interesting question. I didn’t want say that straight out myself that financial was such a big component of it, but it is definitely something that underlines all of the idea of owners for sure. But we do have definitely scenarios where we do have more public private types of infrastructure and project delivery where the money actually is coming from different potential places. That could be private equity or bigger where they’re financing more long-term infrastructure building opportunities. In a delivery perspective, that wouldn’t necessarily be an owner. There’s a variety of different perspectives on that, but I do think you guys are right that financial is really at the heart of an owner’s commitment to it.

Salla:

To add to what Jeff is defining, that’s why I use the term accountability, that there’s financial responsibility in that way when there are multiple owners and investors included, and especially when talking about public entities, that they have taxpayers’ money that they must manage, then it’s the accountability that is their responsibility.

Jeff:

I totally agree.

Salla:

That’s where it’s the financial perspective.

Joe:

Yeah, that makes total sense because if it’s a private enterprise with several investors, it’s a Hold Co that’s the owner. If it’s a P3 project where you have private capital, somebody’s building a bridge AECOM wants to take on, put up some of the money, get some of the receipts, it’s still the municipality that is the ultimate owner even though they have a shared financial stake. I would imagine that would also somewhat complicate ownership at large. In our case, for us, what we serve on the owner, one of the big things is data ownership and transparency. This is one of the things that we really push on, but does not having a mixed pool of financial interest, does that create its own specific challenges as it relates to owner needs?

Jeff:

I would say absolutely. I think in general the idea of ownership is definitely getting more complex and that certainly presents the unique data challenges around management, not only data but systems as well. To give the right really kind performance tracking to create that accountability, whoever that owner model is in a sense. Yeah, definitely. Again, just from my own background of larger scale infrastructure delivery, as those get bigger and those get more complex, these are definitely challenges that reveal itself at the owner level for sure.

Joe:

Even that data ownership. A lot of this, the owner needs to trust the people that they’re working with that they’re forking over the cash to. But to your point, Jeff and Salla, if you have multiple financial stakeholders, you have to have a way as it relates to the way they interact and the information they share, that they trust that as well, even amongst themselves. I would argue that as there are more financial entities involved, even that trust become somewhat compounded.

Salla:

Yes. On that note, with the complexity of the ownership models and the different lengths of how long a different stakeholder and entity is part of the ownership model, that’s why I developed a digital building life cycle that we need to have a way of capturing who was part of the project, at what point in time, and what was their role? Were they the owner or were they the author of the data or were they the manager of the data or someone that was allowed to look at the data or even make changes to it? But it all needs to be somehow recorded. I guess blockchain technology might be one of the solutions that you have the timed stamped, stamped mark somewhere in the history that you know who was doing what and who approved it. That way when it’s really complex and there are long chains of ownership, then we know who’s involved and where the money’s coming from or where the money’s going to.

Joe:

And the liability.

Jeff:

Yep.

Joe:

Right? Because what a lot of that comes down to, I mean you mentioned timestamps and authoritative information. That is most important if there’s a lawsuit, right? Am I incorrect?

Jeff:

Yeah, I mean the legality and the traceability and auditability is one thing, but even coming back to that trust there, which sets the tone really for a legal framework on a particular project or whatever. I’m definitely also seeing the maturity on the owner side in terms of, yes, getting more open book type of contracts in a sense that really are pushing the industry to be able to, as Salla suggested, collect more and curate more granular information and documentation that supports work and time that’s being invoiced for. I’m not saying necessarily this will ever become a true open book in a sense, but there’s definitely a maturing maturity in the owner environment where we’re seeing more accountability even on AECOM’s side in terms of how we present our time sheets and invoices and demonstrating in different ways how we create value for the work that we’re consulting for. These are really important foundational things, as you guys have talked about, in terms of developing that trust narrative and, with that, having the support from a systems perspective, like you said, Joe, being able to then create more value on the traceability and auditability and fitting into the legal setting within a particular project or program.

Joe:

The open book, the trust comes from visibility. That is one of the challenges that we see from our perspective. It’s the visibility into information in a way that’s distributed, that is timely, that is governed because you don’t want to fork over information that you should not or that’s premature. Then with that, the challenges, and I would ask you guys to weigh in on the difference in terms of challenges between data ownership, authorship, and data management. Want to pick that up?

