Transcript: Create Agility and Efficiency: Open Architecture as a Platform

We've been wired to collaborate, look at complex problems and solve those problems. How do we translate that into this new world that we're living in? The inefficiencies that are out there, we've kind of built business and contracts around the inefficiencies that have existed for years because we were constrained by the tools that we used to use. And so all of a sudden we have this assumption of how much time it takes to do certain things like for example putting together documents that used to be very painstaking to hand draft and capture information and put it into documents.

Whereas now with the tools that are out there that's almost becoming irrelevant in many ways. The documentation is not the end product, it's just one of the tools to capture the knowledge and data. And the unfortunate part of that is a lot of our contracts are tied to how many hours we put into them. Which means that if you shrink the amount of hours all of a sudden the immediate connection would be oh my gosh we're going to be shrinking our fees. And if we're tied to how much time it takes to do things then it's not a good formula going forward.

It's really not tying into what value can we produce from the knowledge that we have and the collaborative part of what we do as designers and builders which we naturally have been doing for years. It's the part that I think is the opportunity. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, The Best Way to Build It, episode number 57. I'm your host Brittany Campbell-Turner and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly exceed your end user's desires.

Over the last two weeks we covered some of the trends to be looking for in 2018. We did a review of some of our past interviews that hit on some of our most exciting and important topics that we covered in the past year. In part one we talked about Millennials and the impacts on corporate real estate and infrastructure in recruiting and retention, the trends that corporate real estate has that are affecting economy on a whole, and last but not least sustainability and health programs in organizations.

In part two we covered technology, culture, and contracts digging into AI, AR, VR, Internet of Things, BIM, machine learning, and of course blockchain. So if you haven't listened to those episodes yet, check them out at constructor.com slash Today we will be speaking with Kimon Onuma. He builds architecturally informed environments for the digital and physical world. He is the creator of BIM Storm. We will be talking about what a BIM Storm is and how this pursues the culture of an always growing technological AEC industry, appreciating the wisdom that we have in the minds of our global practitioners now and how that can make sweeping impacts on how owners standards and specifications can be created.

With that let's get into the interview. Kimon Onuma builds architecturally informed environments for the digital and physical world. He is the creator of BIM Storm. So welcome to the constructor podcast Kimon. Thank you.

So you created the revolutionary idea called BIM Storm. Could you tell us how this idea was born? Sure. My background as an architect, I'm used to thinking in terms of a charrette is when you have a workshop and you have people gather and hammer ideas out and try different things that work or don't work and move quickly. And that idea applying the technologies that were available, in fact it started a long time ago in 2008.

So we've had over 40 BIM Storms. We were experimenting with how can we use the web and collaborate long distance with people around the world and see what we can do in a design or planning exercise. That was kind of the starting point. One reason we started it. The other reason is we have a lot of projects that we can't share the results of the projects.

They're confidential or the clients are not willing to share information about what the project is about. But the process of how you actually work on a design and construction project was interesting enough that we thought it would be good to put it out there as far as a process and see who else was out there that was thinking in these terms. How do you collaborate long distance and with the technologies that were coming around with the web and everything. So that was kind of the beginning of it.

And it's evolved over time. And since we started in 2008, we've had over 40 BIM Storms. And we've had thousands of participants actually throughout the years in different types of scenarios. So the first one was for the BIM Storm Los Angeles. And we had over 130 teams participating worldwide.

And it was a 24 hour event. So some of them are 24 hours. Some of them are a few hours. Some of them are a few days or a week or even stretched out over a month. But we set up a real world kind of a scenario in Los Angeles.

We were looking at planning exercises for city planning. And it evolved on its own because we didn't really set the rules really rigidly. We said, OK, we're thinking of looking at this part of the city and doing a master plan for infilling housing or mixed use developments or a museum. And we wanted to get input from the participants, whether they're architects, engineers or builders or even owners were submitting requests and saying, well, we're thinking of building a museum. What can the team do with this?

And that really brought out a lot of new ideas and experimentation. The results of it would be used in the BIM Storm, obviously, but could also be applied to real world projects. Well, how did you even come up with the idea in the first place? You had a lot of projects that you knew you could investigate utilizing technology and improving collaboration, especially in a digital way. What were some of the things that you guys were doing technologically that you felt you wanted to investigate this with other partners?

