G U E S T FUTURE TRENDS The Tech Future Is Here What if someone told you that the way many of us are doing bus ines s today cos t s your organization money, time and quality? That your organization is rapidly developing a competitive disadvantage, and that the owner is going to ask for things you might not be able to provide? Many of us have seen fancy-looking BIM (Building Information Modeling), GIS (Geographic Information System) and other computer-based models and have heard all the promises on how they will improve product quality and save money. They look great in a presentation, you might think, but using these tools out on an active construction project seems like too big a leap. These “computer people” are telling us we are doing it wrong, when we have successfully built projects together for many decades. So why change, you wonder. Construction Technology Changes The reason, of course, is that our industry has changed, and is rapidly changing even more. We have owners asking for a level of data that they never would have asked for 15 years ago. Computer technologies have also made incredible leaps over the last 50 years, and that affects everything. The computer on Apollo 11 had 4 KB of random access memory (RAM). The phone you carry in your pocket likely has at least 4 GB of RAM. That’s a million times more than we had in 1969. As technologies have improved, data is starting to become part of our contracts and a key deliverable to clients along with what is being built. Storage has grown exponentially as times more storage for under $100. We can process and store data at a rate that would have been inconceivable a few decades ago, but the rest of our processes have not quite caught up. But that’s “just computers,” you We have owners asking for a level of data that they never would have asked for 15 years ago. might think. A drill rig is still a drill rig. Is it really, though? While some things have stayed the same, it’s now common to have com- puter data gathering, and some- times computer control, elements on our rigs. Automated grout monitoring has been around for decades, and it often generates data on a 2-second frequency, recording depth, pressures and flow rates that we use during grouting to make real-time decisions. Just for a grouting project, this can produce an incredible amount of data: in 2007, the Center Hill Dam grouting project near Nashville, Tennessee, generated data from more than 10,000 unique grout stages (depths). Ten years later, Mosul Dam in Iraq generated more than 95,000 grouting records. You can’t successfully manage that amount of data by hand. Vanessa C. Bateman Community of Practice Leader, Geotechnical, Geology and Materials, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers EDITORIAL ... the hard part is not producing great graphics, or fancy models. It is going through our own processes and organizing ourselves so that fancy outputs are meaningful. Data Management by Specialists We install deep foundations, grouting holes and seepage cutoff walls deeper and with more precision than ever before. We have measurements occur- ring while drilling, inclino- meters on our tools, automated instrumentation that’s installed well. When computers started out with floppies, they had 80 KB of formatted storage and were expensive. Today, you can buy a 4 TB hard drive with about 12.5 million in the ground reacting to our construction activities, measurement devices to figure out precisely where deep foundations are in the subsurface, digital photos, optical televiewers, surveys, point clouds — and the list keeps going. Now, what do you do when the owner needs to see some of that data? When the owner asks to see that data daily to assess the safety of their project while you are building in the subsurface? The almost unimaginable quantity of data that is being generated is difficult for one or even a small team of people to review unaided. The abundant computer- generated data needs to be understood, synthesized and turned into information that we can use to make decisions quickly during construction. It may be “big data” or just “big enough data,” but we can’t manage all this data with Excel spreadsheets and methods from even just a few years ago. We certainly can’t manage it all on paper. Pen and paper are great; spreadsheets have their uses. But to benefit from the data visualizations being shared by Internet and at conferences, we need a little bit of infrastructure: a database and a plan. It turns out the hard part is not producing great graphics, or fancy models. It is going through our own processes and organizing ourselves so that fancy outputs are meaningful. This takes work on the part of the contractor and the owner, and it involves adding someone to our team: a data specialist (or data manager) whose job is making sure that we are collecting the right data at the right time, and that it gets to the right people. Getting the data organized and compiled is 90 percent of the problem. DEEP FOUNDATIONS • MAY/JUNE 2020 • 105 S • P E E C U I S A S L I I L S A S I U E C E P • S
