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WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOUR DATA CAN HURT YOU How some firms are leveraging profits with investments in big-data tools By Erin Joyce

Dig into the master schedule on any major construction project and you will likely find plenty of ex-amples of big data. They might

include terabytes of building-informa-tion-modeling data tied to perhaps seven different schedules, each with its own logic linked throughout the sequencing of the project.

If the logic that ties some 23,000 ac-tivities—about the average in a two-year project—is a bust, the time it takes the project manager to track down the prob-lems manually while the schedule is mov-ing forward can push a project seriously off its calendar. When that happens, everyone’s margins are at risk with each cascading delay and threat of litigation.

That’s one example of why, in today’s buzzword bingo of information-technol-ogy jargon, big data has become a hot number.

In a recent report, Mark Beyer, vice president of research for Gartner Re-search, summed up the trend. “Big data has such a vast size that it exceeds the ca-pacity of traditional data management technologies,” he wrote. “It requires the use of new or exotic technologies simply to manage the volume alone.”

And it’s not all about size with big data, Beyer adds. “A complex statistical model can make a 300-gigabyte file ‘seem’ bigger than a 110-terabyte database even if both

are running on multicore, distributed par-allel processing platforms,” he adds. “That’s why big data has quickly emerged as a significant challenge for enterprises.”

In an engineering and construction industry where the reach of 3D BIM technology grows more complex when scheduling is added to make a 4D BIM, big data arrives each day with an ever-louder thud.

Yet few firms are investing in data-taming tools. According to Gartner, firms in the construction and materials indus-tries with annual revenue of about $250 million invest about 1.6% of that in IT. For firms with annual revenue of about $10 billion, the average is 1.1%—dead last compared to industries such as bank-ing, health care, retail and transportation (see chart, p. 44). And that’s for all IT operations. Within those percentages, firms are making even smaller invest-ments in software tools to tame big data.

Breaking New Ground

But for every firm whose tech strat-egy is still to work off spread-sheets and re-enter data into different silos, other engineering

and construction firms are breaking new ground. MWH Global, a global “wet” infrastructure firm, is building unique apps for its clients, thanks to the firm’s ability to capture knowledge from its data

systems. Other firms such as Turner Con-struction are joining with Virginia Tech researchers to find new ways of looking at productivity data using jobsite video and images—that is, using mash-ups of struc-tured and unstructured data. Still others are seeking better views of complex scheduling project data.

“No question, schedules are a bear to tame,” says Shawn Pressley, chief infor-mation officer and senior vice president at construction-management firm Hill International.

“It’s when you drill into a schedule’s work breakdown structure or enterprise breakdown structure—that’s where prob-lems can get nasty,” Pressley adds. When project managers start to associate costs to a three-day schedule of a crane, the five-day schedule of its crew, the seven-day schedule of the materials and the cost of the crew’s labor—then factoring that into the schedule—the sheer size of the data can get out of control.

A prime example is the delivery of steel to a site, Pressley notes. “The schedule says when the truck carrying the steel needs to be there and [a beam] needs to be bolted to column 8B, for example,” he says. “You can overcomplicate a schedule so much that logic ties don’t work. That’s when you get logic [busts] that say faucets on the 23rd floor will delay the concrete on the fifth.”

ACUMEN The firm’s benchmarkingand project-scheduling analysis products are catching on with construction firms, such as Hill International.

Faulty logic woven throughout a firm’s files is a common problem among the multinational crews that make up today’s massive project schedules.

“We had a guy on a project in the Middle East send me a schedule to ana-lyze. It was showing a turnaround time of three hours for what guys were normally doing in three weeks,” he adds.

It was examples such as this that sent Hill in search of a new breed of business

intelligence and analysis tools. The com-pany found a solution with Acumen, an Austin, Texas, startup whose services in-clude risk analysis of project schedules as well as benchmarking tools to measure schedule quality against industry data.

The Acumen 360 product generates report scenarios from scheduling data, and Acumen Fuse provides Hill with forensic analysis to get to the bottom of logic busts.

The startup’s benchmarking tool, Acumen Cloud, helps customers check the quality of the schedule against a grow-ing data set of industry samples.

Pressley says four key features of the Acumen software suite form the corner-stone of Hill’s implementation. They in-clude quality-assessment tools called Logic Density, Redundancy Index and Insufficient Detail, which Hill can deploy to assess the framework of a client’s sched-ule and recommend improvements. With these tools’ ability to highlight problem areas and find opportunities, one might argue that a kind of project arbitrage has arrived in construction.