As architects, we typically focus on a single project, right? We're assigned an owner says, OK, we're going to design and construct this building. And it's very much focused on the project and that particular effort of having a team support that project. From a technology point of view, from when you look at social networking, for example, and you're collaborating or communicating with people long distance or with people that you don't even know. We tried to see, well, how can we apply that approach of exploring and finding other people that have capabilities from a technology point of view or from a design point of view and explore that outside of the constraints of actual contracts.

So in a contract, you're contracted to do specific things to design a project, right, and deliver it back to the owner. If you take those constraints out, we wanted to see, OK, what would happen if we don't have any rules? In fact, they called the first one the summer of BIM, kind of working off a woodstock theme. If we had people just come and try different things out, what can we do with that outside of the constraints of a contract? And at the same time, we noticed that the industry was changing.

So we said, OK, if we forecast forward, if we don't wait for an owner to say, well, here's a contract and we want you to deliver this contract and the requirements in here. But if we look fast forward and say, if we use these technologies, what else is possible if we think forward beyond what the owner is assuming is possible? And part of that was actually collaborating, not having to get together in the same room. I mean, it's important to have face-to-face meetings. But we said, OK, if we use the internet, can we bring in an engineer, for example, as we design a building and have their input just at that point in time and say, we're thinking of putting a building here, what should we be considering from an energy point of view, for example, if we're looking to save energy or from a structural point of view?

Structural engineer from Hawaii, for example, was involved in the BIM storm for Los Angeles and they were giving us input as we were doing the design of a 50-story building in downtown Los Angeles. Then others would start jumping in and say, well, you should consider using solar panels different type of energy systems or different structural systems as the building was being designed. And there was hundreds of these buildings that were going up in the 24-hour period. So there was a lot of experimentation on different types of buildings, different parts of the city.

And that collaboration was pretty interesting because we were in a room in Los Angeles in our office and we're getting input from participants from around the world. Thanks for sharing about how BIM storm got started. I think it's a really nice transition to talking about opening up data, opening up design, and it really leads nicely into the discussion about open source. Could you tell us about open source and how that concept ties to what I've heard you speak about architecture as a platform? Yeah, there's open source and there's open standards.

And if we start just from the open standards perspective, it was very important for us as architects to look at the data that we put into the different tools that we use that can flow from one tool to the next. So the open standards movement about creating data in a format that can be shared between different applications was very important to us because we're using different tools. That was kind of a starting point of saying if we look at various tools that we use internally in our office and also collaborating with other consultants out there, everyone's using different tools.

So you have to find a way to collaborate and share information. So we have to have an open standard way of communicating the data about a project. The open source movement is interesting too because that you're able to build applications and share the code about how you build a simple app or a more complex solution and build upon that capability by getting others from around the world that have similar need and build new functionality on top of that. From a building industry perspective, we tend to be very protective about our information and we rightfully should be.

We need to run a business. We need to protect proprietary information. Owners have information they don't want to share. So it's not an all or nothing. And we thought that if we look at the technology world and think in terms of how do you create a platform that you can share information but at the same time protect proprietary information that you shouldn't be sharing.

And with open source tools, it actually allows you to be very transparent about how the software is being built. And you can mix things together, right? So you can have proprietary tools built on top of open source tools. You can collaborate with others and have similar applications. And in the BIMStorm, we wanted to explore that.

And again, without having the constraints of a contract, it's easy to say, well, let's try this out. Let's see if we can take something that exists and actually build new functionality on top of that and share the data between different teams. So we can, for example, share best practices and even future practices looking into the future. And if we kind of project forward, how do we share what's the best way to change the industry and move beyond this area where we're kind of flatlining for many years now?

It hasn't been progressing to something that would solve the challenges that we have in the world today. I mean, the bigger challenges of the environment and resources and risks and all that cannot be solved alone. And that's critical, I think, for us to realize. Obviously there's some resistance to that. And I want to talk a little bit more about that maybe a little bit later.

But first, could you tell us a little bit about some of the benefits that you realized? An example of your most successful BIMStorms? In the BIMStorms, teams formed to tackle these challenges that we put out there. And we found that within those teams, we've actually found other teams that we actually want to work on with real projects or teams formed to create solutions for the industry that didn't exist before. We've found other consultants and other individuals that we like to work with in the BIMStorm that we actually then work on actual projects.

That's one of the benefits that we've found. And we've also had owners that are watching. So the audience really is a mixture, right? So we have owners that are watching what's happening or even submitting requests and saying we have this type of a project, we want to see what kind of solutions there might be. And we've had owners that have come back and said, can we actually apply this to a real project with these teams that we see working here?

