c.i.t.e. seminar, sheffield, 21 march 2003
KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY SIRMICHAEL LATHAM, DEPUTY CHAIRMAN,
WILLMOTT DIXON LIMITED,DEPUTY CHAIRMAN, B.I.W. TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED, CHAIRMAN, CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRYTRAINING BOARD AND PRESIDENT, U.K. CHAPTER, INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCE FORINTEROPERABILITY
It is a greatpleasure for me to be here in Sheffield today for this seeing is believingworkshop programme to support the roll out of C.I.T.E.s road shows about IT inConstruction. I am particularly gladthat it is aimed at smaller and medium sized firms as well as large ones suchas Willmott Dixon, of which I am Deputy Chairman. It is also deliberately intended to be non-techie, and that isvery important. Many years ago,specifically about 1977, I went to a presentation given by I.B.M. at theirheadquarters in London. None of theguests in the room, of which I was one, had I.T. skills, and I remember thatthe I.B.M. lecturer spoke in these terms.He said - and I stress that this was about 26 years ago - in a company,knowledge about I.T. is like a big series of concentric circles. On the outside you have the main board ofdirectors who know absolutely nothing about it at all. Then each circle inside it is of a lowerlevel of management, who know slightly more than the circle outside them. In the middle is the object itself - a hugemainframe surrounded by 22 year olds in jeans, and Superman T shirts who knoweverything about it but are entirely unable to explain it to anybodyelse. In further discussion, we allagreed that I.T. would have earned its place in normal business management whenall sections of the organisation saw it as being as much of a management toolas a telephone, a biro or a photocopier and not as something guarded by theyoungsters in their Superman T shirts with their own incomprehensiblecyberspace jargon.
Well, that wasthen and this is now. Of course, wehave more or less got to the stage where the work station or the computer is anormal tool. I am sure that most of thepeople who visit this exhibition and roadshow today will be involved in basicI.T. communication by e-mails and computerised ordering facilities or payrollarrangements. But in the constructionindustry as a whole there is still a very long way to go before we fullyutilise the flexibility of I.T. Let megive you an example of what frequently - very frequently - happens on buildingprojects, but which could be avoided by the type of facility which C.I.T.E.exists to promulgate. It happens likethis. The project architect decides,perhaps after discussion with the client, that he needs to send an instructionor variation to the site team during the course of the job. The architectural practice uses computeraided design - itself, of course, an I.T. technique which barely existed thirtyyears ago, but is now normal - and calls up on the screen the proposed changedrawing. The architect then downloadsit and prints it off. He or she thenwalks over to the fax machine and sends it in hard copy by fax to the contractorsproject manager. The project managerlooks at it and perhaps scribbles a few notes on it and then photocopies itround the office to estimators and surveyors to price the variation. He also faxes it to the site office. The site manager receives it, perhaps addssome more scribbled notes on to it and then photostats it again several timesin order to give copies to the subcontractors, some of whom may be on site, orindeed may be off site personally that day and so need to be faxed as well. They in their turn may need to work updetails of the variation and may also photostat and fax the drawing, pluscomments, to their own estimators and surveyors. It may also be necessary to involve manufacturers and suppliers,and yet again the photocopier and the fax will be called into play. Note that I have assumed that all will havephotocopiers and faxes. If they dont,the need will be to use couriers, bikes, the telephone or even snail mail. High Tech it isnt. And there are plenty of opportunities forfoul-ups or vital participants being left out of the loop.
Now all of thatcould have been avoided if the supply side team were in I.T. contact with eachother, with compatible systems in construction collaboration technology orindeed just basic I.T. access. Theoriginal computer aided drawings could have been sent in real time direct toall involved in the implementation of the variation. Not only would that save much time and hassle, it would also haveeliminated the possibility that the scribbled notes written by project and sitemanagers, or indeed anyone else in the supply chain, would have been misread ormisunderstood or otherwise became illegible in transmission. There are very large numbers of sites, withprogressive clients and supply chain, who are using collaboration systems ofthat kind and there are a number of I.T. firms which devise and supplythem. Since I am Deputy Chairman of onesuch collaboration technology firm, I will not advertise any of them, includingmy own, but I know that C.I.T.E. would tell you of the various choices if youso wish. You dont need to be a bigfirm or have a lot of expensive kit in order to have this I.T.accessibility. If you do have it, youwill be in good company. If you dont,you may be wasting money unnecessarily on administration and backup.