4Q TECH REPORT SOFTWARE

BEFORE YOU SAY YOU ARE A BIG-DATA ORGANIZATION, YOU NEED TO STANDARDIZE. —BASSEM HAMDY, VP, CMIC

Other tools include Baseline Compli-ance, which helps users find problematic areas of a schedule.

“What we are seeing now is that proj-ects are using this benchmark analysis to set higher standards and raise the bar or expectations when developing project schedules,” says Dan Patterson, CEO and president of Acumen.

“One powerful aspect to this concept is that the benchmarking database is con-stantly gaining more and more data points every time a project runs a schedule analy- sis, and so it is in many ways a self– improving benchmarking mechanism,” says Patterson, a former executive with Pertmaster, which builds risk-analysis tools within Oracle’s Primavera project management products.

Acumen’s tool sets are gaining fans in the construction industry at a time when major providers of scheduling tools are rolling out deeper analytics for big data. These include Oracle’s Primavera Risk Analysis and Vico Software, which offers

sophisticated tools that help users build a complex 4D BIM scheduling model, add in simulations to the model and plug in “what if” scenarios that detect potential problems down the road.

But of all the latest business intelli-gence tools hitting the market, the bench-marking features represent something of the zeitgeist for the engineering and con-struction disciplines, which have long called for more data aggregation for these kinds of industry-standard comparisons.

This is one area in which MWH is see-ing payback within its consulting and knowledge group, a division that lever-ages data and technologies to build new products and apps for clients.

MWH is building project-specific apps and other data-driven products by leveraging data from its past projects.

Now, the apps can be used to frame con-versations with clients about strategic ap-proaches to their engineering needs, says Dan Kieny, director of the consulting di-vision, located in MWH’s Broomfield, Colo., headquarters.

The firm calls them mTOOLS. They include field data collection, data analysis, process guidance frameworks, perfor-mance management, visualization and reporting applications. From little data, big data grows.

According to CEO Alan Krause, the firm invests close to 8% of its profits in IT. That percentage ranks ahead of the construction industry averages cited in Gartner’s statistics.

“We know our clients can benefit from many emerging technologies, particularly technologies that integrate predictive,

historic and real-time data to improve decision-making and event response,” he notes. “We know we can’t afford to sit back and wait for technology to force us to act. We must look inside and outside of our industry for the best technically and commercially innovative ideas.”

It’s an approach to technology that runs throughout the firm’s DNA. Krause says internal technology groups advocate for the adoption of the best ideas after evaluating their technical and commercial potential, helped by the firm’s incubation fund for those investments. “With mobile devices today, we perform our jobs on the site, where we see everything and capture the right data easily and in real time. We use that information to make the best-informed decisions, enabling better work processes. In 10 years, when operating

4Q TECH REPORT SOFTWARE

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GARTNER STATS: AEC DEAD LAST IN IT SPEND

Construction companies with less than $250 million in revenue invest about 1.6% of it on information

technology, according to Gartner Re-search. Meanwhile, construction firms with $10 billion in revenue on average spend only 1.1% on IT. The construction industry is dead last in IT spending com-pared to 14 other industries measured by Gartner. The federal government and banking spend the most on IT (see chart).

For firms struggling through the con-struction recession, underspending on IT may be a shortsighted strategy. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 70% of U.S. productivity growth comes from IT. So, underinvesting in IT for extended peri-ods could put firms at a competitive dis-advantage. Operating IT systems past their end-of-life also could increase risk. Further, Gartner reports that 30% of net income is affected by IT economies of scale, so technologies optimized across the workforce may also improve profitability.

Gartner recently highlighted the nexus of four strategic technologies—mobile, information,

social and cloud—that likely will be game-changers across all industries over the next few years. In fact, this state of affairs may already be the case in the construction industry.

Tablets will continue to be a big trend,

thanks to specialized apps that give workers access to plans, punch-list tools, and safety checklists. New cloud-based collaboration tools facilitate increased productivity and faster construction cycles, especially in integrated project delivery. Many of these apps are longer-term investments whose returns will be difficult to measure until better industry benchmarks emerge.

