A version of this article originally appeared in the February 2004 issue of A-E-C Automation Newsletter.

"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
—Winston Churchill, after the 1942 British victories in North Africa that turned the tide of World War II.

Many historians of technology date the beginnings of the Information Revolution to the World War II ballistics calculators and cryptanalysis machines of John von Neumann and Alan Turing, respectively. Today, nearly 60 years on, we are perhaps at the end of the beginning of this revolution. It’s roughly 40 years since the first commercial availability of computer applications to benefit AEC businesses—such as interactive computer graphics and computer-based scheduling. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the commercialization of graphical user interfaces (GUI) by Apple with the Macintosh; the tenth anniversary of Internet commercialization via the World Wide Web and its HTML-based browser technology; and only five years since XML and related "semantic" technologies first promised to add meaning to the web-based computing experience of GUI-fronted applications rendered in HTML—from WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) to the far richer and more useful realm I call WYGIWIM (what you get is what it means).

If these developments mark the end of the beginning, it was a beginning characterized by computers aiding or enabling paper-based work. These computer-aided beginnings entailed mass migration of work product from ink-smeared wood pulp to digital media. For computer-aided design, whether AEC, MCAD or EDA, this replacement of carbon by silicon has been strongly biased towards product modeling—the representation of things. However, we are now entering the next stage of the Information Revolution: a shift from computer-aided to computer-integrated; from digitizing work product to streamlining work process; from representation of things to representation of activities. In other words, from a dominant focus on product models to an emergent focus on process models.

In the world of AEC—and the broader capital asset context of civil infrastructure, plant and process industries, facility management and real estate—we now have reasonably adequate software tools to describe things we design, construct and operate (although considerable improvement remains, especially regarding data/model interoperability, to advance from building modeling as an end in itself to modeling as a means to support building simulation). Yet, AEC businesses pay less attention to software tools that describe and manage the ways in which the things we design actually are built and run. It would be cliché to recite the usual rationales for the AEC world’s relative lack of interest in process—fragmentation among diverse project participants, ad hoc nature of project collaborations, misalignment of economic incentives versus legal/customary behaviors, ad nauseum—so I won’t. If anything, these fictive impediments are instead strong arguments for the greater rewards to be reaped by process improvement in AEC.

Over the past year and a half, since launching The LaiserinLetter and www.laiserin.com, I’ve come to realize that I was as much a victim as any of my readers regarding the AEC software world’s over-emphasis on product and under-emphasis on process. To correct this short-sightedness, I set out to reeducate myself. In so doing, I have been privileged to encounter hundreds of brilliant researchers and teachers at scores of profound international conferences, as well as visiting and learning from dozens of pioneering AEC businesses and the progressive software developers serving their needs. Allow me to highlight a few of these guides.

One key lesson I learned (although likely not news to the quicker-witted among the audience) is that product and process modeling are not mutually exclusive. Like the Taoist yin and yang, product models can be derived from process models and vice versa. For example, the work of Charles Eastman, Rafael Sacks and Ghang Lee at the Georgia Institute of Technology clearly demonstrates this complementarity (e.g., in their paper "Deriving a Product Model from Process Models," at the Concurrent Engineering 2002 conference). Chuck Eastman literally wrote the book on product models (Building Product Models: Computer Environments Supporting Design and Construction, CRC Press, Boca Raton FL, 1999) while Georgia Tech colleague Godfried Augenbroe is a leading proponent of process models.

The relationship between product and process modeling can best be observed in the European Conferences on Product and Process Modeling in the Building Industry. I was fortunate to attend the 2002 conference in Portoroz, Slovenia and a “mini” ECPPM event during 2003’s 10th International Conference on Concurrent Engineering in Madeira, Portugal, and am looking forward to ECPPM 2004 in Istanbul, Turkey, September 2004. While product modeling approaches dominate most "CAD" conferences and many discussions of building information modeling (BIM), process modeling takes center stage at gatherings such as the annual conferences of the International Building Performance Simulation Association. Again, I was privileged to observe Building Simulation 2003 in Eindhoven, Netherlands, chaired by Georgia Tech’s Fried Augenbroe (IBPSA's USA affiliate will hold its first SimBuild Conference in Boulder, Colorado, August 2004).

Other centers of process modeling focus in the USA include the University of Pennsylvania’s Digital Design Research Laboratory (DDRL) under the direction of Branko Kolarevic and colleagues. In October 2003 I attended DDRL’s conference on Performative Architecture, in which many presentations extended the process modeling/building simulation approach championed by folks like Fried Augenbroe (who also presented) to embrace new exploratory modes in the design process itself. On the opposite coast of the USA, at Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE), Professors John Kunz and Martin Fischer espouse a unified approach that balances product modeling, process modeling and organizational modeling.

As demonstrated at last June’s CIFE Summer Program, in which I was a guest participant, BIM product models (such as ArchiCAD from Graphisoft) can be combined with four-dimensional schedule simulation process models (such as CommonPoint) and organization simulation models (such as SimVision) in an extremely compressed approach to project delivery. In conjunction with its regular 2004 summer program, CIFE will present a one-day Executive Briefing on Achieving Exceptional Building Project Value, jointly offered with Harvard University's Center for Design Informatics (CDI), which is under the direction of Spiro Pollalis and where I have the honor of serving on the dissertation committee of a Doctoral candidate investigating the process of early design. CIFE also is offering the first (and to my knowledge only) Certificate Program in Virtual Design and Construction, another indication of the new parity of process and product modeling approaches.

Lest this emerging interest in process modeling be dismissed as the theoretical musings of academics, there is ample evidence that research-based approaches are rapidly entering the commercial realm. Two early markers are the aforementioned CommonPoint and SimVision, both spin-offs of Stanford/CIFE research. Web-based project administration services (sometimes labeled extranets), which were given up for dead after the dot-com implosion of April 2000, are showing renewed vigor as former post-and-host stalwarts such as Buzzsaw by Autodesk (whose Autodesk University I attended in Las Vegas, December 2003) and Constructware expand beyond their document/data roots with functionality to manage tasks and projects via forms, templates and rules at the action/transaction level. Leading document/collaboration vendor OpenText, with whom I presented a series of AEC seminars around the USA in 2002 and 2003, has upped the ante by incorporating a sophisticated drag and drop workflow templating capability into its LiveLink for Construction collaborative project management offering.

At the October 2003 Meridian Project Systems user conference in Las Vegas, which I attended, the company unveiled a quantum leap over its former flagship Prolog; this new-from-the-ground-up product, called Proliance, raises the stakes yet again—to building process modeling (BPM) that supports managing portfolios comprised of multiple projects. In perhaps the boldest step to date commercializing process modeling, Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Cyntergy Technology (who I visited just prior to this writing) offers ThumbprintCPM (the “CPM” here stands for "collaborative program management"). Thumbprint operates at the program level, which is more comprehensive and with more enterprise-wide interactivity than a mere portfolio of projects. Moreover, Thumbprint employs patent pending technologies for intelligent or adaptive modeling—in other words, it pushes beyond process modeling to automatically learn from and adapt to dynamic changes within processes as well as variations across diverse processes.

Today, the most advanced process modeling tools and methods may hold the greatest initial appeal for organizations with huge building programs (think Wal-Mart) and/or critical time-to-market considerations (think Disney). Nevertheless, for a majority of AEC businesses, the available power of this sophisticated technology will soon make it more than just a work in process.

JL

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