The Achilles Heel of the Design Process
Arazoo Co-Founder Barry LePatner and I recently realized that fast-approaching 2017 is the ten year anniversary of Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets (University of Chicago Press), Barry’s book on why the construction industry operates the way it does. If you haven’t read it, it’s a detailed macroeconomic critique of how the industry’s extreme fragmentation and pervasive asymmetry of information creates perverse incentives that consistently favor contractors over owners, leaving design professionals caught in the inevitable cross-fire between the one with the experience and the one with the money.
Ten years ago, the use of applied technology in the industry was the lowest of any major, non-farm industry. And it remains relatively low today. Technological application then was generally limited to manufacturers’ product and material development use of design software by architects and engineers. BIM was in its infancy, but many predicted that adoption by firms of every size would be swift and design professionals would quickly benefit from major productivity gains. This proved to be overly optimistic.
As our industry slowly emerged from the Great Recession, the Internet 2.0 was quickly evolving into a world of B2B cloud-based apps that were revolutionizing how other industries operated and how people shared information. The lessons Barry and I had been learning as business advisors and owner’s reps managing complex projects for our clients began to coalesce into a larger vision that saw applied technology as one possible driver of improvement and reform in the industry.
We recognized that while BIM and Revit were slowly being adopted by A/E firms and enabling them to produce a more complete and coordinated set of drawings, there was no similar development of applied technology solutions for what we’d come to see as the Achilles Heel of the construction documents: product selection and specifications. On projects that we were called in to review — and even ones we managed ourselves — we found too often that incomplete and inaccurate specifications were a major source of RFIs, change orders, and even substantial delays during construction. The exodus of design professionals during the recession drained many firms of their most experienced staff. Post-recession, project fees remained stubbornly low. In this environment, specs were rarely given the time (or fee) they deserved and became a somewhat rote and boilerplate exercise copied from one project to the next leading to confusion or conflict. Lessons learned rarely were applied from one project to another. No one knew where to find the latest relevant product information or how to easily share it with their colleagues. Costly mistakes were made –and worse — repeated.
It was from these observations that Barry and I realized technology could help protect this vulnerable Achilles Heel. Our insight wasn’t that specification writing itself needed fixing. Rather, it was the “analog” product selection process, with its detailed research and myriad complex, interdependent decisions that was ripe for reform. We developed Arazoo to help design professionals to overcome their vulnerability in the design and construction process, by enabling them to easily collect, organize, and protect hard-won research and lessons learned from project to project. This is the key to developing institutional knowledge, creating valuable intellectual property, reducing risk of errors and omissions, and enhancing the efficiency of the firm. All of that is critical if our industry is to finally realize the benefits that technology has already brought to so many other industries.