Let me give youone specific case study of how I.T. has helped a project. The particular client is a major publicsector organisation, and the specific project was a large 41million schemeincluding new accommodation, an office building, catering and sportsfacilities, a day nursery, and associated infrastructure and externalworks. It was a prime contract and oneof the first to be completed last Autumn.
From the outset,great emphasis was placed on working closely together in an atmosphere ofhonesty, trust and openness. Keyprinciples of the management partnership including open-book accounting andpre-agreed profit levels, and a partnering charter was signed by all teammembers.
Key team memberswere co-located in offices on site, but others continued to work from otherlocations. To support the partneringculture of openness and transparency, the team agreed to use a web-basedcollaboration system, a project extranet, to provide a communication platformto share and exchange all documents, drawings and other information relating tothe project. This agreement was writteninto a key document, the project execution plan.
The InformationChannel makes data available to every team member through a unique, secure,project-specific website - accessible by authorised individuals from anylocation 24x7. Users are able tocreate, and have access to, information on the site including drawings,specifications, comments, notes of meetings, schedules, photographs, teammember details, etc. The systemprovides a transparent, single repository of the most up-to-date information,and all user activity is tracked and recorded, providing an audit traildetailing who did what and when.
The Channel wasopened in February 2001, and as training extended across the project team,usage grew rapidly, averaging more than 2,000 log-ins every month throughoutthe summer. One factor in this rapidadoption was that design work continued in parallel with construction for some months,so the Channel became a vital conduit between designers, constructors andsuppliers. In 20 months, there wereover 23,600 system log-ins; 1,733documents and 4,072 drawings were published, over 1,300 comments on these weremade, and all were accessible to over 170 users from 27 organisations.
Instead ofdesigners distributing multiple packages of drawings to lots of individuals,drawings were published once - to the Channel - and individuals could thenview, comment upon and, if necessary, print off just the drawings or detailsthey needed. This drastically cut thevolume of paperwork produced, distributed and stored. (Team feedback suggests this reduction was also partly due to thepartnering ethos; the absence of anadversarial culture removed the need for the many contract letters found onmore traditional projects). Informationcould be found more readily. Some teammembers contrasted ease of access to a single repository with searching throughe-mail attachments or filing cabinet drawers).The client team logged-in nearly 900 times.
This is by nomeans an isolated case. The lateststatistics that I have for the particular collaboration technology company, ofwhich I am Deputy Chairman, is that there have been 22,296 individual users, 2,623user companies, and 1,120 projects. Sothere is plenty of use of this hi tech route to cost cutting and best practice.
Then there arevirtual reality models. When I wasundertaking the research for my review in 1993/4, which led to the publicationof Constructing the Team in July 1994, I was invited by Reading University togo to their campus and see their work on what they called knowledge basedengineering. This was the techniquebeing used by large aeroplane manufacturers, and also by motor manufacturers,to plot the intended manufacturing process through I.T. I was impressed by Readings research, whichseemed to me likely to be highly beneficial to clients, as well as to thesupply chain. When I reported on thisdays visit back to my expert industry assessors - and, again, remember thatall this was nine years ago - both the contractor and the professionalconsultant assessors, who were very experienced and respected figures in theindustry, said that while this was interesting visionary work, it was very muchthe technology of the 21st century. Thesoftware would be much too expensive.Clients would not want to pay for it.The consultants could not afford it because their fees were so low inthe light of the very tough competitive fee bidding which was taking place at that time. But that was not the reaction of the two client assessors,representing the British Property Federation and the Chartered Institute ofPurchasing and Supply. They both saidthat clients certainly might be prepared to pay for it if they felt it wouldhelp them to get the project which they wanted, to the quality and timescalewhich they envisaged and for the price which they had agreed. What was more they both expected that theprice of the software would fall very soon.Encouraged by that, I put some supportive remarks about knowledge basedengineering - virtual reality models as they are now more widely known - in myreport.
That was in July1994. Early in 1995 I was in Cardiffwith the C.I.O.B. President, visiting what was then South Glamorgan CountyCouncil. The Chief Education Architectof the Council showed me the virtual reality model which he had devised to walkcouncillors, school heads, college principals and boards of governors throughtheir proposed new classroom facilities.It was very simple, but also very explicit and valuable to such layclients to be able to say Oh no, we dont want the windows or the door there,they should be over there or that is not a good place for the washroom or thechanging rooms, they would be better at the other end of the corridor -exactly the kind of clear sighted user comment and advice which we need beforework begins on site, not when such a change would require an expensivevariation. Whats more, the chiefarchitect said that the software had been quite economical to devise.