What has been some of the spin-off from that is that we've triggered questions from owners that they would never realize it's even possible to do without seeing it. It's kind of like a skunkworks, right? You're seeing something happening that you never had imagined was possible. And they would say, can we apply this to our real need on our actual projects and our actual portfolio of existing facilities even? And that has spun off to a series of different owners that have used this approach on their projects with us involved in it.

Could you tell us a little bit about the Veterans Affairs and how they worked with opening up their data? That's an interesting spin-off from this too, is that the technologies that we used to all work with, right? They used to be very monolithic and you would put your data in it and you'd have to be trained in the particular application that has information. And that creates a lot of silos if you want to get data out of one system into the next, whether it's an architectural software and an engineering software or facility management software or a GIS system.

You'd have to move data from one system to the next. The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense Military Health System approached us and said, okay, if we think in terms of where this technology is going and where the industry is going and the open standards that are being used and open source tools, how can we avoid this trap that we've had in the past where we've invested in different systems, whether they're built within an owner's organization for custom tools or they license off the shelf tools that they put their information into, but they have a very difficult time getting it out.

So they invest a lot of money and effort into building a system up, putting their information into it and five years later they can't get it out easily. They have to pretty much start from scratch again a lot of times. They have a lot of good data. We found every owner that we've worked with, they all have good information but usually in the wrong format. It's stuffed away in Excel files or databases that are closed.

So they approached us and said, how can we think in terms of getting our data in a format that can be universally accessible? So an owner, for example, has requirements of how they put hospitals together. Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense Military Health System have that. Okay, how do we design hospitals? And they used to distribute that kind of information in a very analog format, whether it was paper documents initially and then PDF files or even DVDs.

They would burn information on DVDs and distribute the DVDs and say, these are our standards of how you put hospitals together. That in these documents was very valuable information about how do you put an exam room together? What type of equipment do we need in it? What's the performance characteristics of this operating room? So we said, okay, if you take the data that you already have in the systems and it's not the actual final project, it's just about what are your requirements for putting a hospital together and you open it up to the industry and post it on the web and say, these are our standards, how we put hospitals together and put it in a digital format and use APIs and web services, which means other vendors and consultants and applications can link directly to it.

Then all of a sudden you have your knowledge base as an owner accessible to the outside world and you can communicate more directly with the outside world with consultants and vendors out there and they would bring more value back to you. That was the beginning discussion that we had with them. What would that look like? That turned into a multi-year effort, starting from some very simple concepts of how do you open up your data and not share it with DVDs. We said, we're not in 1989 anymore, we're in 2015 at the time.

There are new ways of sharing information on the web. That was the starting discussion and that triggered a whole series of strategies and implementations and interactions with other consultants and vendors that saw that as a value that they could provide back to these owners. It started a whole series of very interesting solutions centered around the owner's data. Were they one of the groups that was monitoring what was taking place in a BIM storm and that's how they approached you and wanted to investigate for themselves? Partially that.

They were involved watching what was happening in the BIM storm. They were also watching community colleges in California that were involved in these BIM storms and on actual projects. They also were involved in a group called Healthcare BIM Consortium at the National Institute of Building Sciences, which is a series of owners. Again, this is the same thing, similar owners that might be even competing with each other, other private healthcare owners like Kaiser and Sutter and the Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense were involved in this consortium that wanted to find new ways of designing, constructing and managing healthcare facilities.

Through that, we got involved with them as well too and said, well, here are some ideas. They wanted to brainstorm what else is out there. That was the beginning of that project. Did they feel resistant in some ways then to the opening up of their data? Obviously, they were sharing the proprietary information with their partners and building out their spaces, but how did they respond to saying, let's put this online?

Right. That was a very interesting discussion because we went in, it's not an all or nothing. We started looking at examples in the industry elsewhere. For example, the Department of Defense global positioning system, the satellites that tell us where we are and allow us to use our mobile devices to call up a ride or find our friends or whatever. That's a Department of Defense system that's accessible to the public, that's used for defense as well too initially and still is, but they're not giving away how they're actually using their systems for defense purposes.

They're just giving access to the satellites to locate where we are in the world, including access to their adversaries, but it's for the better of the community to be able to use that to create solutions around. We pointed to that and said, okay, imagine if a DOD satellite system can be shared with the world, how can healthcare requirements be shared with the world as well and still protect your projects? For example, you would not share information about an actual hospital project in Afghanistan, say. This is a hospital layout.