Salla:

Yeah, I’ll pick this one because it is something that we were having deep discussions when I started my career in this industry and digital tools and visual databases were coming and people started realizing that more and more data is going to be delivered or managed in a digital format rather than paper documents and archives. That’s where things got really interesting very quickly, because people didn’t have clarity on who owns the digital representation of the building when the physical building has a very clear owner, but then the digital building doesn’t necessarily have, and the digital building has multiple different authors, but then you have people that are managing and updating the data during the digital building life cycle and the technical life cycle of the physical building. When thinking about the future projects and the projects of today, it’s something that needs to be defined in the project contracts and into the project execution plans that who is the owner of the data so that they have clarity on what responsibility they have as the owner, but then they need to define who is the author of the data and if that is the original designer or engineer that they have certain rights or responsibilities.

But then it doesn’t necessarily last once changes start to happen. Then if someone is the manager for the data, that it doesn’t give them the author rights so they can’t just go and make changes based on what the owner wants to do if they don’t have the author rights to the physical building itself and the digital representation of it. Someone might have just viewer rights, that they should have that transparency that you were talking about, Joe, so they can make decisions or continue doing their processes. There are multiple stakeholders that we are now seeing come into the digital world of building environment industry that haven’t been clearly defined before because they haven’t preexisted and now there are legal aspects into things, especially knowing that some designers have lifetime rights into their design and any changes that happen into the physical structure or the physical design need to be approved by them, and that’s how they’ve contracted it decades ago. Do we have similar situations in the future that someone wants to make changes into the digital representation of a building to make it into a digital twin, for example, that do they have the right to do it or do they need to have a consensus as a group to then implement it?

Joe:

Yeah, it makes sense because if you design something that is bleeding edge and somebody else goes in and mucks it up, you, as the original author, might get sued again. Everything has money in lawsuits here, but that is a huge consequence of it. I can say that on the data ownership side, it’s really where we cut our teeth. Off of our services organization, and this is pedestrian, but we see it all over the place. We were working for major serial manufacturer, and they were using a very large competitor to AECOM and OAC. What they had told us outright was, by using the vendor system, which was project-wise, every time they had a billing dispute or an argument or anything, that consulting firm would hold back their deliverables, their designs, their as-builts as such. During that period, we had largely a SharePoint practice back in the day. The desired end state was that they had a way to funnel all the, as-builts and the like into SharePoint as a place of record because that data ownership was, how shall I say it, compounded and in real world people were holding their data hostage, basically.

Jeff:

Yeah. I think that’s definitely been something that’s been in our industry for a while. In terms of those silos. Those are really outcomes of having silos of information through different phases of projects and between the client and different stakeholders, et cetera. That world is obviously changing quite a bit with the integration that’s really required across multi organization project environments to deliver really any type of project now. It’s an interesting topic for sure, and as projects do and programs do get bigger and larger scale, and as the private capital starts to infuse into industry, those risks do get higher and higher and the traceability and the auditability and the ability to trace back decisions becomes even more critical to a successful delivery.

But there is, as guys, Salla, you mentioned, that there’s a reality to this project delivery world where we do have to operate with different authoring environments and different software that need to connect to each other. There’s the reality of that versus at the owner level needing to have some record that is stable and core that they can rely on that they know can never and be trusted from a legal and traceability perspective. It’s a very interesting place where you’ve got a lot of information at our highest volumes yet being authored in multiple different places and being, obviously, I think ISO 19650, and Salla, I’d love to hear your thoughts in terms of how that helps support even the governance over this data strategy here. But definitely we’re seeing at an owner level the desire to retain some data residency and some connection to every process and every document, Joe, as you mentioned, connected to a project or a program. Figuring out all that data architecture and the automation of that definitely is on the owner’s minds these days.

Joe:

I’m remiss in bringing Shaili into this conversation and it’s not the worst pivot either, is that, okay, so data ownership, data authorship, data management, this is implicitly governance. We all know that information will span many systems even from the owner, their system of record may be ACC and SharePoint. It may be a combination. Shaili, from a technical perspective, what do you see some of the ways to resolve that and some of the challenges that remain?

