While we’re very optimised to keep water off the roads, we don’t really understand other aspects, such as whether a drainage ditch should be built to go left or right at a particular junction.
But the use of cross-sector data hints at even more powerful opportunities in the future, such as:.Longer term pipelines..
The Construction Playbook includes policies for publishing commercial pipelines and developing long-term plans for key asset types.The data set developed by the Hub could be expanded (‘upwards’ from spaces into assets and complexes and ‘downwards’ into sub-assemblies and products) to create a holistic data set that would allow suppliers to carry out their own analysis and forecasting.. Where better to publish this data than on a digital marketplace?.Searching the data for ‘SL_90_10_47 Lifts’ would show the exact number of lifts in the five-year pipeline and allow government to place contracts for the manufacture, installation and assembly of bulk orders of lifts, creating economies of scale;.
Open sourcing this data set would then allow third parties to develop their own goods and services (in exactly the way that open source data published by Transport for London, OpenStreetMaps and others has allowed the creation of common apps such as Citymapper, Bus Checker and Waze).This could create a new ecosystem of apps and tools that could sit alongside e-commerce to help clients, designers and manufacturers;.
Longer term digital transformation.. Last year, I wrote a. piece on a future state for Platforms.
, much of which was underpinned by a continuous flow of data across the design, manufacturing, assembly and operation phases.This is problematic, he says, because the great unlock we’re seeking in the construction industry is going to come from those lower tiers, with people like the rebar tradesman, the electrician and the plumber.. Bryden Wood agree that one of the key issues blocking the progress of the industry is the struggle to try and get digital construction technology down into the supply chain through the massive long-tail of small suppliers.
The large general contractors and consultants have already adopted digital to quite a significant extent.However, getting construction technology down to the smaller contractors and lower tiers on a construction site remains challenging.
Without their involvement, we aren’t gathering valuable site data, which simply evaporates.Therefore, the logical question becomes, how do we engage those people?.