Despite these stats, plenty of firms are pursuing new technology and realizing its benefits. For example, Bechtel CIO Geir Ramleth says Bechtel has developed ap-plication programming interfaces for con-struction project teams; APIs interface with the firm’s core enterprise data, en-abling use of tablets and web-based inter-faces. At McGraw-Hill’s FutureTech con-ference in October, Turner Construction SVP Richard Bach said a key investment is

to consolidate enterprise-resource-planning systems in order to improve the accuracy and timeliness of a company’s data and profits.

By Isaac Sacolick, CIO and Vice President of Technology, McGraw-Hill Construction

and managing the assets we designed or built, people have the opportunity to use data captured on-site to most effectively manage whole-life costs and performance of those assets.”

Data experts say companies have to change their thinking about IT invest-ments and the tool sets they use to keep up with firms that are made more nimble at spotting on-the-job problems with superior data visualization.

Investments in Cultural Changes

‘A lot of large [general contrac-tors] are still running [Micro-soft] Excel spreadsheets on their core systems,” says Bas-

sem Hamdy, chief marketing officer and vice president at construction software management provider CMiC.

“You can’t become a big-data master by having some of your systems in [Microsoft] Access and some in Excel,” Hamdy says. As good as spreadsheets are, they’re not as useful as a SQL-based database system for managing cost codes, change orders and the like.

Also, when Hamdy hears potential customers talking about investing in scan-ning software to knit together a trove of siloed documents—rather than discussing standardized content management sys-tems that can be incorporated with SQL database tools—he knows they have some work to do on the back end.

“Before you can say ‘I’m a big-data organization’ and ‘I understand it,’ you have to have a layer of standardization within your systems,” he adds. Think of standardization as if it were a playbook, which indicates how something gets done. A firm’s approach may be only one of 15 plays in the playbook. “If you want to win, you need to stick to the playbook,” Hamdy says.

When it comes to getting jobs, many general contractors place too much stock in relationships, rather than looking at what data sets can reveal about a team’s past performance. “A lot of guys will say ‘We know these guys, so we’ll get that job.’ But owners are getting smarter,” Hamdy says, “and GCs better get smarter,

Developers of enterprise data manage-ment systems say the long-awaited dawn of business intelligence for con-

struction has arrived, thanks in part to the rapid adoption of mobile computing devices and anywhere-anytime access to years of company data. Some users, however, say that while the sun may be rising—and that’s worth celebrating—it’s still only the early adopters who are seeing the light.

Access to business intelligence is rising with the expansion of fast internet connec-tions as well as cloud and web services for storing, processing and delivering informa-tion. But vendors say the use of mobile de-vices with browser access to dynamic data analysis is providing the key that’s unlocking business intelligence for practical use.

“Mobile tools and technology have ex-ploded in the last six months,” says Brian LaMee, a marketing director at Deltek, a 30-year-old vendor of enterprise manage-ment software for architecture and engi-neering. “Mobile technology and speed of the network for doing data on wireless de-vices has improved drastically,” he says.

In response to this trend, Deltek for the past year has improved its Vision enterprise database’s interface with mobile devices, especially through browser access to dash-board views of performance data. The latest release, Vision 7, arrived on Oct. 22. With Deltek’s performance management module, dashboards can bring role-appropriate, cur-rent, drillable information to any device with an internet connection, anywhere, anytime.

LaMee also contends that data feeding into the database is improved by mobile ac-cess. “We are getting the project managers away from spreadsheets. They are logging that information into the database. We are seeing a major uptick in that,” he says.

Bob Johansen, director of information analytics at Omaha, Neb.-based AEC firm

Leo A Daly, hasn’t seen evidence of mobile devices improving data quality, but he agrees that by accessing enterprise data from the field, mobile devices are starting to play a big role in delivering practical, easily navigated business intelligence to decision-makers. “It really brings the value out of the database and puts it right there in front of you,” Johansen says. “It helps users make better decisions faster, more easily and keeps their people more productive.”

Johansen says the growing use of web-services collaboration tools such as Share-Point also has put business-intelligence platforms within reach, even for small firms. SharePoint has tools that can effectively pre-analyze data components—for exam-ple, cost, profit or schedule—in relational databases and promote that information to dashboards through the use of “cubes” that cover those areas. The cubes can be set to refresh nightly with updated data for nearly real-time views of performance metrics.

On the construction-management side, vendor Dexter + Chaney is on the same page as Deltek. It has redesigned its Spec-trum dashboard “from top to bottom to make it compatible with mobile devices,” says Wayne Newitts, marketing director.