Shaili Modi Oza:

Yeah, it’s just definitely interesting to hear all these different sides. I think from a technical perspective, one of the biggest challenges I’ve seen just working through all of these different systems is there is no particular standard in place. Even in terms of the quality of the data, I think it’s very important. It’s not just about bringing it together because we’ve seen different systems where they just do a drop-off with just a whole Excel file of data, which is just not manageable. Even if we get that data into one system, I think it’s the format of the data, it’s the way the data comes in together, which would then make it more technically viable to then report against or just make that in a usable format, which when we need to pull out all of that information. I think that is one of the biggest challenges that we… Because the data is needed, people are sending around just in email attachments, Excel files, the data moves around in such ungoverned fashion. There needs to be something that is more governed in a more proper data regulated format to just be able to report against it properly.

Joe:

Even on the larger level outside of spreadsheets and the like in conversations with customers that go, “Oh, we have a data warehouse,” and instead of throwing a whole bunch of documents into Dropbox, they’re throwing a whole bunch of SQL and Oracle queries into a database. That’s still not really doing much. I think your point, Shaili, is you really do need a taxonomy that establishes a standard.

Shaili:

Yeah, it’s a lot of data to sift through if it’s not properly organized because in different systems it’s managed differently, stored differently, so even if we try to pull that together, it’s a difficult challenge to bring it all together.

Joe:

One of the underpinnings of garbage in, garbage out, our previous webcast about AI.

Shaili:

Yes.

Jeff:

Exactly,

Shaili:

Definitely.

Joe:

You have a whole bucket of data. It’s like having to say, “Look at all this stuff in my closet. Can you find anything?”

Jeff:

Basically, the idea is if you do data at the beginning, it’s going to have a significant impact on everything.

Joe:

Right, and that it stops there. It’s like, “Well, we’ll just get all the data.” Something that you had referenced earlier too, Salla, was having this data plan upfront. What are the standards? What are the inter exchange? It’s not just dumping data.

Salla:

Exactly, and like Jeff and Shaili mentioned, the ISO 19650 and the quality of data and how it can be reused, those are the foundation for people to choose the tools that they want to use for their own business because some of the solutions that are out there an overkill for companies that are not too large yet but are on the growth trajectory. Some tools are too simple for a bigger corporation that needs to do more with the data that they’re collecting and managing. That’s why we literally need the global standards and the international and national standards so that we all have the same rules and regulations or the law for delivering the data and managing the data and that way give the flexibility to the end users to choose that which tools do they want to choose and use so that they’re not locked into an ecosystem that they don’t need or they no longer need.

From the end user perspective and from the client perspective, they’re being held hostage with legacy systems because they can’t transition into something that is more advanced or better suited fit for them because it’s the data management problem for them that they never followed any internationally recognized data standard, but their IT department created some way of collecting the data into an Excel file and that’s how they’ve been running their business and now they can’t transition because it’s too big of a lift and nobody knows what they’re looking in.

Joe:

Even above and beyond Excel, not to speak ill of my brethren, but there’s a certain amount of laziness I think in some of these companies where they go, “Let’s pick one application, one monolithic thing may not work for this group, may not work for that other group, but we got all our data together,” in a way that’s meaningless because those other groups will not participate and the fidelity of the data, which still has to be matched with other external systems, is not addressed.

Jeff:

I guess just one other layer to add in here, and I guess the whole principle of ISO 19650 in terms of the lifecycle components of that compliance structure or framework there is that, it’s one thing definitely on the design and construction side, the number of challenges in terms of delivering infrastructure, but Salla, as you and I know being involved with standardization on that handoff between a construction phase into operations and maintenance and the whole digital twin industry and metaverse industry, these issues even become more complex but also more required to have that full lifecycle plan. From an owner view, really, of course, we’re seeing again the maturity of ISO 19650, the implementation particularly in North America, from an owner level, it’s still maturing, but there is this ethos that there’s the maturity into lifecycle type of thinking. Because of that, that just triggers the importance of these data planning and governance frameworks that we’re talking about here. It’s not just like the start point, but the start point also needs to see the whole lifecycle long view as well.

