We live in a world of digital Darwinism where through Disruptive Selection it is reported that, 70% of the companies on the Fortune 1000 list 10 years ago have vanished and in an environment where no business is too big to fail or too small to succeed, where technology and society are growing at a faster pace than organisation and corporation can catch. Massive disruption is coming, and the only question is whether your firm is going to cause it or fall victim to it. Disruption is not easy--either to create or to confront. We have no illusions about that” says Bruce Kasanoff & Michael Hinshaw in a Fast Company Article: 7 Ways to Disrupt.

Some business leaders have seen the writing on the wall but for the majority life goes on as they are caught up in the cycle of boom and bust, feast or famine not realizing this digital globalized economy will disrupt any industry. This is especially true for most industries that have not learned to adjust itself to the digital, globalised economy where society and technology are progressing at a faster rate than institutions and organisations.

The rapid advancement of technology & globalization in the digital globalized economy allows new business models to be introduced at an ever-increasing rate & with rapidly declining costs forcing transformational change disrupting industries or industries getting disrupted. Business disruption is the new normal, rare a decade ago but now a reality, faced on a regular basis. "The truth is, at this very moment your company is most likely either disrupting other companies or being disrupted." Says John Kotter from Kotter International.

The AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) Industry is no exception, it has to undergo a transformational change through disruption and face the reality as rapid advancement of technology & globalization which allows new business models to be introduced at an ever-increasing rate & with rapidly declining costs.

The AEC industry consists of three separate players - Architecture, Engineering and Construction - working in a project to bring it to fruition, these are separate entities integrating into a single industry resulting in many issues.

Implementation of standards -particularly problematic

Each building process individually covers an extensive area

Difficult to streamline the standards between components

Each of these industries also uses different terminology

A recent study carried out by A Weippert & S. L. Kajewski at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia titled: AEC Industry Culture: a need for change highlights some of the issues in the industry. "Four decades of international Architectural, Engineering, and Contractor (AEC) industry publications reinforce poor communication and information transmission; coordination; and teamwork issues, are the cause of countless performance problems on numerous AEC projects.”

 

It is an industry that is out of step with all industry players’ just shades of gray - almost similar providing professional engineering & good design through long drawn project delivery & methodology using high skill intensive & customized approach to build combined with most work is still performed manually and on site and the end product is costly and time consuming.

There has been advances in the industry in the last decade such as Building information modeling (BIM) requiring specialized training due to the complexity of the process and the initiation of Smart Building Technology, technological advanced Equip. / Building materials together with low-tech modularization of construction and construction oriented manufacturing.

These are advances in a predictable linear fashion while in the digital innovative globalized world technology is advancing exponentially and converging.  Vivek Wadhwa: in his WSJ article on: How the Nature of Competition Has Changed explains: Because you can no longer see the competition coming. Technologies are no longer progressing in a predictable linear fashion, but are advancing exponentially — and converging. Fields such as computing, medicine, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, robotics, nanomaterials  and synthetic biology are simultaneously making advances, and combining these allows one industry to rapidly disrupt another — before market leaders even know what hit them.

It is obvious the AEC industry must disrupt as in this disruptive, digital global economy, the AEC industry will find its environment of operation will have to change quickly to survive. It will have to change the game internally to accelerating speed-of-execution and become agile to seize new opportunities while disrupting to gain critical competitive advantage. In short it will have to Out-Execute and Out-Innovate.

I look forward to hear your opinion and the others in the AEC industry.

Previous blog post on the same subject:  Is your industry ready to be disrupted, mine is?