The dashboard’s elegantly customizable interface is built by pulling topic-specific analysis apps from a library. Each can tap into and process data from the database. The apps are dragged and dropped to build the dashboard, and once there, multiple apps can be opened at once, each in a tabbed window.

“It would be impossible to make dash-boards worthwhile without cloud computing enabling anywhere-on-any-device delivery and browser-based access to the data,” says Newitts. But with it, “it’s business intel-ligence built your way,” he says.

By Tom Sawyer

MOBILE DEVICES ARE KEY TO BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

2012 IT SPEND AS PERCENTAGE OF REVENUE

INDUSTRY

ANNUAL REVENUEAPPROXIMATELY

$250 MILLION

ANNUAL REVENUEAPPROXIMATELY

$10 BILLION

SOURCE: GARTNER IT KEY METRICS DATABASE, 2012

BANKING 7.3% 6.2%

CONSTRUCTION & MATERIALS 1.6% 1.1%

EDUCATION 5.6% 3.3%

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT 10.8% 7.9%

STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT 4.6% 1.8%

SOFTWARE AND INTERNET 8.4% 5.4%

INSURANCE 5.3% 2.9%

HEALTH CARE 3.5% 3.3%

MEDIA 5.4% 3.2%

PHARMACEUTICALS 3.0% 2.6%

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES 5.6% 3.4%

RETAIL AND WHOLESALE 1.9% 0.9%

TELECOMMUNICATIONS 4.9% 3.8%

TRANSPORTATION 3.5% 2.3%

UTILITIES 4.2% 1.7%

ACROSS ALL 15 INDUSTRIES 5.04% 3.16%

too.” Without a better view of project data, contractors could fall even further behind in a world that is increasingly managed with these software tools.

Take the predictive analytics that are baked into BIM models—no matter which authoring tool is used, he adds. The one thing that never changes in a model are the coordinates, so users know what the building object looks like in a model state. The same analogy holds for firms’ use of data. “You want to be storing data and having it render on a model rather than a model render the data,” Hamdy notes. Another example he uses is home

movies: A viewer can pull out a VHS ver-sion of a movie or download the digital version or stream it or pop in the collec-tors-edition Blu-Ray DVD.

“No matter which format, it’s the same movie,” Hamdy says. “The only differ-ence is the way it’s being stored. That’s where the industry is trying to move toward in BIM and data management—to have it reside intelligently in your data-base.” But it takes a commitment. “A company has to manage the change both at a cultural level and from a technology standpoint,” he says.

Hamdy says the cultural aversion to

investing in new data management plat-forms still runs deep in many construction industry firms. “I think we’re the only industry where [this kind of] technology is slowly being acquired,” he says.

Project execution should not be man-aged in multiple systems anymore, even through many are. But there are firms that are investing in single integrated plat-forms that contain key elements, includ-ing predictive project analytics, which are used to improve project performance by examining the successes and failures of past projects. Relationship management software lets companies gain insight about

46 ENR December 3, 2012 enr.com

inter-relationships as well as create per-formance indicators. “Now I can better select my team from looking at past data, from a more quantitative perspective,” says Hamdy.

Miles Haladay, product manager for business intelligence for Viewpoint Soft-ware, is seeing the company’s general-contractor clients now interested in im-proving their ability to leverage their data. They want to be able to do forecasting and benchmark internally with their own systems, he says.

“Five years ago, you didn’t have sys-tems that brought it all together. Today, you do,” says Haladay. There are a lot of different big-data components, including the unstructured data many firms oversee in their document management systems; the structured side within ERP systems; and a firm’s operational data, which sits in the middle and may entail accounting or change management, such as tracking change orders. “If they can leverage it off a standard platform, they can start build-ing better internal metrics for delivering projects on time and under budget by checking progress along the way,” he says.

One customer told him, “If I could use data visualization to tell the foreman on a job at the end of every day whether he did

to 15 years as data becomes easier to deploy in feedback loops,” he adds. Mobile-device use on jobsites represents the leading wave of this rising technology tide (see sidebar, p. 45).

“You have data coming from the field to the office and back, and it’s going faster, and you get that actionable infor-mation to decision-makers,” Haladay says. “But the key is that you’ve got to give them something they can under-stand. It’s got to be easy and intuitive, and it shouldn’t have to take a complete IT staff to get it done.” Yes, there are com-plexities, he adds, but they are not insur-mountable.