You definitely would not share that, but best practices of how you put together an operating room and the type of equipment and functionality that you need is something that you should be able to share because you want others to know what you're thinking and by sharing it, you also can get input from other healthcare organizations saying, well, here's a new way of putting together an operating room. What's the best practice? Having information out there that's accessible then helps you as an organization to be more efficient and actually improve that information that you have.

You might have the wrong assumption. There are a lot of examples of things that have been baked into requirements that might be 20 years old but haven't been changed because nobody saw that they need to be changed. The more transparency you put into it, it actually allows you to refine what you think you need in a project, for example. That was the beginning of that discussion and it took a while to get them comfortable and thinking it's okay to share certain parts of this and it resulted in what we have now on their website.

You can actually get to their data directly through APIs and web services. I think it's a real testament to sharing what your ideas are for the betterment of improving the concept in its entirety. Just talking about a standard, taking one perspective, looking at it intensely, asking the broader questions, asking the detailed questions, understanding the motives behind why something was included. Like you said, something that could be included 20 years ago may have been relevant at that time but no longer. Maybe no one's asking that question today.

There's something to be said about that collaboration and being open to just having that discussion. The other thing from the platform perspective, if we go back to your previous question, architecture is a platform or engineering is a platform or an owner's requirements is a platform. If you imagine the complexity of the building industry, we all know that we're living in it every day. It's incredibly complex. There's a lot of data.

The amount of data is growing. It's physically impossible to manage it in an analog way or a manual way or the way that we typically, a lot of the industry is still doing this. We're typically relying on having to communicate with documents, whether they're digital or paper documents as we started off with. We feel that the only way to really scale is if we think of all of this knowledge base as platforms, whether they're an owner's desire to build something. There's a lot of data and information of what that owner is doing and how they decide to share that.

We can plug into that owner's mind and say, okay, we know that you have this desire to build and be efficient and run hospitals efficiently over many years. We know that you're looking for the best practices, the best thing that's out there right now, or even things that you don't know even exist today, things in the future. You have to be agile enough to adjust for the future. The only way to become really efficient at doing that is giving access directly to that data. It could be controlled.

It's not always a free for all. I'm not suggesting everything should be 100% open, but you have to build it in a way that if you wanted to plug somebody into that, let's say an engineering firm has knowledge about how to create energy efficient buildings. Imagine if you could plug an engineering platform into an owner's platform and then you can create solutions from that and then adjust them on the fly. In the building industry as architects and engineers, it's a very linear process. We have a challenge to design and construct something.

We go through a year designing it. We document it, put it into a digital file, even a building information model, and that's kind of a very linear end result. But then the requirements are constantly changing. How do we constantly adjust to those requirements and maybe even adjust them at the very last minute even? What's the very last minute that you can change things?

Then not only at the end of construction, but delivering it back to the owner, that knowledge that we spent so much time putting into a project. Information about that building is very valuable for the owner as they manage it over the life cycle. Again, complex data, a lot of big data that cannot be managed in a manual analog process or even a digital process in the wrong format. You can't manage it with a bunch of Excel files, for example. The technology definitely exists out there.

If we look outside of the building industry, all the things that are happening on the internet and big data and all the open source movement that's happening, you can see a lot of examples that can be applied to the building industry. How can we take those best practices and bring them back into the building industry? I think that's a great transition into the question I wanted to ask you next about how the design community is actually adapting to the idea of sharing their architecture as a platform perspective.

How are they positioning themselves to share their data? They have intellectual property, so what have you been seeing? I'm going to put my architect's hat on for a while. As an architect, we started getting into building information modeling in the early 90s. When we first got there, I thought, wow, this is going to take off in a few years.

But the industry is pretty conservative and slow moving, I think. That's a concern for me as an architect. If we don't move quickly enough, if we're waiting for things to happen, then we get overtaken. I think there are a lot of very advanced teams doing really incredible work out there as designers and technology firms. There's also a lot of hesitation, which drew me pretty early on to owners.

I thought that owners could really drive the discussion a lot more because they're holding the purse strings. They're putting out the RFPs out there for projects. If the owner can understand that this is possible and declare this is how we want to work, it could help move the industry forward. At the same time, we need a C community to come forward to and say, this is what we can do for you as an owner. I felt that the architectural world engineers, builders have been pretty conservative and maybe slow moving.