12 months laterI was a main speaker at the Health Service Management Conference at theBirmingham National Exhibition Centre.At the exhibition, a medium sized firm of architects were displayingtheir virtual reality models, exactly the kind of professional practice whichthe assessors had said 1 years earlier would not be able to afford such kitbecause of their fee levels. And thefollowing year again, 1997, I was in Newcastle upon Tyne where a very smallfirm of environmental consultants, basically a two person practice, showed metheir virtual reality model for the environmental enhancement of the quaysideof the river Tyne flowing through the city.Again, it was clear, simple, valuable to clients and inexpensive.
Nowadays, ofcourse, virtual reality models are very widely available, and much moresophisticated than they were nine years ago.But note the historical parallels.I am sure that in 1887 there were engineers, architects and builderssaying that this funny American speaking thing, (what was it called? atelephone) will never catch on. In1901 they were saying the same about the typewriter. In 1957 about the photocopier.In 1977 about the fax machine.In 1985 about e-mail. And, as Ihave already told you, it was actually said to me in 1994 about virtual realitymodels. The truth is that no firm everlost competitive advantage by investing in value adding new technologies. Of course, you need to avoid being sweptaway by the apparent novelty of something, as the dot com absurdityshowed. But telephones, typewriters,photocopiers, faxes, e-mail, laptops and virtual reality models have become asmuch part of a serious business in their time as desks, filing cabinets andbiros have also been and indeed still are, although the filing cabinet may nowhave CD Roms in it rather than reams of paper.
So these are allbig steps forward with which C.I.T.E. can help you, providing advice on bestpractice. You dont have to be a wizardtechie, understanding all the bells and whistles. I certainly dont. ButI.T. can also be of big benefit to you in sorting out your administrativeprocedures and I dont just mean putting the payroll or the income taxdeductions of your staff onto a computer.One of my roles is to be Chairman of the Construction Industry TrainingBoard. I asked the permanent staff toillustrate for me what they had done throughout the organisation - whichemploys over 1200 people through Great Britain, a lot of whom work from home asfield staff - what they have done to use I.T. and, perhaps more important, howthey have upgraded it to take account of concerns and criticisms of it. C.I.T.B. recently had a study done by anoutside expert management consultant who had reviewed the procedures five yearsago and was asked to revisit the work five years later. It is particularly important that theseprocedures should be as efficient as possible, since they involve collectinglevy from industry firms, paying out grants to those who train, placing youngpeople in apprenticeships, both in colleges of F.E. and with employers,supervising their progress, and umpteen other important roles. This is all very much in the public eye ofthe industry itself, the educational profession, parents and indeedpoliticians, both national and local.So we need to get it fully up to speed to ensure the best possibledelivery of our services, and to ensure that past failings are addressed. Five years ago, consultants told us that C.I.T.B.operated a large number of operating systems and bespoke applications. Since then, there have been a number of highlevel developments. Some of them areinternal, such as the advent of more effective business planning inC.I.T.B. Some of them are external,such as the Governments Quinquennial Review of the Boards work and thee-government initiative on electronic service delivery, which have prompted astep change in C.I.T.B.s information strategy and performance. Our very recent updated review has foundthat the I.T. systems are much simpler and more coherent than five years agoand far more user friendly. A lotneeded to be done. An I.T. steeringgroup had commented in 1996 that we should not get carried away by computersand technology ........... Humanbeings work better with paper than screens.That Luddite attitude has been overcome. C.I.T.B. is an information business. Of course, its goal and subject matter are skills training anddevelopment, but the process and control are now predominantly informationbased.
I asked my CITB colleagues for afew examples of how they have used IT to improve their performance and outreachto the construction industry.
1. A particularly important issue is the health and safety test,which is increasingly demanded by employers and is a vital part of the CSCSCard. It needs to be as accessible aspossible to the industry.
The initial launch of the test in 2000 made itavailable through the 154 Thomson Prometric test centres throughout the UK. Thisnetwork of centres was supplemented in 2001 by the Mobile Testing Facilitywhich allows the test to be carried out on site. Later in 2003 a furtherelement of flexibility will be introduced with the launch of an internetenabled Health and Safety Test.