As Gartner notes in its report, “The ability to manage extreme data will be a core competency of enterprises that are increasingly using new forms of informa-tion (text, social, context) to look for pat-terns that support business decisions (pattern-based strategy).” Gartner recom-mends: Focus on information governance so as to be able to manage valuable rele-vant information—do not try to govern all of your available assets. Develop ap-propriate specialist competencies in the organization, such as data scientists, to evaluate both how information is used and how it evolves.

Whips and Chairs

For Hill’s Pressley, construction management tools are becoming more science-based, especially when dealing with schedules “that

look pretty but fall apart under “b---s--- logic that doesn’t hold up.”

He now uses Acumen’s tools with all project management applications. “It ab-sorbs that data, no matter what scheduling platform you’re running: Microsoft Proj-ect, P3, Deltek, even Excel,” he adds.

“Real complex schedules used to take us one, sometimes two weeks to analyze. By the time you got the answer to the scheduling problems, it was already out of date because everything on the project just moved up.” Now, the firm can resolve problems in a day or so.

He says, “It’s like having a chair and whip” to tame the growth of big data.

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enr.com December 3, 2012 ENR 47

WINDOWS 8 LOWERS DATA ACCESS BARRIERS

Microsoft’s rolling release of its new Windows 8 operating system, along with its companion Surface touch-

screen tablets to run it, is being greeted by construction IT managers like a beast with a split personality—but with great potential to liberate data.

For some qualities—specifically, the ability to run Windows applications while using Microsoft’s DirectAccess server to make se-cure, effortless connections through firewalls, along with Surface’s battery life that is far lon-ger than laptops—they love it. But for in-office upgrades, they say they would rather not go there, as the new user interface is counter- intuitive, making for a difficult to transition.

Although mobile devices such as iPads and Android tablets have brought valuable com-puting power to jobsites, Jason Burns, vice president of technology at New York City-based Hunter Roberts Construction, says the drawback is that users can’t run Windows pro-grams on such devices and IT managers can’t easily tie those devices into a firm’s enterprise network system. That leaves frustrated users resorting to software approximations of their office tools and wading through thickets of log-in screens to make a connection.

“Our superintendents will go mad if I install apps that make their lives more difficult,” says Burns. “You need Windows token [access]

management, and only Windows has it.” Other Windows 8 beta testers at PCL Con-

structors, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, agree. Shane Crawford, PCL’s manager for infra-structure, say Windows’ DirectAccess tool gives both Windows 7 and 8 a decisive advan-tage for enterprise users over other available systems. “No user intervention or activity is required to establish the connection to the company’s infrastructure,” says Crawford. Once the tablet or a compatible device has an internet connection, the DirectAccess service automatically connects to the corporate DirectAccess server. Then, users interact with their system exactly as if they were in the of-fice using a typical desktop computer.

Even though Windows 8 RT and Windows 8 Pro are out, only the first-generation Surface RT tablets are available; thus, the direct con-nectivity and power will not be delivered until the release of the enterprise-grade Surface Pro, which Mary Jo Foley, editor of ZDNet’s “All About Microsoft” blog, says is promised for late January. When that happens, Burns and Crawford agree that unleashing the Windows tool sets on touch-screen tablet PCs will be so compelling that issuing and supporting desk-top or laptop computers for users may no lon-ger be necessary. Mobile devices will do.

By Tom Sawyer

SPECIALIZED APPS Screen shot of an MWH app designed to track a client’s water systems.

NEW INTERFACE Oliver Soler, Hunter Roberts information systems manager, explains Windows 8’s home screen to his IT team.

“ BIG DATA HAS EMERGEDAS A SIGNIFICANT CHALLENGE FOR ENTERPRISES.”

—MARK BEYER, GARTNER RESEARCH

a good job or a bad job, that’s an indicator he can use to figure out how to improve his productivity.”

Haladay says, “What’s cool is that you can use apps built on scalable infrastruc-ture [such as an SQL database] where you can have accounting, project manage-ment, job costs and payroll—all your internal components—on one system.”

Now a firm can push that data to an iPad and get real-time information from the field, then push the data back to its cloud-based system, which will show the productivity for that day. A really good app is browser-based, making device op-erating systems irrelevant. The user is able to see data visualizations—such as green or red flags that note how the work is progressing. “That’s where the rubber meets the road with big data and business intelligence,” Haladay says.

“That’s where we’re going to see con-struction take off, especially in the next 10 PH

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