The key issue is to figure out a team that can work very efficiently together.

Part 2 
 
 
Now we come to Lower Risk, which for us in construction/engineering/design is a real biggie and, frankly, large parts of our industry will become shark bait as a huge great white called the legal system (trial lawyers) comes a-calling. Remember the scene in Jaws where the sexual passions and music flow then the big shark takes a huge bite out of the gorgeous damsel and (if you are male) every visceral muscle in your scrotum and reptile brain shriveled up? Well, guess what: many of you are about to experience that same feeling. Earlier this year we published a paper about what BIM/VCM/Parametric could eventually grow into. We treated it as futuristic fiction, but, surprisingly, most of the components exist today (http://www.ideapete.com/AATG.html). About three months ago. we had a call from a group who represent a law firm who wanted a presentation on the ramifications of what we had put in the paper. So we thought this was going to be just a tech transfer lecture, and we trotted off with our demo, which could basically be called BIM/VCM and Litigation Management Oversight (just another tentacle to the Octopus). Well, at the meeting were several legal beagles and representatives of the insurance industry who want to know flat out how our systems could expose fraud (that's what they call not doing what you said you were going to do) and identify companies who simply did not WTWTTT. What we found was that by cross-referencing searches of state and local permit and licensing databases, matching engineering data, correlating financial status and cross-referencing to insurance requirements and lots more, and tying the data into the same BIM/VCM Para model, huge issues suddenly became glaringly apparent -- issues that exposed a cakewalk for trial attorneys and gave the insurers a great tool to simply dump risky clients no matter how large your premium. Simply because our industry has looked at BIM/VCM as an unknown and difficult choice to implement and dismissed it with a "Who cares? It's not going to make a real difference," a whole new client base is coming into play who are going to use parametric modeling in ways we never thought of to, bluntly, rip huge holes into parts of our industry. Once they latch onto it (which is likely to be soon, if our recent meeting is any indication), those who thought BIM/VCM/para was optional ... well, sadly, sayonara, you are outta here. BIM/VCM/para will shortly take on a whole new meaning: you will simply need it to survive, period. You will not in the near future be able to get any form of insurance or bonds or financing unless you REALLY deploy the whole enchilada. A particularly interesting part of the second presentation was when a rep team from a very big well known BIM company (who thought they had a big potential construction company sale) got grilled on verification processes, layers and ultra complexity (IT tech department's special training). What came out was how solely database-driven BIM could be misused to hide problems in contracts. Well, it wasn't pretty and the BIM rep team was decimated as their company's whole marketing strategy had never considered what happens when a new player comes into town. The moral of the story is simply: do not depend solely on your internal technical team who have to please their boss and talk in a language that is unintelligible to your senior management. Always, always get outside independent verification of your entire process and, failing that, again, go take Mark to lunch: he will lay it out for you in simple survival terms. It's very sad for us in our company, because around 60% of our future parametric business is not going to come from construction companies or architects or even developer clients (to whom we have been preaching passionately for many years) but from an industry that is going to use the same technology to reexamine contracts for compliance or non- going back many many years. Yes, yes, I know: it's been standard practice and we started out promising that a quality-scale grade 10 would be our project target, and as we got busier the 10 became a 9, then an 8, then a 6, and so on, and everyone played pass the hand grenade, and the primary developers compromised because after the 4-year depreciation expired and they offloaded the thing and it all became someone else's problem ... Yes, I have heard all this, but guess what: if you touched it, it's coming back to pay you a visit, and the scariest thing is your insurers are not solidly in your camp any more. And if you think the statute of limitations will protect you, think again, because there is a whole new kind of legal forensic archaeologist in town. Go check the fine print on your insurance coverage, and be afraid, be very afraid. 
 
Last, we come to Reduce Debt. Although the slide is aimed at VenCap clients, Mark's tongue in cheek comment "Sorry. BIM can't help you with the "Debt" part... at least not directly " deserves more attention, because debt risk is simply another tentacle of the Octopus that can be rapidly deployed in any BIM/VCM connected to the cloud -- but it needs to be driven by your financial staff with windows of verification from the real world that are accessible by all stakeholders: your bankers, insurers, clients, whatever. Bluntly, a major problem has been that the entire construction process is a giant, complex, non-linear, interactive system that, unfortunately, most have been looking at with linear view-only tools. So they have been blind to many events (the sub who went bankrupt, the architect who's been sued by 10 clients, the purchasing agent who kept chasing dollars instead of quality, you name it) and consequently blind to their real risk. Many do not know their real risk or debt exposure, have no idea where the prudent threshold is (mostly it's been whatever you could get away with or Wall street allowed), and so don't know when it's been crossed. Banks and insurance companies have not helped, because a huge amount of debt risk was protected by insurance policies and that worked fine -- until the whole chain came apart, when it was discovered that bad risk inside the primary insurer was being offset not by real assets or money, but by looped pseudo coverage inside the same company not worth the paper it was printed on. Real time feedback -- from the real world -- will become a standard tentacle to parametric systems, and if you don't have it, you may as well wave a piece of paper at the next hurricane that pays you a visit and pretend you are protected. 
 
Lastly, inside the same presentation are two beauts: What decisions do you plan to to make ? What decisions do you wish you had made ? "To survive" would be an excellent answer to both. I'll leave the answers to these two questions up to wise CEOs who have seen Jaws and did not like that first feeling from below and want to do an independent audit of exactly what their company's status is. If they don't find answers, they're going to be wondering: "Why, oh, why didn't we adopt BIM/VCM/Parametric/Deming's 14 a long time ago," because then, instead of just us evangelists who are proud of that name droning round the country and world seeking converts, we could all have been working on the next set of tentacles together. 
 
To close, one thing I am sure of is that, when the colossus of ingenuity that is our great country and its compatriots wakes up, no matter how rudely, then nothing is impossible -- especially when a huge amount of the grunt work has already been done. 
 
Get Real or Go Home indeed, preferably before you are sent there, especially by someone else's lawyers. 
 
Hint - Mark does discounts for multiple lunches 
 
( : ( : pete 
Peter Baston 
IDEAS 
www.ideapete.com