People. Process. Platform. These are the three P’s of digitization according to Accenture and Industry X’s Principal Director, Stephen Pester. And though research from Accenture shows that 90 percent of companies in the construction industry are investing in digital transformation, more than 60 percent of them are not getting the results they were hoping to see.
So where is the disconnect between digitization investments and workflow improvements? How can government agencies and contracted firms in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry remedy this problem and take full advantage of the benefits digital transformation is bringing to the AEC lifecycles?
Last month, Autodesk University 2021 held a special keynote session, that included panelists from Autodesk, Accenture, AECOM, and Emerson Automation Solutions, on how to maximize and optimize the benefits of AEC digital transformation, and how government agencies and contracted AEC professionals can successfully digitize their project lifecycles through people, processes, and platforms.
Changing the mentality and routine of a large operation’s workforce is extremely difficult and takes a great amount of time. According to the panelists, in order to overcome this challenge and get AEC teams on board with integrating advanced technologies into their tried-and-true – though not optimal – processes requires the institutionalization of a data-centric culture.
It all starts with finding your North Star, and defining what true, end-to-end digital transformation looks like for your organization. – Stephen Pester, Accenture
This means government agencies and AEC firms must invest in the human and organizational capital needed to drive the entire agency or company forward. By doing this, government agencies and AEC firms are seeing the breakdown of project siloes and barriers, and the enabling of the workforce to fully discover the power of data and realize all the benefits and promise of digital transformation.
A common and frustrating challenge that government agencies and AEC professionals encounter is that many project processes do not allow data to flow to the right people, at the right time, in ways that are easy for them to consume. Session panelists point to operationalization to overcome this challenge.
When you have a customized experience, you can enable better and faster decision making. You can converge processes and industries. You can imagine and create the new possible world where everything fits precisely the way you need it. – Susanna Holt, Autodesk
When government agencies and AEC firms embrace digital transformation and focus on the operationalization of data processes, they are empowered to harness data for better and quicker decision making as early as possible. As agencies and firms begin to make digital transformation and data processes work for them, unnecessary bottlenecks and “hurry up and wait” scenarios are soon eliminated.
The final “P” of successfully digitizing the AEC project lifecycle is selecting and working off of a platform that enables connected workflows across project disciplines and industries. Government agencies and AEC firms need to deploy a platform that gives them the agility to adapt and respond to their specific needs.
Autodesk Forge is a cloud platform that is at the forefront of AEC digitization and is empowering agencies and firms to mobilize their data where it needs to go, making it visual, making it actionable, and helping them find value. According to the session panelists, the Autodesk Forge platform enables government agencies and companies to overcome the common challenges of digital transformation and take giant leaps forward in their digitization initiatives.
We’re partnering with Forge to be sure that we can build out our product breadth using a common, easy-to-use toolset that enables customers to build part numbers specific to the problem that they’re solving, and then seamlessly move it into the Forge system. – Brad Budde, Emerson Automation Solutions
Data and process security is also at the forefront of Forge. Autodesk is fortifying the Forge platform to ensure the security and resiliency of all products, solutions, data, processes, and workflow connections built on top of it.
Sitting on top of the foundation is fluid data and services that enable automated and connected workflows and provide actionable insights across tools, disciplines and industries. Forge is essentially building the framework for data interoperability, enabling workflow connections within government agencies and AEC teams across projects, not just across software. This is allowing AEC teams to not just unite processes, but industries too.
And working on Forge doesn’t necessarily mean government agencies and AEC firms would be limited to working with Autodesk solutions and products. Forge utilizes agnostic technology to get all agencies and firms working on a single AEC project on the same page, no matter which solutions or products they utilize.
