Electronic Signature Legality for Construction Industry in Australia

How to eSign a document: electronic signature legality for Construction Industry in Australia

well ladies and gentlemen good afternoon and welcome to standards Australia here in Bridge Street Sydney um for those of you who've been able to join us and to all of you online a very good afternoon good evening and good morning um to you all my name is Adam stengemore I'm the general manager of Engagement and Communications with standards Australia and as we start this afternoon I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet here in Sydney the Europe people of the gadigal nation and pay respects to Elders past present and emerging this is a very very important conversation for us this afternoon that we're starting on digital engineering a term that for all of the people in the room here today probably means something a little bit different but if I could if I could start with my own personal Reflections having started my professional career as a construction litigator 20 or more than 20 years ago the construction sector has an opportunity ahead of it to build on a lot of the work that many of you are doing many of you are leading um and that many of you are deeply deeply involved in today but in order to do that we're probably going to have to change the way that we've been doing some things for not just 20 years but 200 years I could be entirely wrong you might all say you know what Adam there's nothing to change everything's fine nothing to see here we have a slightly different View um and to start this conversation here this afternoon I'm very pleased to have Simon Vox with us Simon a leader described by some a disrupter described by others um and presently CEO of dios digital Simon um good afternoon good afternoon Adam it's great to be here and um it's great to see so many people have actually shown up to attend and talk about digital engineering today both here in present and also online so I welcomes you all um Simon tell me about your experience in the construction sector uh right um so I am a civil engineer by background um chartered civil engineer with ice um I started my career about 20 years ago and if I reflect back uh first working as a structural engineer on day one I was introduced to the red pencil the blue pencil tracing paper so butter paper and a drawing board and I was told how to trace architectural drawings and you know work out loads and so forth and um you know it's kind of surprised me I think just in the year 2001 so actually be working that way but that was you know still the way some people worked and over the years I moved from designing Bridges to managing designs to working in Railways and then around 2007 joined transport for New South Wales and for 14 years I was working inside government to drive or manage projects but also then start to drive change around digital engineering so I had a bit of an arc from starting very much with the analog way of working to um something that was very much digital by the end drafting table and the the blue and red pencil what's changed between that sort of first start in your career and where we are today um less pencils I'd say like um you know what's really changed is um there's a lot more appetite for working online um you know we've over the 20-year period if we take a step back and not just look at our industry just look at Society Society has changed so much and you know consumer Tech is everywhere like um you know we don't even talk about smartphones anymore it's just phones and technology is ubiquitous the appetite for using data for managing data for accessing data and analytics and everything that it entails is significant and so that's what's happening in the world around us in our sector there are things happening like there's been the introduction in the last maybe 10 years or so things like Bim have really taken off but um they you know have moved us some part of the way but I'd say that our industry still has a lot of challenges still has issues with project overruns with productivity you could go as far as to say diversity and other things like that as well so there's a lot more that could be done in our sector to try to make it a lot more digital than potentially where we are right now um and and just sort of drilling in a little bit on the sort of smartphone piece how does a smartphone have anything to do with engineering infrastructure projects talk to me about that um yeah that's a good question I'll start a bit abstract and we'll work our way in a thing that I read late last year which sort of is a real light bulb moment for me I started getting into reading textbooks about databases and in one textbook there's this image and it was the ubiquitous nature of or the pervasive nature of databases but the image was called a day in Susan's life and if you Google it just go to Google Images a day in Susan's life maybe Chuck database on the end and it just showed at five phases throughout the day the kind of things that Susan's up to so when she first gets up she goes on a social social media like Facebook you know Twitter whatever and she's interacting with databases but she just doesn't see it at lunchtime she goes to the shops she goes to the chemist the chemist is using databases to manage inventory after work she goes to the supermarket when she gets home she does online shopping she books a holiday later on and at every stage she's interacting with databases and it got me thinking more and more around just how how pervasive databases are these days and if you think about your mobile phone everything that you're doing on your mobile phone is interacting with the database it's just you just don't see it it's like there's the the iceberg what you see above is the app and that's the the presentation layer but underneath all of that behind every app that you use virtually is a database and those databases all have design which is a data model and that is the starting point of understanding what data architecture is like and what true digital transformation is all about so every other sector is moving in that space building up capabilities with databases except for hours and so