Ian Howell is an Australian architect by training, with professional experience as managing director of the The Buchan Group, based in Sydney.
He has extensive experience in the AEC software industry including positions with Autodesk, Citadon, Alias Research and Rucaps Australia. Among his contributions to the AEC software industry, Ian was a founder of the International Alliance for Interoperability (now the buildingSMART Alliance). He is currently the chief executive officer of U.S. company Newforma, which is based in Boston.
Ian was recently in Australia, and in an exclusive interview with Inside Construction, he discusses the fundamental differences between the two countries and how technology should be seen as an enabler not a solution.
Are Australian companies lagging behind the US in regards to technology?
It’s about change management. It’s the culture and willingness to admit there’s a problem doing it the old way and continuing to do it the old way. We, recently published a scorecard showing how bad it is even in the US and found 77% of projects under perform, 75% run last, 69% of projects are greater than 10% over budget, so its OK to say the Australians are behind but the American scorecard is pretty shocking as an industry.
The whole industry has to reinvent itself, particularly with construction coming down the line with urbanisation, emerging countries and new infrastructure. A report we shared from McKinsey and Company based in Singapore, indicated some of the Asian projects were just as bad with statistics on projects. Large projects run 20% behind time and up to 80% over budget. This is an endemic industry problem we are facing.
It’s about the willingness to adopt technology but technology is not a solution it’s an enabler. The real solution is the collaboration and communication of the projectee who is a member of a professional team who are focused on shared outcomes.
The industry has been very adversarial. How much litigation is out there? It’s all about blame and pointing fingers. If we can get rid of that adversarial nature of the industry and really focus on shared responsibility and mutual accountability and working together for the same outcome instead of against one another then the technology that is an enabler will work for that to occur.
In what area is technological advancement lagging behind i.e. civic, Tier 1 & 2?
I would say it’s in the mainstream. The thing we are seeing is the largest contractors in the US are willing to experiment. They are flying drones over sites, which are not there for just visual inspections but are now being used as GPS controls for site layout. The larger firms are starting to experiment with virtual reality, where a computer model of the building is being projected together with the design model so it’s blended. We are seeing the bigger firms investing, which is great because there is a two to three times return on investment by using virtual reality. The biggest firms have the RnD budget where they can try these things.
We say just be willing to experiment. Every new project is an opportunity to try something. The stuff that works and gives benefit you keep doing, the stuff that doesn’t work, you stop doing. The whole industry will move forward with that willingness to learn and every project offers that opportunity.
How receptive are Australians to these ideas?
There is a lot of rationalisation around different forms of contracts. That’s looking in the rear view mirror, companies need to look forward and say imagine changing this industry from the bottom up. People in Australia say you have to get to the regulators and change the way governments are procuring buildings. That’s going to take forever. But from the bottom up, if you can the projects standing around a visual planning board and collaborate and make commitments to one another, then a whole lot of the problems will go away because you have that accountability to each other on the ground floor level. That’s where the big gains are occurring.
Is government regulation as prevalent in American as it is in Australia?
The level of discussion around government has shocked me, while I’ve been visiting Australia. Yes, there are regulations in the US and compliance but at the end of the day it’s a much more private industry and I don’t hear about government near as much as I do in Australia.
What does Newforma do?
We are leaders in managing project information. There is a lot of information that has to be passed between members of the team, and I call it the situational team. These companies come together temporarily around a project. They have never worked together before and they may never work together again. Each of them has their own office systems but how do they work together effectively? We are an enabler so we say, “OK, your using different systems, have your different methods but as a team, how do you share information? How do you track information? It’s about everyone working off the same page. We provide a set of tools where there is an audit trail that anyone in the firm could search and find the relevant document, which gives the whole team visibility. There is transparency, which is the to drive best practice. Sharing requires a neutral platform where everything is transparent and collaborative. If you are on the action item list, then the accountability to your peers is to have it done on time because the people relying on it can get their work done. We call it trust with verification. It’s not the wall with the post it notes on it it’s the people in the room that create the magic.
What can AEC businesses in Australia learn from international practices using PIM strategies?
There are 100 firms in Australia already using it. Some are the leaders of industry. We have an incredible number of customers using Project Information Management, because we take away all of the clutter. Professional engineers and architects went to school to do design, not to manage project information so the more we can do that through the technology platform and free up their time, the hours become more billable, so more profitability so they can focus on the higher value work like trying to solve design problems as well as providing better communication with the contractor.
The firms that are using this had a much higher level of job satisfaction and value add and they are really standardising on their best practices across all of their offices and all their project teams. Their brand is around service delivery at the end of the day.
When a job goes into construction people tend to look for a construction management solution. That’s all about the construction tags. Where we add value is where there are 100 construction projects, there may be 80-90 in design and maybe only 20 in construction. We can help the engineer and architect in the process and we have the tools to help during the construction.
How comparable are the US and Australian construction markets at the moment?
In both markets, the proliferation of the design construct is accountable and there are integrated project delivery and alliance projects going on in Australia. When members of the American Institute of Architects, came to Australia to look at what was being done here in terms of alliance projects they went back to the states and that’s where the IPP documents came from, so Australia must remember its been a leader in the past.
The fact that it’s a relatively small market makes it very competitive. Competing on price and buying a job is part of the culture in Australia, which causes problems downstream. We should be pricing on value, where there is profit margin for us all and we can all win. In the US, there is more to go around.
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