The industry has been slow moving, which leaves a lot of opportunities for those that want to move quickly, which goes back to the Bim Storm again, too. We thought that if we put something out there and try and push the envelope more, then it shows owners what's possible and it can help move things faster. Why do you think they're so resistant? The design community, even contractors, what would you say the feedback has been? Obviously, there's competition.

We need to compete. There's also the need to be efficient at what we do. We think that we have the secret sauce, even going back to protecting our documents, the layouts of the floor plan, for example. We even have it in our contracts. Who owns the documents and who owns the information?

I think that's important. We obviously have to protect our intellectual property, but also if you lock things down too much, you lose that opportunity to collaborate and to find new opportunities. I think that's one part of the business part of being hesitant to do that. The other trend that I have seen, and this is kind of unfortunate, is the inefficiencies that are out there. We've kind of built business and contracts around the inefficiencies that have existed for years because we were constrained by the tools that we used to use.

All of a sudden, we have this assumption of how much time it takes to do certain things, like, for example, putting together documents that used to be very painstaking to hand draft and capture information, put it into documents. Whereas now with the tools that are out there, that's almost becoming irrelevant in many ways. The documentation is not the end product. It's just one of the tools to capture the knowledge and data. The unfortunate part of that is a lot of our contracts are tied to how many hours we put into them, which means that if you shrink the amount of hours, all of a sudden the immediate connection would be, oh my gosh, we're going to be shrinking our fees.

If we're tied to how much time it takes to do things, then it's not a good formula going forward. It's really not tying into what value can we produce from the knowledge that we have and the collaborative part of what we do as designers and builders, which we naturally have been doing for years. It's the part that I think is the opportunity. We've been wired to collaborate, look at complex problems, and solve those problems. How do we translate that into this new world that we're living in?

I think it's so interesting that you mentioned value and how the way that people are working is getting more and more efficient and more productive, especially the more and more we collaborate. You're able to gain those efficiencies and get to decisions much more quickly and innovations as well much more quickly. You can't attach money to the amount of hours that you're spending. You really do have to determine what that value means from a different metric. It's a different barometer there for sure.

Years ago when we first started getting into building information modeling, I was negotiating a contract with a client and they were counting how many sheets of documents were going to be produced for that project. 30 by 42 documents, how many square feet of documents are you going to produce? Can you reduce that by 20%? Can we get less paper? I started thinking, well, you can shrink this down to one-tenth of the size and have less documents.

Is that what we're really tied to is the physical amount of paper that we produce? That's really the information that's embedded in those documents that is the value and the value that we bring back to the owner that's trying to solve these complex problems they have. I think if we can think in terms of what value can we generate as an industry and how can we collaborate with others that we typically do not collaborate with. Architects, for example, at the end of a project, we kind of walk away from it.

We spend years putting information into the design and construction of facilities and that building over to the owner who then has to manage it for the life cycle. That embedded information is incredibly valuable to the owner, but they typically have to go back to the building and extract it from the completed construction. I think there are a lot of firms that are seeing that potential there, but we've been trained to think in terms of, okay, we walk away at the end of the construction or the end of the design process.

That's really unfortunate. We don't look in terms of value. How can we bring that value back to the owners that are trying to manage these facilities for the life cycle? While we're on the topic of design and capturing data for buildings, how do you see blockchain entering into the scene? Blockchain was interesting.

In one of the recent BIM storms, we were looking at agreements and how do you actually contract for the work that you put into a project. If we go away from this document, how many pages of documents we're handing over to the owner, it's actually the information inside those documents. If we can get much more granular about decisions that are made and who's responsible for that we thought, well, maybe blockchain would be a way to identify decisions that are made, who's responsible for that piece of information, and how do we track and audit those decisions that are being made.

So, in the BIM storm we had James Salmon, who's an attorney, was involved with several BIM storms from years ago and he said, let's explore what it would look like if we have blockchain attached to a project. It's still at the very beginning, this has just happened in the last year or so, where we started exploring that and said, okay, what would it look like if we attach agreements to the data and then we have many collaborators in there and we have agreements with the owners that we're delivering certain pieces of information in the design and construction process and maybe even take it all the way into facility management.

What happens if that data starts living into the life cycle and you can track, for example, if you say, okay, we designed this building to perform very energy efficient and then it actually does perform like that. Whoever made that engineering decision, that should be of great value to the owner, but there's no way currently how to audit the performance of a building after it's completed. It's a different set of teams that are doing that, right? So, there's no direct connection back to the engineer or the architect or the builder that was involved with that blockchain.