that's the starting point of where we want to have this new conversation around what digital engineering could really mean for a sector so um just want to move on to to Bim building information modeling there's a lot of data associated with all the work that's going on in Bim and that's continuing to iterate and move how is this conversation different from the evolution of Bin uh yeah good question um make me think um so with with Bim a bit like with digital engineering if you've got everybody around the room say hey what's Ben you are going to get a whole cross-section of um of definitions but maybe if we just talk about the heritage of where bins come from and what it's how it's evolved it really started from CAD it was all about the the evolution from 2D drawings to 3D models for visualization then the next Evolution was packing metadata inside that 3D model so let's call it a smart 3D model as such now with the Advent of UK standards becoming ISO standards the Bim approach has really taken off and it did show a real difference between the previous way of working with two-dimensional drawings so now having 3D models that you can interact with but where I'd say there's a limitation of Bim is that Bim requires that you manage metadata inside a 3D model and I'd sort of put out the um I guess the concept that maybe 3D models aren't the best vehicle for managing metadata every other sector just uses databases every other sectors built up expertise in this space from data governance data management you know data analytics and business intelligence but if we continue to insist on using Bim as a solution being a metadata stored inside a 3D model then we're locking away the capability of accessing metadata on a broad scale so I think bims come a long way it's Been instrumental in driving a lot of change but I think it's also worth examining what every other sector is doing and whether or not there's further things that we can explore and capitalize on excellent so um sort of going backwards from there we've got um the Bim through any model that sort of operates down here what operates Upstream of that in you know digital engineering environment um yeah okay so um it's it's a bit it feels a bit like heresy to sort of suggest that Bim wouldn't be the center of your project which is I guess the the concept that when I first started on the journey that's what I would have believed is the way forward but what I'd say is that instead of Bim being the core I'd say it's a component so so what's at the center structured data people talk about that a lot but structured data in my view should be a database that's a manage metadata that's every other sector does it so when we talk about structured data we should really be reframing that to a common data model a common data model that is used to design the way your databases work so we can manage metadata so Bim could just be one component out of every other deliverable that you managed on the projects which so GIS drawings requirements time cost risk all these other components all these other information deliverables using common metadata or call that a common data model and so Bim is one very instrumental deliverable but it's not the sensor at the center is a database that manages metadata and works with many other deliverables with Bim and many others and what does that allow us to do differently how would that change things if we were to sort of start thinking about a common data model that sits above the engineering project um the this is foundational if I sort of describe it like that the um the real benefit is once you start talking about data in a in this sort of level then you can start thinking around data analytics you can start thinking around business intelligence not just for a single organization but for a sector or you know there's a lot of talk these days about the digital thread or the golden thread of data now this is not just a file management approach of managing files and then trying to make do we want to try to automate process as much as possible now automation requires databases to actually inform the automation sorry I've got to talk in front of the mic a bit more what's up yeah sorry um so the other benefit so we have the digital thread we want to be able to line up different life cycle stages from concept design detail design construction operate maintain we don't want to have disconnected life cycle processes we want to build up from the entire life cycle so we have that efficiency and we can start driving automation the other benefits is that there's a lot of talk about say digital Twins and digital twins not just for projects but for organizations or for jurisdictions so New South Wales has got New South Wales spatial digital twin Victoria's got digital depending Victoria they're a national digital twin programs happening around the world what they really predicate on is all organizations setting up metadata in a consistent way so it means that multiple organizations can all talk and share an exchange and you can get analytics you can have dashboarding that sits above all of that which if we insist on managing data sets with metadata squirrel away that can't be accessed unless using specialist software or if we're managing data just as files we're never going to get there we're not going to be able to achieve those smarter objectives smart cities you know smart infrastructure if we still if we don't have that sort of foundational data model set up first of all and if I extend that a bit further because I think where this goes to is smart cities I think that's if you imagine a pyramid that's at the Pinnacle most governments want to set up smart cities what we don't want is um smart Shanty towns we don't want to have you know disconnected little pockets of data that there are smart bits but then there's a wasteland in between if we want to have this orchestrated we've got to think around the architecture the master planning for how these smart cities will work on a digital level and that's where full circle that's where this data model really comes in excellent um when when we started well as the start of this conversation we've put out a a paper on on digital engineering