Buckminster Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”; he noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years.
Today things are not as simple as different types of knowledge have different rates of growth. But on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours. With this speed in knowledge and data creation, data and analytics are vital to the emerging digital transformations in the Architectural and Engineering in Construction (AEC) industry.
With the right approach, data and analytics can be a leading source of competitive advantage. Organizations have an opportunity to use enterprise analytics to drive digital transformation and redefine the customer experience.
At Sweco, we strongly believe that a data driven culture, which focus on delivering business value, is one of the key factors to strengthen our business and the deliveries we offer to our clients. We are going beyond thinking and talking about data as ‘the new oil’.
Data and analytics can become so much more than any fossil fuel. Data and analytics are helping us to improve Sweco Model: client focus, best people, internal efficiency and decentralized organization. They are also helping us tackle some of the biggest challenges in the industry, such as sustainability, stagnant productivity levels, lack of collaboration and low technology adoption.
For example, in one of the on-going development projects in Finland, we have been collecting data from Building Information Modelling (BIM) design software. Project WISDOM data miners have been active for a combined of 450 years during past 11 months. They have collected billions of data points which can be seen as the “genetic code” that represents the way design is done at Sweco.
During this time, we have also built several augmented analytics systems. These systems aim to generate deeper insights, make predictions, generate recommendations, find areas in the existing processes where automation would bring the highest value, among many other things. These systems support our digital transformation journey and help us augment how people explore and analyze data in analytics and BI platforms.
In the future, companies and systems that can access, process and target filtered information in real time, will become the surviving gladiators in the fast-changing, data driven, industries and markets. These capabilities might become the differentiator between the companies that can, quickly, innovate and adapt to these fast changes, to the ones that will fail to improve and reinvent themselves and therefore fade with time.
This is an extremely challenging task, which is something that requires a join effort in our industry in order to create a real impact in our business environment. If you have similar experiences, missions or goals talk to us, we are always eager to find new partners in this journey.
Ricardo Farinha, Director of Technology, Sweco