It's an enabler to help us manage the transactions. What are we declaring we're going to do and how do we actually track it? We actually get that done and how do we identify who actually gave input at that point? And that's, I think the potential there exists. So, obviously, we still are a ways off from that, but what we found as we started putting that on the BimStorm, we actually had some reaction from some large owners that were saying, yes, we're actually starting to look at this.

We're thinking of things like this and exploring blockchain themselves. That kind of surprised us that they were actually exploring that on their own as well, too. So, I think it's an opportunity for the industry to get ahead. Again, if owners are actually starting to think of this on their own, what can we do from the AEC perspective to respond to that and see that as an opportunity that we can work with these owners? Architects and the building industry in general, what we've been trained to do in the past is to wait for software solutions to come our way, evaluate them and then use them.

That dynamic, I think, is changing and should change. We're much more proactive and this is only possible because it's becoming easier to actually create software solutions. We all, in a way, become software developers, quote unquote, but from a different angle, bringing our knowledge in. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it begs the question, how is value defined now?

How is the design and then also the building itself, especially if it's able to execute specific performance, especially whether it be energy utilization or whatever it might be? And actually with the buildings, the Internet of Things and the buildings are basically talking now, right? All the devices that are out there are starting to broadcast what they're doing. So if you can imagine a building that's actually declaring what it's doing, whether it's energy efficiency or the use or how people interact, every person that walks into a building is a sensor in themselves, right?

They have mobile devices that they're carrying around and there are some advanced groups that are already doing things like that, tracking how the building is being used and performing. And if you imagine a whole city like that, and there's a lot of discussion about this future state of Internet of Things, and it's obviously going to take a while to get there. And there's obviously a lot of security issues revolving around that as well. How do we solve that problem of being able to track information yet still protect ourselves?

And that's not going to be an easy one to crack. But if we take it in smaller pieces and not trying to solve the whole puzzle, I think there are ways to explore what that would look like. I love it. So let's talk a little bit about generational transference. We're touching on the topic of big data, open source, getting people to collaborate, looking at specific standards and proving them by having that collaboration take place.

How would you say the different generations are adapting to this concept? So what's happening outside of the building industry, the technologies that we're using today on our mobile devices are exponentially more easy to use than they were 10, 15 years ago. In the building industry, a lot of the tools that we do use today are pretty complex. I mean, if you're putting together CAD or BIM or data about facilities, there's a lot of really very powerful but still very complex tools. And there's whole industries kind of built around that, specialists in different applications or different part of the life cycle.

I think the need to simplify access to information and make the applications and software almost go away, that it shouldn't be the central focus. It's really how do you interact and generate value and decisions that you make with that information. And I think from a generational perspective, that would actually make it easier for non-techies to get involved. It shouldn't be threatening to interact with this information, especially if you know a lot about buildings and energy and construction and design. There's a lot of value in that, regardless of if you're a techie.

That's been part of the BIMSTORM theme as well, too. We actually encouraged planners and designers to come in and just sketch on paper as well, too. We're not anti-analog in any way. You need to figure out where you plug in your capability into a process. And that could be sketching on paper still, as long as it plugs into a decision that goes into the system somewhere.

And I think these tools, as they get simpler to use, it should become easier to engage more levels of users. And that's going to be critical, I think. Looking at the industry from the labor perspective, we have a labor need in the construction side. I would imagine that something similar is taking place in the design world. This is just my speculation.

Part of it is the industry has not adopted technology as much as maybe other tech companies have. And maybe the interest level is not as high. And then there's a desire to obviously take part in the built environment. But when you're coming into organizations and they're senior designers working on things, the question is how do you get involved but also adapt to the technology that's available and speculate that there's some resistance from the millennials' perspective as well, in addition to maybe the older generations? The millennials expect it to all work.

They're used to using the technology and it just becomes very transparent. We obviously have to pass the knowledge to the next generation. Traditionally, how that was done was with mentorship, training, and all that. Now with the technology, it actually can help us capture knowledge in more efficient ways. So that's an opportunity.

At the same time, there's a lot of resistance to using a lot of these technologies. So there's the danger of losing some of that and passing it to the next generation. The other angle that I see a lot of is the frustration of the millennials and the younger generation. They come into the workplace and they say, what is going on here? You guys are still doing things like this.

Why would I be interested in this industry if things are done in kind of an analog process, even with the technologies that are being used? It's that surprise frustration. You could see that the younger generation doesn't see us advancing fast enough, which means that we have the potential of losing interest, getting younger architects and engineers and builders to join the industry and solve these gnarly problems that we have. The older generation has a lot of knowledge and value about the industry, and they feel threatened often because of the complexity of the technology.