Simon that you work very closely with us to develop and in it we talk about the concepts of the built environment and the digital environment coming together and what are your points in the paper is that um I want to get this right engineering is from Mars and digital is from Venus what the hell does that mean son uh I probably had a bit too much caffeine when I wrote those but yeah it just yeah you know it made sense at the time no um what I was trying to get to there is um I think the book came out 80s or 90s it's written in the paper as an international bestseller and it's just all about different parties communicate and handle pressure in different ways essentially um different parties think differently and you need to understand how other people think to be able to communicate and um and you know get along like just avoid conflicts um and I was using that as a way of describing how the way um the digital world tends to operate the way they think around data is very different so the current state of the way our sector mostly things around data and um I think for us to be able to engage in a digital to start becoming more digital the way every other sector is doing it we need to start understanding what are their artifacts what are the ceremonies what are the ways that the way that they work so we can start doing that too and so instead of you know in this concept of different worlds how do we bring these two worlds together and that's you know if we are able to um you know speak openly and start to challenge existing ideas then maybe we can start to learn from what they're doing we can start picking up that too okay so um two more questions for me and then we're going to open up to a sort of broader broader panel discussion Simon um the last 18 months two years in Australia there's been a an emerging conversation about embodied carbon and um embodied energy within buildings and infrastructure and how we might economy-wide do better at sort of trying to count that capture that manage that through the life cycle of a facility yep I have two questions that hang off that first of all can we do that today and then second of all would digital engineering help us do that better uh all right yeah um look uh first one can we do it today uh we could um but yeah we could do a lot better so how would it be done today um I'd say that the counting carbon's very similar to other sort of activities like cost estimation um where um organizations have their own IP they have their own ways of doing it but it would never be done automatically um so everything can be done manually but it's just inefficient um so you could have a bit like in cost estimation we'd have a whole bunch of cost estimators working to try to append cost to deliverables to items to assets to activities you could do the same thing with carbon but the better way of doing it is to um once again if you have a data model where you say right every time this material comes up this is how much carbon is produced per ton of this material and that's just a property then of different types of assets so if you start thinking around it's just being another entity or another attribute in your database with every other ncn attribute and all the relationships are already pre-designed because you've thought about the data architecture well before you ever thought about counting Carbon on a specific project so when you start when you then just start building up catalogs libraries of you know Carbon or the amount of carbon on different types of assets and so forth so when it goes and gets the projects you want to do carbon embodied carbon calculation that is automated as much as possible and so that's a difference from current state to Future state excellent um so last question for me before we open up um to to the panel discussion um today we're starting this conversation in Australia about digital engineering um where would you like us to get to over the next few months as this conversation evolves is there something that we're sort of tangibly trying to achieve is there a change that we're looking for is there a community we're looking to build what is it that you know in two or three months time we can say you know what we've done well from starting this conversation today um apart from me still having a job yeah I know I'd say the um what we want to do is um I think with sort of organizational change and I can speak from experience I've sort of worked in organizational change and as a transport you can either go bottom well sorry top down or you can go bottom up so bottom up so yeah the bottom up is sort of pilot projects case studies testing things let's just do stuff but that can only get you so far sometimes so maybe your top down might be something you want to consider top down you start with a vision what's the flag of Hell the lighthouse the you know the sort of thing that everyone goes all right we agree with that once you have a common agreement you can then set a culture around it this is what we're all working towards and um that's something that we're kind of missing I think so if we can first start getting some agreement on what our Collective vision is something short Snappy right we're going to try to achieve or send industry in this new direction from that we're going to start thinking around roadmap we can think around participants but um I liken it a bit like when um maybe in the last 20 years how safety really changed in the construction sector where one of the first things that happened was the industry created excuse the pun but they created a safe space in Industry to be able to go we need to talk about this we need to talk about safety and we don't want to have defensive attitudes we don't want to have people saying mission accomplished nothing to see here we want to have a serious conversation around what we should be changing and that set industry in a New Direction Where safety isn't something anyone can question now and I think for us if we can start to create a safe space within our sector to be able to start questioning challenging learning and growing and start thinking around a new vision of what our sector could be and we can start doing that in the next