Voyansi Voices Blog

Hopefully, you got a chance to read our blog last week. My colleague Mike “the photographer” wrote a short piece on one of his favorite conference anecdotes: the Kodak Story and the dangers of not innovating. Long story short, if you think photography today, it’s not Kodak, but rather Apple, Sony, Samsung, or maybe Nikon. What happened? Lack of desire to be at the cutting edge of technology. 

If you’re reading this today, you are probably anxious to implement BIM but are wondering how you sell it to leadership. You know that a move to BIM is more than just an update to the “latest and greatest” CAD tools. Within an organization, capital expenditure approval involves not only calculating your overall project cost but also showing the justification for spending that money in the first place. Even if you believe the purchase is necessary and reasonable, you have to convince your other colleagues.  

If you’re reading this article, you probably already know that it’s essential to implement BIM, so I want you to reframe your mindset before making the business case. The starting point is a technological renovation that, far from being thought of as an expense, should be viewed as an investment in the future. You know you need to invest in your organization’s future, so the question really is: How do you prove it to skeptical stakeholders?  

By leveraging the power of data-driven design, your team will not only come to optimal
spatial layouts today but improve your design process for the future at the same time.
Once finalized designs are manually adjusted, the feedback is sent to the repository for
future design generation.

Why? It’s a fundamental question we all learn at a young age. The drive to understand why we do what we do is as human as eating or breathing. Why do we work? Putting deep philosophy aside, most of us work to pay our bills. At work, there are different levels of participation. We all have additional drivers, various day-to-day responsibilities, and differing needs for our software, tools, and interaction levels with other employees.

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.

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.

Think for a moment about your chest of tools as an architect, engineer, or designer. You have a variety of software systems, years of experience, and training. Experience tells you when things won't work well, like that element can't go there, it will cause a clash. If you are new to BIM, drafting in 3D, or using Dynamo, this probably sounds like a bright future, but how do you get to that level?

In my last post, we covered our rules for software selection and how we found the right pieces for our software ecosystem. Choosing the software is just the beginning, stitching them into a cohesive end to end system takes trust, effort, and time. Our teams have been hard building towards new workflows. In this post, we will cover some of our design principles around our data ecosystem. These keep us aligned in our goals and allow us to decentralized our decisions.

Last year before AEC Lab rolled into Voyansi, we wrote about applying the Pareto Principle to software problems. To summarize in case you missed it, we discussed the fact that organizations can make large impacts by solving the biggest problems first. In summation, correctly identifying your largest “stones” or issues is your challenge. Finding the stone that represents 20% of the causality but solves the 80% of your problems.

2020 was a life-changing year, and while some things may go back to normal, we took this opportunity to have a chance to return to better than normal. The change from AEC Lab and AEC Resource to Voyansi was more than just a brand change, we fundamentally changed the way we work.

At the end of the day, we deliver data. Over the next few weeks, I'll write about how we transformed our digital ecosystem to take our first steps as a data-driven company, from end to end. We believe this is possible for any company where information work is the primary medium. Evermore so, we believe being data-driven is a requirement to survive in the incoming competitive environment. 

We've covered many advantages of data-driven design in previous posts. Thinking data first has many advantages along the project's life cycle that raise efficiency by saving time and resources, improving accuracy, facilitating daily workflows, and simplifying what it means to build.

There is an idea out there that all of us have heard or even been a part of on certain projects or with our respective employers. The idea is this: If you are a General Contractor and receive a building information model from the consultants working on your projects, you can get the budget automatically with not much leg work.