Digital Transformation in the Construction Sector – Revisiting the Roadmap for 2025

Wednesday February 26th 2020 Maynooth University

Why Participate?

Digital technologies and streamlined processes will transform the entire building and construction sector. With this initiative we aim to facilitate and help the industry to explore its potential and understand how best to adopt and implement Digital technologies. These include advances in BIM standards, virtual and augmented reality, automation, robotics, internet of things, drones, and many more together with novel artificial intelligence, analytics and blockchain approaches are able to improve the profitability and efficiency, and create a smarter and more diverse industry. Large projects typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 80 percent over budget (Mckinsey), and as a result financial returns for contractors are often relatively low.

 

One study found that 75 percent of those that adopted BIM reported a positive return on investment, shorter project life cycles, and savings on paperwork and material costs. The benefits of BIM and digital technologies are evident, and many companies have already embraced automated construction workflows, analytics and digitalisation. However, the adoption of BIM is somehow slow, and thus hampers the increase of collaboration, through open standards. In addition, challenges to adopt digital technologies specific to the construction sector have a role in the slow pace of digitization.

 

By revisiting the digital transformation roadmap we aim to explore the opportunities for large construction projects and shaping a vision for 2025. This workshop will analyse and discuss possible digital services/solutions to tackle the challenges ahead. With a small group of experts and leaders, we seek to define a digital construction value network and ecosystem, business models and enabling technologies. We will identify a possible strategy and action plan to position key stakeholders ahead of the competition.

Forming a focused research initiative

To get the full benefit of BIM technology, project owners and contractors need to incorporate its use right from the design stage, and all stakeholders need to adopt standardized design and data-reporting formats compatible with BIM. In addition, owners and contractors need to dedicate resources for BIM implementation and invest in capability building. 

 

The intent is to build a working consortium of stakeholders, business and researchers, who ‘stay together’ over the coming two years, to share and engage in this discovery and definition effort. We ‘learn and apply’ together. Ideally, we establish a core group that drive specific aspects, and a broader group that appreciate the shared knowledge and contribute as they can. Our current thinking is to run bi- annual detailed workshops. With this workshop we aim to find answers to the following question: 

 

  • What is the action plan to achieve 2025 objectives toward paperless construction projects?   
  • What are the practical reasons to rely on paper plans, reports, schedule, etc.? 
  • What are the potential digital solutions to reduce dependency on paper documents for construction projects?
  • What are the BIM related challenges in large-scale construction projects? 
  • What skills and trainings are mostly required to move toward more efficient use of digital technologies? 

Who should attend?

This is an invitation-only event for select senior leaders, business unit leaders, programme managers, Innovation leaders across the spectrum of the construction sector with an interest in Digital Transformation and Building information Modelling and Management.  

 

Outputs:

  • Possible scenarios and value network(s)
  • Prioritisation of challenges
  • Action plan to address key challenges 

The Facilitators

Prof Markus Helfert

Dr Zohreh Pourzolfaghar

Leads IVI's academic education and professional training & certification programmes

Michael Hanley

Ralph Montague

Dr Kris McGlinn

Prof Markus Helfert

Markus Helfert is the Director of the Innovation Value Institute research centre and Professor of Digital Service Innovation at Maynooth University. His research interests include PayTech,Information Management, Innovation, Cloud Computing, Service Science, Enterprise Architecture and Smart Cities and Smart Buildings. He collaborates with a range of Enterprises in relation to Innovation and IT Management. He is the Project coordinator of the H2020 Projects: PERFORM on Digital Retail and is the Chair of Steering Committee Elite-S H2020 Marie Curie Project on ‘Future Leaders in ICT Standardisation for Europe’.

Markus has authored more than 200+ academic articles, journal and book contributions and has presented his work at international conferences. He is a member of the international programme committees and reviewer and associate editor of IS journals.

Dr Zohreh Pourzolfaghar

Dr. Zohreh Pourzolfaghar is Assistant Professor in Management Information System in Maynooth University. Her research interests include Smart Cities, Enterprise Architecture, Business Modelling/Processes, Information and Knowledge Management, BIM, and Smart Buildings. She has been the theme lead in a project investigating the application of Enterprise Architecture in Smart Cities funded by Science Foundation Ireland. Zohreh presented her work at international conferences and has published research in Journals and Conference Proceedings. She has initiated and led many collaborations with academia and industry partners to work on a variety of proposals. She has been awarded the SFI industry fellowship (2018) working with industry on Building Information Management topic. She is a member of working group at NSAI to develop an Irish annex for Standard I SO 19650-2: Organization and digitization of information about buildings.