few months I think that would be signs that were going in the right direction excellent and um for us at standards Australia Simon we're very happy to host that conversation over the next over the next few months to see where we get to um we want all of you to come on this journey with us it's not an exclusive conversation um in any way and it's the people around us today and and others who will be able to help us help us move so I want to shift gears a little bit and welcome Dr James Glastonbury the executive general manager um of engineering technology and Innovation with McConnell Dow to join us and Dr Ian Opperman um the New South Wales government Chief data scientist industry professor at UTS and director of Standards Australia good afternoon James and Ian great to be here thanks Adam um we're here James you've you've heard us sort of start this conversation off this afternoon but for you in your role what does digital engineering mean for you and why would it be of any benefit well look it is it is a critical lever for us I I represent I suppose the construction end of this conversation um digital absolutely has to be part of how we go to work and increasingly it has to transform how we work we're an industry that has some metrics that no one can be comfortable with productivity being one of them you know we are in the slow lane in terms of productivity and that's a global industry statement one percent year on year for the last 20 years compared to Global productivity growth of 2.8 or 3. so so there's work to do across the industry globally digital has to be part of how we address some of that productivity under performance but I think Simon's touched on a few other things you know we have a A diversity dilemma we have some safety records that again none of us can be comfortable with and and the sooner we and the further we go down a digitally activated way of working the sooner we can really tangibly address some of those things that really need addressing excellent and and Ian from your view when you look at the opportunities that exist in a broader digital context with a digitally engineered built environment what are they thanks Adam I think we're at a relatively still early stage in terms of our embracing of digital my background's actually telecoms mobile Communications in particular and that's a sector where there's very little actually physical built all the value all the services are created in the digital world which means you can change and adapt really really quickly and one of the things we learned fairly early on as we moved from GSM to 3G and so on is that the physics wasn't good enough anymore we'd actually deploy a network suck all the data in optimize push it back out and then just repeat that process and that was a real eye-opener that very little of of the value creation was actually in the physical world most of it was was data when you look across different sectors building into construction looks to be at the other end of that Spectrum most of the value you think is created in the physical realization of the physical objects and the physical buildings but the Practical reality is that there's so much more we could do in the world of data and digital and I'm literally just back from an IEC general meeting in San Francisco and we're talking about the disruption everywhere in every sector about digital and how we as the world of Standards need to think differently about it and that that is true for everything so so far we've touched on digital twins we haven't talked about internet of things we haven't talked much about AI we haven't talked much about data sharing in use we have talked a little bit about metadata there is an ocean of stuff coming you have not seen anything yet so I think that those that don't Embrace digital are genuinely going to be left in the 20th century which is the past those that don't Embrace digital and the digital services are not going to be competitive and issues like diversity and inclusion or even cyber security and privacy there are aspects you can't solve with with a simple model it's something you have to think holistically about and from a whole of ecosystem whole of an economy perspective about and if you don't think it's happening just wait a moment and you will see wave after wave after wave of digital Innovation come barreling towards you well James um how are you responding um if if you agree with Ian um and I think it's pretty hard not to how were you responding today um on the ground to those types of challenges oh look I I I I I mean and probably has a different view of of uh what's ahead of us but I've got no doubt tomorrow is going to be fundamentally different to today and next week and next month and next year will be even more radically different so we know we can't stay here we know we can't keep practicing the way we have quite what that looks like in individual businesses is really the hands of you know business leadership but at an industry and and sort of government level or jurisdictional level there are some things that we can and should be doing to get better ready for that such as having the open conversation around what what is a what is a sensible and rational uh architecture or definition for the data that we generate each and every day you know we we need to get more organized around that no no single participant around this conversation can solve it themselves it requires joined up thinking um again just just thinking about the industry I'm part of you know historically we've had fairly adversarial forms of contract that that sort of push parties to either corner of the room we need to examine whether that's the right environment to really move the industry forward if I look at government across across our country you know we're a Federation of states and and each of our state leaders have have differing views and wants and Direction um and I think it's important we look at a at a national level where can we get uh uniformity in in some of what we're trying to do here because you know I suspect many around this forum have a part of businesses that operate across borders so you want some way of working that translates from New South Wales to