This delivery method will allow the test to beundertaken anywhere where an internet connection can be made provided thatcertain criteria can be met. Stringent security measures have been built intothe system to ensure the safety and integrity of the test information duringits transmission through the Internet.
2. TheSkillMatch system provides on site assessment and training providers with atool to undertake skills profiling, the first stage of candidates assessmenttowards an NVQ.
The system is accessible over the internetallowing Providers immediate access to the current profilingdocumentation. Assessors can downloadthe profile questionnaire to laptop or handheld computers, complete the profileon site and then upload the results direct to the SkillMatch database.
The system waslaunched in April 2002 and to date around 200 OSAT Providers and associatedAssessors have been given access.
3. The NationalConstructionCollege are working with partners to promote and deliver theEuropean Computer Driving Licence (ECDL) to Construction Firms. The ECDLqualification provides a basic level of competency across a number of IT areasincluding:
Word processingand use of Spreadsheets
Use of theInternet
Use ofElectronic mail
Use of basicDatabases
The ECDL isincreasingly used across UK industry as a benchmark to ensure that staff areequipped to handle and exploit business technologies.
4. Originally set up in 2000with a pilot group, the CQS Online facility allows colleges to submit informationrelating to NVQ Unit Achievements and NVQ Registrations via the Internet ratherthan using the traditional paper forms.
The system has grown to encompass more than 150Colleges and the Registrationssubmitted online now represent over 20% of the total processed. CITB isactively seeking to increase the number of Colleges using the facility and willintroduce an enhanced version of the system in early summer 2003 .
5. The CSCS Online facilityhas been developed in order to give employers an easier method of registeringnumbers of staff for the Scheme. The system underwent extensive testing lastyear and was installed with a pilot Employer during the Autumn. It will be made available to more Employersduring 2003.
6. CITB have been working inpartnership with the Building Research Establishment to launch an on linebookshop for CITB products. The bookshop will be launched in April 2003 intandem with a revised Publications section of the www.citb.co.uk website.
7. From April 2003Registered Employers will be able to choose how to complete their CITB LevyReturn. As well as the standard paper based return, which has beensignificantly simplified for this Return year, Employers will be able toregister to complete their Return over the internet. Available from 6am until12 midnight the service provides instant validation of base information, onlinelook up tables and help fields to assist the user and will feed direct into theCITB Levy processing system removing the need for manual input.
The launch ofthis service follows a pilot carried out late in 2002 and it is anticipatedthat further online services such as Grant Claims and Account enquiries will bepiloted during 2003 and 2004.
The constructionindustry has been widely regarded as an extremely conservative industry, slowto change and suspicious of new ideas.Of course that is partly true.There are many crafts, and indeed many businesses, where people believethat the way that it was done by their fathers and grandfathers is good enoughfor themselves today, and that these fancy ideas drawn up by college boys orgirls will not last. This is human andindeed understandable. But there isanother aspect to it, which far sighted firms, and particularly far sightedclients, increasingly demand. They are not just concerned about a buildinggoing up. They want it to go up to thetimescale, cost and quality which clients had expected, and do so on acollaborative, non adversarial basis of partnering. In that regard they are looking to take out non value addingcosts at the earliest possible stage of conceptual design, let alone duringwork on site. They are also looking foran efficient process, not just a completed product. That is where I.T. can help a lot. It can use real time visibility to assist the most effective useof value management to drive out non value adding costs. This is not just theoretical or wishfulthinking. There are now top clientsinsisting upon the best use of the most modern techniques, includingcollaboration technology, to give them real route maps and high visibility tokeep their projects on track. They arealso looking for their consultants and contractors to have their own efficientoffice systems geared to lean production and best value project delivery. You can call it the Egan process, or bestpractice, or just modern commercial approaches. Whatever name it has, and however it is manifested in a modernconstruction business, I.T. has a crucial role to play. I welcome the roadshow and seminar. I congratulate C.I.T.E. for organisingit. And please remember that if youalways do what you always did, youll always get what you always got. That isnt good enough for modern clients ora modern industry. And there are plentyof progressive businesses out there who have taken this to heart and introducedmodern techniques to deliver a first class product. If you need further advice or assistance, ask the C.I.T.E.people. I know they will be pleased tohelp.