Our General Approach
We think of ourselves as Information management specialists, who
work with and in the UK construction industry. We use a capital I
for Information to help get people thinking about Information as a
real, manageable, valuable resource, not just some sort of
background thing, an ether from which facts can just be plucked at
will. Information really is not like that.
The purpose of Information is to help people make decisions. The
better the Information, the better their decision making will be.
Our aim is to help people on construction projects, and in project
facing organisations, to make better decisions, by helping them
better to understand and manage the Information they use in their
decision making processes.
"Better Information" is a loaded term. We take it to mean
Information that is:
- Relevant - Reflects the user's requirements
- Accurate - Well specified, from a known source, objectively
verifiable
- Timely - Current, refreshable
- Sufficient - Not too much, not too little
A construction project is a hugely Information-intensive
enterprise. One study has shown that, across a range of fairly
standard £20M plus, commercial and retail projects, upwards of 500
individual documents are generated for every million pounds worth of
project value. The same study revealed that even relatively small
projects can involve scores of different organisations, all with
different roles and interests in the project's operations. If one
adds to that the transient nature of the typical project
organisation, and the dramatic changes in organisational shape and
structure that take place as the project evolves over time, one has
some sense of the Information challenge facing the typical
construction project management team.
Our main aim is to help project teams meet that challenge.
We work with client organisations, project managers, construction
managers and contractors. We provide a wide range of Information and
systems related services, as well as two software packages that, we
think, are easily the best of their type on the UK market.
Most of our work is actually concerned with helping organisations
just to think more explicitly about the Information they need and
use on their projects. We find that there is a great tendency
throughout the industry, from the mightiest client organisations
down to the most basic trade contractors, to take Information for
granted, and to treat each project as if it were a wholly unique
thing, a complete one-off. Rather than treating it as a resource to
be harnessed and managed, people tend to deal with Information in an
unstructured, ad hoc, manner.
Individuals also tend to want to invent the wheel on every new
project. So they tend not fully to think through the
Information-related implications of their current employer's
standards and procedures. Rather than referring to corporate best
practice, they overplay the specific requirements and limitations of
the current project team, the particular form of contract they're
currently working with, and so on.
Individuals also tend to deal with "their" Information, in
isolation from other members of the team, and without careful
consideration of the Information flows they use: where has this come
from, what does its originator really mean; where does it have to go
to, will my recipient understand its meaning or significance? And so
on.
In an enterprise as dynamic and as complex as a modern
construction project there is inevitably a good deal of "noise" in
the system; a lot of truly unstructured material that makes sense
only in the particular circumstances in which it's created. So there
are real limits to the extent to which formal Information Management
methods can be applied to production level events on construction
sites. However, it hardly needs saying that we are nowhere near
those limits at the moment.
Our Insight Production Management system is one of the first
pieces of software to attempt to tackle this issue and to enable
project teams to capture and use production level Information
systematically on their projects. However a whole new approach to
construction systems is emerging into the main stream. This approach
is based on the use of new computer aided, component based, 3D
building modelling systems. The components in this environment are
"intelligent", in the sense that they can carry, as pre-defined
attributes, many different types of data, in addition to their basic
geometry. This data can include information about the physical and
economic properties of the components that make up the 3D model.
These models will enable projects to be managed directly and
effectively at the level of the individual production event - the
installation of an individual component - on the construction site.
Building Information Modelling, the activity of managing the data
associated with these models will become critically important in the
industry over the next few years. We believe it will bring about
dramatic fundamental improvements in the performance of the industry
over the next five to ten years. The first of our Discussion papers
expands at some length on this topic.