Letter to the editor: Embrace the geek - no wrestling required

Rennie Chadwick
25 November 2014

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Antony Oliver is wrong. Construction has to embrace technology and its technologists and use it to rethink business models if we ever want margins to increase, says Rennie Chadwick.

Infrastructure Intelligence editor Antony Oliver has always had a knack for writing challenging and insightful editorial pieces.  Normally, he makes me think, challenges my assumptions or sheds light on a perspective that had previously eluded me. 

"If we were process driven we would have done better than a 2% improvement in productivity between 1987 and 2007 and we would find it easy to adopt the process changes required to benefit from BIM – but we don’t."

His piece on BIM on 7th November engaged me for completely different reasons.  His assertions that we need to ‘wrestle the tech from the domain of the geek’ and that our industry is ‘process driven’ paint entirely the wrong picture. 

I am aware that I am picking up on two points from the entire piece and I acknowledge now that I am in agreement with his sentiment that we are in exciting times.  So, why the grumpy response from me?

Firstly, I have been in this industry for over 25 years and, whilst there are pockets of excellence, to describe the industry as a whole as ‘process driven’ is simply wrong.  If we were process driven we would have done better than a 2% improvement in productivity between 1987 and 2007 and we would find it easy to adopt the process changes required to benefit from BIM – but we don’t.

Secondly, implying that BIM technology has to be ‘wrestled out of the domain of the geek’ is at best an unfortunate turn of phrase. It implies that the technologists, ie people that are not like the rest of us, have for some reason been keeping the technology to themselves.  I have had the good fortune to work with technologists for most of my career and my experience is the polar opposite. 

Getting anything new adopted within construction, that does not show a payback in the project it is first used in, is nigh on impossible.  Why is that? 

We have, for decades, been a project focused industry with some well developed and entrenched business models.  Contracting companies work on very small margins and survive by managing a positive cash flow which historically has been topped up by interest earned on that positive cash flow.  The impact of the recession has driven a coach and horses through this business model, the results of which are in the trade press almost every week.

If we want a sustainable future, in the true sense, we have got to start operating to different business models and earn a better quality margin. 

To deserve a better quality of margin from the work we do, we have to invest in the technology and processes that underpin our products and services over their lifetime and not limit ourselves by the confines or timescales of individual projects.

To succeed in this endeavour requires many things not least an enquiring mind, unconstrained by custom and practice.  This enquiring mind has to accommodate the apparent contradiction of disciplined process and never ending innovation.  To succeed we need to embrace the ‘geek’, the inner one as well as the real experts, not wrestle with them.

Rennie Chadwick is director, design and IT, at Osborne.

Write to the editor at antony.oliver@infrastructure-intelligence.com