News Feature

Building IT into Construction

By Matt Villano

June 15, 2001 — CIO — In the heart of Chicago’s Near North Side, on the corner of North and Sheffield streets, a half-finished eight-story building buzzes with life. On the ground level, men in hard hats and flannel shirts

work furiously to fight the clock and install windows. Up near the seventh floor, men weld, solder and hammer away, creating a cacophony that mutes honking cars on the streets below. At first glance, the whole project seems just like any other construction site?dirty, fragmented and remarkably low-tech. This building, however, is different.

In all, six architects, 40 engineers and more than 60 subcontractors will work on the $24.2 million retail-entertainment-residential project, and San Francisco-based architectural firm Gensler will coordinate their efforts through a local Web service that automates almost every aspect of the process using a collaborative, password-protected intranet. In the past, many of these contractors

would exchange blueprints and employment bids via fax or Federal Express. Today they use the Web to quickly upload and send information electronically.

What’s more, says Gensler’s Chicago office CIO Randall Dolph, while subcontractors used to spend hours on the phone with suppliers ordering from catalogs, now they can connect to suppliers and order online. "This technology enables us to triple or quadruple the speed with which we can pull off a project," he says. "It’s like we’ve been waiting for this kind of improvement all our professional lives."

Dolph discusses this new connective tech-nology the same way a proud father talks about his child. For the first time, superfast Web connectivity is available to the midsize and small players, like Gensler, and not just the big guys like Bechtel ($15.1 billion in revenue), the Houston-based global engineering and construction giant that has managed projects such as the $20 billion construction of Jubail Industrial City in Saudi Arabia. From design and planning to procurement and production, companies in every corner of the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry are undergoing a foundation-to-roof renovation of the building process, rejuvenating traditionally low-tech approaches with Internet-enabled IT. At a handful of the biggest companies, CIOs have incorporated new, proprietary Web applications to reengineer the way they use data from the beginning. Smaller companies without big IT budgets have opted for outsourcing, relying on a number of new subscription-based Web tools to revolutionize cooperation and collaboration in virtual space.

These changes appear to be working wonders. Days, even weeks, are being shaved from project schedules. In an industry where paper-thin profit margins of 1 percent and 2 percent have been attributed to fragmentation, performance improvements have resulted in significant cost savings overall.