Without platforms, all you get is wet.
"All our metrics showing that we're doing pretty good." But how good are your metrics - not against past standards, but leading-edge standards?
We are limited far less by the limits of our tools than by the limits of our understanding of our tools.
And platforms are the most empowering, most complex and least optimized tier of tools.
Platform Mastery
Our platforms are designed to support today’s best practices and tomorrow’s. But many remain entrenched in Yesterday’s practices and mindsets.
Why?
- Complexity. Complexity is always an adoption, optimization and quality challenge.
- Heads-downness? The sheer grind of meeting deadlines (perhaps worsened by using yesterday’s practices). "We're too busy to be better!"
- Periphery. We tend to learn from our required core outward. We are most brilliant and efficient in our core. Our performance and compensation tends to be weighted towards the core. "Speeding the core" is the obvious focus. The periphery is fuzzy.
- The unknown. Engineers enjoy learning, but direct, clear, and full-applicable learning (on the job, we're driven by direct utility). An unguided labyrinth kills the perceived ROI. Nobody, particularly engineers, likes a dead end.
- Integration. A lot of the improvements to workflows occur at the periphery, the handoffs, the interstices (or chasms) between Expertise Silos.
- Training and Learning Resources for peripheral and integrated solutions tend to be sparse and less directly applicable. Way too much interpretation outside our expertise.
In our manual transmission Porsche 911 (993), we're using only a foot and never our right hand. First gear is actually pretty fast if you don't know any better.
The spatial Data Environments are converging to greater Commonality (yay!). The data platforms (.dgn, .dwg) are fairly mature, with extensive capabilities built in to a familiar interface.
The ongoing Digital Integration Revolution aims for a "platform-less" consumability. Consumers and Collaborators(!) need only a web browser - a transformative goal, an actual revolution.
But the platforms that enable and manage "platform-less" are heavy.
Decades ago ProjectWise was for the long-haulers, the heavyweights - DOTs, MegaCorps. Today it's for everyone with a large project. And while today ProjectWise in primarily used as a file collaboration server - everyone with the same software and workspace - tomorrow's collaboration will be widely heterogeneous. Bentley Infrastructure Cloud and Autodesk Construction Clouds are the platforms designed to support ultra-wide consumability and heterogeneous participation.
How do we move our platform expertise from little things today to Big Things Tomorrow (today).
To get to the big things, you need:
- content expertise (the work, the client...)
- platform expertise
- integration expertise
- a business framework for adoption decisions (business opportunities, cost sharing strategies, how much investment with/without immediate return...)
- a framework for technical infrastructure implementation (costs, schedules, risk; infrastructure requirements)
- a framework for technical and workflow adoption by staff/client/project (training, support)
- criteria for project implementation (go/no-go)
Well-designed, future-ready platforms are our great enablers. They're here today. They're inescapable.
You can take advantage of their higher gears or you can continue to redline it in first.
It's a choice (and then a commitment (and then victory laps!).