Joe:

I think the other thing with owners, to your point, Jeff, to becoming more sophisticated now, you just get this haunting sense that back in the day, which is not that long ago, owners like, “We put up the money, give me the building, don’t really want to hear about it,” if you will. “We hired you to do this,” is inadequate for an owner to protect their own interests. They have to participate in the game, they have to have their own data strategies and plans in place to intersect with everybody’s individual data plans. Then to your point, Salla, the overarching one, which I guess I think I know the answer, but that overarching plan, who provides that? Is that the vendor that was hired on behalf of the owner? Is that the owner themselves that should come up with that? I understand it will be a collaboration, but let me throw that at you guys.

Jeff:

Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I think it also depends where you are in the world as well in terms of maturity of the owner world.

Joe:

19650, it’s the owner, right?

Jeff:

It is, but I’ve certainly seen in the Canadian market, the requirements for that compliance on large infrastructure delivery. But in terms of the full auditable process that goes with that, which is very complex and requires and, Salla definitely probably even more richer experience than mine, but definitely requires a lot of documentation and planning and governance that were described here. I’ve seen owners transition into and agree to the principles of ISO 19650 and implement certain function like BIM handoff for example, more defined process on adding classification to BIM models as they’re moving through different phases, et cetera. The different quality review process. There is some governance that’s emerging, but it’s still, I think, a long way to go in terms of the full implementation of ISO 19650 across at least in North America. Salla, maybe from an international perspective, I know there’s pockets where it is more mature for sure.

Salla:

Yeah, I’m thinking that have I ever come across this question before? Because all the different stakeholders, they’re always hurrying up to wait on any construction project that they’re in and the decision making times and the overall total project lead times are always so long that people have already transitioned from that original organization to somewhere else and even beyond. How do you keep everyone on the same track when the owners don’t necessarily have the deep understanding of the digital construction technologies and capabilities? They really ask the experts, “What would you do? What would be beneficial?” Their perspective is, what’s in it for them? What’s beneficial for them? They never touch base on what’s in it for the overall project team. That’s where we need more collaboration and more discussion and thought because I sat in planning meetings for creating beam execution plans and people have been arguing about naming conventions for eight months and it is that type of reality out there.

Everyone is just trying to get their own stuff done and then move on. But with the new national BIM standard that is being published by NIPS here in the United States, I think we are taking the steps towards the right direction that we can now have a longer perspective into what are we actually trying to deliver? Is it the physical building or is the physical building and its digital representation and for what purposes? Now that the AI is emerging on multiple fronts, then starting to think about what might that do for the benefit of people that don’t have the time or the knowledge to absorb it all and then make the final decisions? Nobody has the time or even the lifetime to capture everything. There’s too much data and information to think about, but AI could do some of the processing for us and then present the most feasible options and carve a little bit of the core process in front of us so that we don’t end up making decisions that just lead to a dead end or only serve our own purposes.

That’s something that’s very new for the build environment industry that we’ve been very local before and now we are becoming local, global local because a lot of the investors are coming from outside of our national borders. They have their own data governance that they’ve been using so they have all these ideas of how they would do things for the projects that they own. That’s the challenge, that how do we become more digitally mature and digital ready because the whole game is now changing with the emerging technologies.

Joe:

Throwing on the technical side, if you will, in our own small way, it still comes down to data, having data, curating data, and making sense of data for AI again and all these other things to work. You mentioned that eight months of arguing on nomenclature, that I would argue is what APIs and databases are for so that everybody can call it what they want, but some way to map that content, map that information, automate that naming convention in a way that everybody can make sense. Again, I just want to pivot back to Shaili for a second. Would you pick up on that?

Shaili:

Yeah, I was listening to both Jeff and Salla thinking that it’s important. In this case, I was just thinking about the way we handle metadata, so it’s not just the naming convention, but there are so many aspects around the data and metadata is a great way to bring things together. Just leading on to what Salla was mentioning about AI and then digital twins, so all of this metadata properties, if they are tagged properly and stored properly just going forward, I feel based on the type of a project, AI would be greatly useful. If we have a hundred data points that we are tracking to just even guide the users on scanning the documents automatically, setting all of this metadata, and just helping standardize that in a better way.

Joe:

Yeah, then you don’t get into nomenclature wars because that’s one thing the industry is, how shall I say, overly fond of, is communication.

