Round Table: The Big Data Challenge in Construction

There are many reasons why the industry needs to improve its data collection and sharing. Construction News and Quickbase brought together key industry members to explore the issues involved

Panel Sponsor: Quickbase

A lack of building data being stored, maintained and shared has “enormous costs” to public efforts to improve residential building standards, according to a senior investment director at the government’s housing accelerator . Homes England’s Edward Jezeph says that while there is a wealth of digital information about buildings in their early stages, once they are completed this “disappears”, affecting efforts to tackle issues such as embodied carbon and energy efficiency.

This is just one of the data fragmentation issues shared in a panel discussion held in central London by Construction news, sponsored by dynamic construction management software provider Quickbase. Project costs, Building Safety Act requirements, and insurance are among the other big drivers of better data collection.

Great challenge

“We have 24 million homes in England and we take about 240,000 a year,” says Jezeph. “We have a lot of digital information about these buildings as designed in our planning database and under construction, but then it disappears.

“As soon as this house is completed, the information is no longer available, so if I want to find out how this house was built, I have to send a surveyor.”

This causes a “huge challenge” to comply with certain policies, such as getting buildings to operate with net zero carbon emissions, he explains. “I need the existing data used in the building process to be live and accessible, then I can use it for the modernization agenda, including the £10,000-£40,000 we will have to spend on each house. to put it to the standard, or to make the business decision that it is no longer economically worthwhile to continue and replace it.”

Others make similar points. Daniel Cook, outgoing chief executive of research and advisory body Active Building Center, agrees that not enough data is available as a standard. He says the organization worked with homebuilder Greencore Construction to examine whether their homes are climate positive, meaning they save more greenhouse gas emissions than are generated during their construction. “They use materials and options that reduce embodied carbon and maximize energy production over the life of their buildings,” he says. “I think they are an industry leader and they compiled all this information into the BIM model to allow these calculations to be made.

“But there’s a lack of standards and requirements in this market. If you look at a place like the US, it’s much more mandatory.”

Is it just the lack of regulations that is causing the missing project data, or is there more to it? For Lee Brankley, chief executive of steel certification body Cares, a fragmented industry leads to data fragmentation, with the multitude of parties involved in projects – customers, contractors, subcontractors and different product manufacturers – to the root “I think the challenge is that all the different parts of the value chain have different IT systems, they’re collecting different data in different formats and sharing that data in different ways. The challenge is to connect the data between the different parties involved,” he says.

Many believe that these obstacles can be overcome, however.

Customer clarity

“A lot of data fragmentation starts because people don’t say what they want to in the beginning,” says Buro Happold, May Winfield’s global head of business, legal and digital risk. “If you’re very clear, ‘I want this,’ and the other person says, ‘This is what I’m going to provide and this is how I’m going to do it,’ you probably have very little data fragmentation because the expectations are very clear.”

Having this clarity from customers is useful, agrees Robert Fawn, head of integrated management systems at Tilbury Douglas. “Usually it’s a good developer who identifies the early gates they need and works with key quantity surveyors, architects and other stakeholders, and then everything else trickles down. Then you need all the other parties involved to contribute and buy in, as needed”.

In addition to the zero agenda, the Building Safety Act’s requirement that those involved in the construction process be able to demonstrate the characteristics of their work to the building safety regulator also creates an imperative need for good data collection, according to the panel.

KPMG technical director Kevin Masters says project funding is also increasingly linked to demonstrations of carbon and safety credentials. “A big capital project isn’t going to get funded at a decent rate unless it can demonstrate throughout the supply chain that people are doing what they say they’re doing. The industry needs to respond to that question of trust [is part of] the issue of the Building Safety Act.

“I think [the industry] has been struggling with a lack of trust and now is an opportunity for us to collectively address that and start building trust with our customers and with our customers.”

Simeon Seamer, head of construction, UK and Ireland, at Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance adds that his industry is looking for contractors to be able to share consistent data over time.

barriers

Better data sharing could also have many benefits within the sector, including improving the provision of national infrastructure, several participants say.

But there are barriers to sharing information, especially the intellectual property of an individual company. Arcadis director Phil Brown says: “We have to figure out what data is sacrosanct, what data do we actively need in an infrastructure that allows other datasets to come to life? Then we [need to] define what is in the public and social good versus what [is needed] to innovate I think that would create positive competition.”

Birdi’s creative director, Harbinder Birdi, meanwhile, is asking regional mayors and local authorities to facilitate the project’s data sharing. He points out that in recent years the number of in-house architects has dropped significantly in town halls.

“Are local authorities writing briefs where they understand what data they want and do they have people in their boroughs who actually know how to open it and use it?” he asks

usability

This ability to use data becomes an important point of discussion.

Peter Sutcliffe, head of technical practice – building engineering at Aecom, says: “There is
lots of very smart people developing digital tools. The industry is starting to link some of them, but there is still a long way to go. The big problem is getting it through the business, otherwise you end up with almost a two- or three-speed operation [use of the tools] it’s the reserve of the top 5%, but people at the coalface are struggling to understand where we’re going.”

Arcadis technical director Andrea Gillarduzzi echoes the sentiment. He says digital tools should be carefully selected based on criteria such as functionality, usability, reliability and cost.

“I’ve been involved in software selection, and I’ve found that one of the biggest problems is that a lot of times it’s selected almost out of emotion, without thinking,” he says.

Andy Winter, of software provider Quickbase, also says that making the tools usable is key to their effectiveness, despite the challenges posed by construction inflation.

“Project and materials costs can change so quickly, so when a company gets together and downloads all the information, puts it into a report and sends it out, the cost may not be accurate. [any longer],” he says.

“You need tools that allow continuity and put software in people’s hands that is easy to use and that they feel saves them time. Someone who has been doing the same job for 30 years has to see it as routine.”