And then those that are very techie and capable of using the different tools, a lot of times you almost build a wall around that group and say, okay, that's their strength, right? And in many ways, we're kind of drawn to the complex nature of the tools that we use. That becomes the goal almost. I've become an expert in A, B, and C. Therefore, that's who I am.

That's what I do. I use these tools to be able to solve complex problems, and you have to come to me to solve them. And I think the applications should be disposable, just like on our mobile devices. If we get tired of an app, we throw it away and start using something else. And they become much easier to build new solutions on top of you.

That goes back to the platform. You don't have to start from scratch and build a satellite system to build a GPS system to find a location. Somebody already has that built so you can build new functionality on top of that. There's no reason to start from zero. So the only way to really solve the complex nature of the industry is really to break it down into smaller modules like this, and then to engage experts in decisions that need to be made at that point in time in the project and give them an interface that's very simple and easy to use to have their input on that part of the process.

It's just putting things in place for whoever is taking part in the discussion to basically adapt and be enabled. And it sounds like it's just that simple. It has to be simple because if it's too complex to train on how to use it, to maintain it, to troubleshoot it, it just becomes a burden. As you break things down into simple, that's why we love our mobile device. There's a button and you turn it on and you start pushing on things and things happen and you can communicate.

But in the background, there's a lot of complexity happening. The wiring of how this all comes together is basically a platform. If you imagine multiple platforms communicating with each other, then all of a sudden you don't have to understand the complexity of the other platform. You just need to know where you plug in. How do I plug in to get information about where I can find a ride in the city?

I push on my phone and I call up a Lyft and there it is. I don't need to know how that worked in the background. I kind of know, but if I want to build some new functionality on top of that, I can come up with a new use case and actually build a new application. Whole business around that. That's essentially how Lyft and Uber started right in all the other terms out there.

Creates new opportunities, I think, if we think in terms like that. Let me ask this. I want to make sure that I wrapped up the question about being resistant to open source and talked about owners. We talked about designers. What about the contractor perspective?

I think it's the same pattern. We've noticed that if you change the names, the underlying DNA is very similar. You have information about what you're doing. If you're a contractor or designer and owner and you have business rules that you're running with and you have interfaces of how you interact with that data and if you make that data accessible to yourself as an organization and then also design it in a way that others can use it If they might need it, then it's up to you to decide how much you open up.

You don't have to give everything away, but you could say, well, here, if I go back to the VA example, you could say, well, here's what we think we need to design for this hospital. And then the contractors might say, well, here is an efficient way of building a hospital. Here are things that you might want to consider changing on your assumptions of what you want to design for the hospital. So you don't just get handed over the fence of just their assumptions. There might be wrong assumptions in there.

It allows you to interact at a different level that was not possible if you're just waiting for something to get handed to you as a big package and then you have to respond to that. You can really assess that constructability early on. The earlier you can engage, the more opportunity there is to bring value back. So if you have a builder getting involved earlier in the process or a vendor that has a new type of equipment that might be able to save money and bring value back to the owner or a designer that has a new idea of how to put a project together.

A process that right now is very linear and very difficult to adjust once you go down a path and you get more engagement earlier on, which sounds complex because you're starting to stack a lot of different people, organizations together and a lot more data. But the challenge of too much data is not really a problem as long as you can structure it in the right way and you can plug into the right place to get the information to you. Then too much data is not a problem.

Right. You have to be able to analyze it and pull the correct information that's going to enable you to make the decisions that fulfill the needs in the long run. I feel like we covered a lot of what I wanted to discuss here. Is there anything else that you wanted to note about BEMStorm? In the middle of actually one right now, we just finished a conference last week at the Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

where we had a BEMStorm for designing an airport. That's going to be ongoing. It's free to participate. That's another part of BEMStorm. If you just go to BEMStorm.com and log in and say, I want to be part of this, you can actually plug in and get access to material and training material and files and data that we've been using for the BEMStorm or even give us input on that.

That's a great place to start to find out more about it. We encourage others to be part of that. They're virtually online, but we're also involved with different conferences. Every few months we have something that happens and there's a conference like the one a couple weeks ago in D.C. Then we have another one in Orange County coming up next year and the AIA conference and other venues that we actually go and collaborate.