Shaili:

Yeah, by separating it out, having metadata properties, it just gives a much better way to then have the AI tools learn that with these kind of data, these are the different data points, and that feeds in a much better fashion, I feel.

Joe:

All right. I guess just turning it back over to the larger group here. What are some of the ways to address those challenges? Everything from, and we’ve referenced a number here, but everything from making sure you have governance and data plans upfront. But anyway, I want to turn it back to you guys.

Salla:

Well, I’m hopeful that the build environment industry would start collaborating more with the materials and products industry and the manufacturing industry because a lot of the data that we have to deal with in order to verify that the design and the engineering of a solution actually functions and delivers what the owners want to pay for, et cetera. The data has already been created, but it’s been created outside of our industry and it is somehow unattainable for us that we then try to recapture it from all kinds of specs and documentations and re-import it that maybe there is a broader opportunity for a collaboration across different industries. We start collecting the digital supply chain much earlier on and enable the original authors of that original data related to the specific material or a product to be engaged in populating the databases that we then need and create a separation of what are the design and engineers for? What are the construction teams for? Rather than add a task of data input, data output onto everyone’s plate. That’s what I’m hoping for, that we can actually start more collaboration and cooperation rather than have the separation of different industries that are actually connected.

Joe:

That makes sense. It’s brute force labor of low value for what’s in a tight labor market as well.

Jeff:

I’ll add another a challenge in the whole complexity of the data framework that we’re talking about here, and that is time. At least what I’ve been seeing at the owner level, is there is this, obviously in the US that’s emerging now been other areas around the world, infrastructure stimulus, that’s resulted in downstream, big infrastructure programs being delivered these days. It’s really putting a pressure on owners to, within the next zero to 10 years, as this new infrastructure wave emerges, there’s a real fear in a sense that if the current standards and setups and governance and plans, everything that we’re talking about here, are not in place, that could result in some probably painful capital delivery programs. There is a bit of a pressure on the industry and, with that, comes the pressure of transformation and coming down to the owner level in terms of organizational change and culture change and really taking a digital strategy that maybe needs acceleration or maybe you can’t go through a three-year program to transform how you operate as an organization. It needs to be a bit more agile as you’re delivering infrastructure. There’s really a pressure and a time pressure to digital transformation and with that data transformation and I think accelerated, and I’ll plug I guess ProjectReady in a sense for-

Joe:

Thank you. I was about to, so there you go.

Jeff:

In terms of how owners would typically be looking for methodologies for doing that faster really and addressing the more modular, and I’m sure that came out of the last podcast there, incremental change. These concepts are phased in change management types of ideas and is really interesting growth in terms of a mentality for owner level. There’s a pressure, but also acknowledging that they need to do it. Right.

Joe:

Right, and that they do need an accelerator, right? Because not just a shameful plug for what we do, which is what we do. We sort of automate the creation of a data warehouse and relationships. But I think the challenge that you have in getting, to your point, nobody wants to spend three years, you need governance plans, you need the formality, but if it takes too long, it’s like end user adoption. If it takes too many clicks on an app, nobody will use the app and, all these projects, it’s hurry up and wait. All of a sudden, they get the funding and then they’re behind schedule and there’s this huge rush, my observation, to get the things going. Yes, you need the formality, but you do need accelerators. I absolutely agree with you. I think everything is agile these days to a reasonable extent, but as long as you put in bumper guards, right? Okay. As I talk a blue streak and the like. If it’s appropriate for you guys, one of the things that I’d really love to hear from you, I don’t know if you can name names, as they say, but any real world examples of where there has been challenges, any solutions therein, some of your own customer experiences, if you will? What’s worked and what hasn’t?

I hear everybody breathing. I don’t know if this is something that y’all are comfortable discussing.

Salla:

It’s a good question, but it runs a Rolodex in the head that where the successes have happened have always been where there has been high trust amongst the project teams and people have genuinely collaborated and try to level up everyone rather than just fight for their own preference or something that is beneficial for them only regardless of what it causes for others. But the complexity of projects these days is what is always kind throwing the curve ball at everyone, that there are so many different stakeholders and the amount is just continuously increasing and people are brought on board at different points in time. Then onboarding and off boarding different stakeholders from the same project is a trick. But otherwise, I’d say that technology is ready, but the challenge is that how ready are people and what the different digital maturity of organizations are and what are the transition plans, now that we have a tremendous amount of knowledge retiring, and I’ve spoken about this a lot, and it’s not to be mean at everyone.