Leads IVI's academic education and professional training & certification programmes

Michael Hanley

Michael is involved in IVI’s academic education and professional training & certification programmes. Since 2011, IVI has trained more than 8000 professionals globally, helping organisations digitally transform using IVI’s Capability Maturity Framework. More recently he co-created the MSc in Digital Healthcare Transformation hosted in UL, and ReThink|ReDesign – Maynooth University’s SME digital transformation initiative, supported by Enterprise Ireland’s innovation voucher scheme. In early 2022 he successfully completed a pilot Future Workforce Skills Development Programme for a large public sector organisation. He created the course using an innovative approach he calls Design Thinking for Teaching & Development (DT4TD).

Michael has an MSc in Education & Technology, and he is a Fellow of the Irish Institute of Training and Development.

He will complete his Doctorate in Education Leadership in 2023. His doctoral thesis concerns the impact of digital transformation and disruptive innovation on Irish higher education institutions’ future strategy, business models, and value propositions.

Ralph Montague

Ralph Montague
Architect, BArch MRIAI
Director, ArcDox BIM Consultants

Ralph Montague is managing partner of ArcDox, a specialist BIM (Building Information Modelling) consultancy practice based in Dublin, Ireland, providing professionally managed advice, production, support and training services to the construction and property industry. A registered architect with over 30 years’ experience in managing large projects, Ralph endorses BIM as a more cost effective and highly efficient way of producing and managing design and construction documentation. and improving the building process.
Ralph is a member of the National BIM Council of Ireland and coordinator of the Construction IT Alliance (CITA) BIM Group. In these roles, he has been instrumental in leading the development and adoption of BIM in Ireland since 2009. As past chairman of the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland (RIAI) practice sub-committee for BIM, Ralph has represented Ireland on the Architects Council of Europe (ACE) BIM Working. He is also the current chair of the National Standards Authority of Ireland (NSAI) Technical Mirror Committee on BIM, monitoring the work on European Committee for Standardization (CEN TC442) and International Organization for Standardization (ISOTC59) technical committees on BIM standards. Ralph is also a part-time lecturer at Trinity College Dublin School of Engineering Post-Graduate Diploma in Project Management.

Dr Kris McGlinn

Dr. Kris McGlinn is a research fellow in the Adapt Centre Trinity College Dublin conducting research on the intelligent management of buildings, with a focus on issues of data interoperability when dealing with both the large amounts of data generated by heterogeneous sources throughout the buildings life cycle, and other relevant data sources. His main research interest has been on the uplift of building data through the application of Web of Data technologies to support a wide range of use cases, such as AI driven intelligent monitoring and control of the built environment. He is also co-founder and chair of the Linked Building Data community group.

Your Hosts

The Innovation Value Institute (IVI) is a multidisciplinary research and education institute co-founded in 2006 by Maynooth University and Intel Corporation with the support of the Irish Government.

IVI’s mission is to research, develop and disseminate empirically proven and industry validated IT best practice through a unique open innovation and collaboration between leading academic and industry practitioners.

Maynooth University Department of Computer Science provides a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Multimedia and Mobile Systems along with an extensive research programme leading to M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in many exciting areas.
Computers have become a part of everybody’s daily life, and in the Department of Computer Science we teach how computer systems work, with a particular focus on software, and we research into how computer systems will develop into the future. Our courses cover a wide spectrum of topics from software to computer hardware, from internal details of operating systems to computer applications, and from software engineering practice to computational theory. Our approach is to instill a thorough understanding of fundamental principles, while developing analytical abilities and practical skills.
View Agenda

09:30 – 10:00 Registration & Tea/Coffee
10:00 – 10:30 Agenda and Introductions
10:30 – 11:20 Focused Learning – Setting the scene (Zohreh Purzolfaghar, IVI)
Briefing on the challenges to realise digital twin in construction industry
11:20 – 12:10 Discovery Activity – Mapping the Contextual Landscape:
Explore benefits of using BIM in real world projects
Identify challenges to use BIM technology in real projects
Prioritising the challenges to be resolved from practice perspective
12:10 – 13:00 Discovery Activity – Exploring Opportunities (Michael Healy, IVI)
Using Root Cause Analysis identify:
1. Organisational challenges
2. Dominant challenges and potential solutions
3. Exploring opportunities
13:00 – 13:45 Lunch Break
13:45 – 14:30 Discovery Activity – Digital Construction 2025 objectives
Categorise various stakeholders
Characterise how various stakeholders define success
Identify and prioritise required features
14:30 – 15:10 Design Activity – Innovation to achieve 2025 objectives
Innovative services to improve project planning coordination
Innovative services for performance analytics
Innovative services to reduce information sharing delay
15:10 – 15:20 Tea/Coffee Break
15:20 – 15:45 Activity – Journey to Enterprise Architecture Practices for 2025
Action Plan for innovation creation
Identify metrics to validate progress
15:45 – 16:00 Follow Up – IVI Research Engagement & Support Opportunities
Reflect on today’s learnings / Key takeaways
Next Steps
16:00 – 16:05 Wrap and Close

The location:

Wednesday February 26th 2020
Maynooth University
Innovation Value Institute, 2nd Floor,
Eolas Building,
North Campus,
Maynooth University

Registration for this workshop is now closed