That would be a place to start for BEMStorm to find out more about that. What would you recommend to that owner operator who is hesitant right now about opening up their data? What would you say to them? It's very valuable to not reinvent the wheel and look at what other owners have been doing. The VA DoD is a great example to see what's happened there with their data.

Another one is the California Community Colleges. They have a system called Fusion and they have statewide information about their 5,000 buildings in their system. And then there are organizations like the National Institute of Building Sciences that interacts with owners and agencies and the building industry and they share information about the open standards there as well. And these projects, the DoD VA project for example, there's a lot of documentation that's been shared about that project and how these owners actually opened up their data. What we found is whether you're a healthcare owner or whether you're a community college, large organization, private or public, the underlying structure of what you're trying to do is very similar.

You could pretty much replace the names but it's pretty much the same thing. It's about buildings and facilities and design and construction. Dollars, obviously how much things cost and the use of energy and how you manage the facility for the life cycle and the value that you bring in back to your customers, whether they're your customers or students or patients or travelers at an airport. It's all very similar. It's important to share that information and not to reinvent the wheel and to think in terms of open source and open standards and actually challenge the industry as an owner.

We just have a lot of power to do that and I think a lot of owners are not challenging us enough. We're still kind of stuck in how things used to be done and I think there's a lot of opportunities to challenge us more. What can we do as builders and contractors and architects for these owners? And I think that's really the only way that we can move forward. I love that response.

And how do you think if they want to start opening up their data, what do you recommend their first steps be? You don't have to have everything solved. You can start very simple. Just the industry in general, we're kind of stuck on we have to solve everything first before we can start something. So this whole agile approach to even software development now, think in terms of in an agile way, how can you start something that would bring value back to you?

And every single owner has data of some type, even if it's in an Excel file or even paper documents for that matter, they have information about what they do. What do they provide for their customers? What do they do for their facilities? If they look at the data that they have, and they look at what other owners have been doing like through the projects that I mentioned earlier, you can apply the same approach to what you need to do for your organization and seek out solutions like that, seek out approaches like that versus being stuck in how things are done, were done in the past.

And I think you have to be a little bit fearless about sharing information. It's better to tend towards opening up and being more transparent about what you're trying to do, or at least especially within your organization. There's a lot of silos internally and every organization has different silos and the technologies they use, for example. So internally, even how do you open up sharing information internally and then design it in a way that if you needed to connect to the outside world, how can you imagine plugging into the builder or AEC industry and then allow your information to be connected to them?

And this goes back to the VA DOD work that we mentioned earlier, that'll help generate value for you as an owner. And it hopefully will draw out people in the industry that are ready to work like that. And I think that's going to be the trend really is more about that. How do we find like minded groups that want to work in a transparent, open way yet still be very successful at what they do and the value that they bring back to their customers? All right.

So come on, what is the best way to connect with you or to learn more about BimStorm? BimStorm is BimStorm.com. I'm on LinkedIn and the Kimono Numa on Twitter and we have our own site, Onuma.com, but we have a lot of information about what we do as a technology company and as architects. And we have our own software as well too. Larry, check it out.

And also I'm involved with the Building Smart Alliance at the National Institute of Building Sciences, thought leadership chair there. And we encourage others to join us and learn more there. That's an open standards group. Awesome. I'm going to put all of those on the show notes.

Thank you so much for joining us for the interview today. It's been really a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to this interview with Kimono Numa. Please check out BimStorm.com.

It is really easy to join a BimStorm and start watching right now. You can just go to BimStorm.com and click to join and fill out a form actually clicking the boxes that indicate how you want to participate. So if you really learned something valuable in this episode, share this episode with your friends and colleagues. You can also let me know that you enjoyed it by connecting with me on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn or email me at Brittany at Constructor.com. That's B-R-I-T-T-N-I-E at ConstructRR.com.

Next week we'll be speaking with Ron Backer, founding partner at PLP Architecture. Ron was involved with designing the world's most sustainable office building known as the Edge in Amstam. We discussed the different elements of the building life cycle from design to occupancy to operations, including the 30,000 sensors collecting data on a moment by moment basis. We discussed how the occupants of the built environment are enhanced by the technology incorporated into design, as well as what is integrated with mobile technology. So Ron is a really fun guy to speak with and I know you guys will enjoy this next interview.

So look forward to it next week. If you haven't already subscribed to this podcast, you can do so at iTunes and Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn, iHeartRadio. You can find replays on Periscope if you are connected with me on Twitter. Please leave a review to show your support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast. I look forward to talking with you guys next week.