I value people that have had long careers, but they are now leaving and they are not necessarily coming back and the new generations of people, they have not necessarily been exposed to a lot of the complexities of projects that they are inheriting because there hasn’t been enough room on the projects to bring on board more junior people. The project budgets hasn’t allowed that. Now the challenge is at the people level that are people motivated for the digital transformation and do they see the value in the current hype or is that they are choosing to skip this one and wait what comes next? The speed of technology evolution is just increasing all the time and the amount of tools that are available, it is overwhelming.

That’s why the data master plan is something that I really thought deeply about, that if we had a better foundation as a standard foundation for the industry, for every organization to start building their own guidelines on top of and the playbooks on top of and let go of their own company standards, not standards anymore. Standards are national or international global and everything that is a individual organization solution is a guideline, it’s a playbook. We need to switch our mindsets and be comfortable with putting the 20, 30 years of governance plans and systems plans aside and restart from scratch. Hit reset. Yeah.

Joe:

Entrenchment is not a standard and I think that’s what you’re alluding to, is there’s a lot of entrenched ways of doing things in organizations which are inward looking. I can tell you that even, I come from a professional services background, our best projects are we have a great relationship with the client, we’re sharing data. I believe in open book, those are our most successful projects. They’re best on budget, best quality of delivery, and you really do need that trust and that collaboration, which I do believe younger folk, I mean I’m in my sixties, but everybody’s sort of a edge case if you will, are much more comfortable collaborating and particularly on cloud and online technology.

Jeff:

I can just bring up two examples from, as you guys are talking here, fitting into that and not specific examples, but I think one of the catalysts, I mean there’s many different catalysts that are going to force those changes, generational changes, those types of things. One of the catalysts that I feel has always been a factor and especially over the last five years has been alternative delivery and the way that infrastructure and projects are delivered. The contract frameworks for that and more and more those types of new untraditional contracts collaboration is at the foundation of those and that we see those as significant components of evaluations on major infrastructure proposals these days is that collaboration component, actually evaluating how we collaborate as a team, not only the people side, but certainly on the systems side as well.

In particular, within the alternative delivery kind types of contract, there’s all different types of frameworks we’ve seen like design build, finance and traditional P3 and alliance, but the one that I’m really I think is going to reveal the integrated data planning and frameworks here is this progressive design build type of contract where risk is really mitigated across the owner, contractor, designer contract. It’s a completely different way of delivering infrastructure where you spend the first conceptual design stage, some definition phase, delivering a design that has a certain target. We get into terminology like target design and target pricing. Coming back to this accountability at the owner level, accountability in terms of data is becoming more real time requirements. The monthly board meetings, getting PowerPoint presentations, seeing how performance are out the window. We’re needing real time performance tracking on almost a weekly basis in terms of how teams are measuring up to those target designs and that target construction costs. The types of contracts, like the more collaborative they get, the more requirements for fully functioning data systems and architecture.

Joe:

You know contingent on this, Jeff, I don’t see the difference between technology and people, so I’m a cyborg guy, but it’s true, right? We’ve had pacemakers for a long time. There’s an absolute intersection of human effort and technology and I think that’s also one of the other challenges that has to be overridden is that cultural view. “Well, I’m a smart person, I’ve done this forever. I know I have my skillset,” but you’re not divorced from technology. That is absolutely the evolution of the human race beginning with fire. All right, that’s my pontification, but…

Jeff:

Yep.

Joe:

All right. I think we’ve gotten through a pretty long list here. Any closing thoughts? Probably not, just throwing it out there.

Salla:

Thank you so much for having us on today’s episode, Joe. Always a pleasure, Shaili and Jeff. This was amazing.

Jeff:

Yeah, I feel the same way. Thanks, Joe, for organizing, Shaili, Salla, definitely always wonderful talking with you guys. Yeah.

Joe:

Yeah, and my view is I only come off as smart because I have smarter friends, so I do appreciate your participation here today.

Jeff:

Okay, thanks guys.

Joe:

All right. Thank you, everybody. See you next time.

Jeff:

Thanks.

Joe:

Bye.