Voyansi Voices Blog

I’m looking at a pile of paperwork on my desk this morning. I know that buried in that stack is a financial document I need to review later. I know who sent it, when it came in, and vaguely what it looks like. I’m still dreading having to physically sort through the mess to find the one piece I want. Sorry Michael Scott, but if I had one wish in life, it might be to eliminate all the paperwork. 

Last we got a call from one of our long time customers. He had finally quit the grind of his corporate job after 20 years. After knowing them for several years both as one of Voyansi's production team members, then later in a commercial role, I knew this would not be retirement! There is an allure to architects to be able to pick and choose what you work on. As an architect myself, I know this feeling, it's experiential and almost indescribable. However, tempering that, the ability to pick and choose comes with the need for industry standard tools and workflows. 

Imagine for a minute, you're doing laundry. Everything is dry, in a basket and ready to put away. Where do you start? In my case, following the Pareto Principle, I dump the basket on the bed and head for the towels first. Once the towels are finished, I typically start with pants, then shirts, finally folding up small things such as socks, underwear, or other accessories. 

Especially in the last year, there seems to be no shortage of issues to solve in any organization. While we grapple with our internal challenges, we are also helping our customers transform their businesses. In all these experiences, a constant that we always return to is the problem definition. Understanding what we're trying to solve before we tackle it helps us prioritize and efficiently implement.

In recent years we have assimilated a lot of new ideas. Imagine yourself as a drafter in the 1950s, and how mind-blowing printing technology is today. How about a lot of the tedious calculation-based work that has been replaced with software tools: quantity take-offs, spatially organizing office space in a building, or even in creating models themselves. We work in an industry that is constantly evolving and changing. BIM, our chart and compass guiding us in the right direction. 

Today is the first day in over a year that I will be working from somewhere other than my office. It's Monday, which means of course things are slower than normal and the urgency of a Tuesday or Wednesday has not arrived yet. Complicating matters is the fact that I haven’t had to fully dress myself in over a year. 

Personal feelings aside for the state of social media today, I realized there is some truth in the importance of creating content for exposure. No, I'm not suggesting you go purchase a pair of black skinny jeans, a go-pro, and quit your job to travel.

Imagine for a minute that you’re a plumber working on a building back in the paper age, maybe right around 1956. You have three, 12” storm pipes that need to run through an entire 30.000 sq.ft floor. To complicate matters, these pipes are going inside a Lab. They are sloped, and the piping needs to be as continuous and straight as possible along the way. Oh yea, remember, it’s a lab, so there is a ton of MEP equipment, and there are a handful of beams that you absolutely cannot clash with because they are structural. 

Implementing BIM. It sounds challenging, scary even. Maybe it's on your radar, but the budget is not yet approved and you are still planning. There is a vast unknown ocean you are about to dive into, what kind of monsters lie in wait? Rework, lost productivity, expense, or additional effort are all lurking out there in the depth. 

In our last few posts, we introduced you to our ecosystem design principles and the platforms we chose. Implementation can always be more perfect, and just as we changed a lot internally in the last 5 months, the next year will hold even more surprises for us. We know you are going through similar changes, so this is  of how we formed an architecture for our data ecosystem.