south Australia to wa to Tasmania and at the moment we're a little bit hamstrung by some of those jurisdictional differences so I think it's a really important debate that we're having how how we can get harmonization in in the data that we are increasingly going to generate in much greater volumes than we are today does that answer your questions it does um and it leads to to a question to Simon so in the in the paper Simon that that we put out you we we put some mapping in there um that looked at media and entertainment Financial manufacturing and the software sectors and then the construction sector and am I really simple eye it showed that there was a Delta between where everybody else is on the data journey and the connectivity journey and then the construction sector is was that a fair interpretation from me yeah um I I sort of interpret the same um if you guys haven't seen it um a bit of a plug check out the paper available online um but yeah so in the um I took an extract from research paper from 2014 from a company called box which is like Dropbox and they did these sort of knowledge graphs of five different Industries and it's quite fascinating because it just shows the pattern of the way those organizations are different Industries work so Financial Services heavily centralized there's like one big node it's like a Galaxy you know everything's all coming into a central point manufacturing and software a lot of collaboration but um in the construction sector it's this thin wispy Shadow compared to the others um very dislocated very low levels of collaboration it really is the outlier and you just look at it it just stands out like a sore thumb and you know it's endemic of our sector where um to um you know James's Point Australia is an island each jurisdiction in some ways is like an island then but if you go inside it's jurisdiction I was working in health sorry in transport but in health in education and Justice they're all dislocated as well it's just like another Island projects you know government agencies jurisdictions all broken up and somewhere in the middle we're trying to manage data in this heavily fragmented nation and so if we start thinking around some form of collaboration where just imagine if we could start bridging those gaps because now we all have not just common ways of describing files or you know basic deliverables but actually we have an underlying common data data model we can just use things in databases we can query data on mass am I getting value on this project versus many other projects how are other states going how are the sectors going we could ask all sorts of get all sorts of insights that we can never have because at the moment where there's those thin wispy dislocated sector yeah okay um I'm gonna open up to questions from the floor here in a second but I've got I've got a question first for Ian so Ian in terms of a construction sector conversation um what is a smart City and what role should the construction sector have in that smart City that's a great question so I I said for New South Wales government I chair the smart cities advisory Council and we had a presentation from status Australia recently talking about the recently released paper on on Smart City standards uh from a from the perspective I set in from a government perspective it's about delivering services to the customers of New South Wales and being able to adapt those services to the needs of people as they adapt from a technological perspective it's about Gathering data using data to help situational awareness to understand root cause when things go wrong to understand how to how to optimize things in a meaningful way as we were starting to build from during covert understanding what was happening to New South Wales as we applied restrictions from a construction perspective it's actually about making sure the infrastructure is in place thinking ahead about all the different forms of data that we need to gather or will gather whether it's it's a deliberate purposed sensors or whether it's things like secondary use of of information and second resources and then the ability to do something about it in with the New South Wales government smart cities smart places advisory committee half the problem we talk about half the problems all the things we talk about actually come back to data and the ability to capture it to store it to use it in an appropriate safe ethical ways which are also in line with what we've agreed with the customer data Charter this is what we will do with your data this is what we won't do with your data so there's a lot of there's a lot of simple digital Plumbing issues from a construction perspective there is a whole lot of alignment issues between different layers of government between different different parties and someone I think it might have been Simon earlier said this isn't something that anyone in particular has got it's something that whenever we do a smart place is smart cities activity we need to have industry we need to have at least two layers preferably three layers of government we need to have the Innovation sector we need to have stakeholders we need to have customers we need to have citizens we need to have people who are talking about diversity and inclusion and we need that safe space to to think through some of these big problems that don't drive people into into different Corners so there is a there's a lot to that question Adam uh and but hopefully that the most important messages are being ready being able to to identify where the smart needs to go and then being able to appropriately and safely share and use data to make things smart and responsive excellent and and that's really the basis of the conversation that we want to have over the next few months about being ready and I think we've described it as a pivot in terms of our thinking to sort of pause reflect on all the good that's going on at the moment and then and then what we can do perhaps a little bit differently there's a question here it's a little bit beyond me so I'll flick it to you Simon do Kobe or does the Kobe address the data challenges like we've seen in asset management software um yeah so I just for the uh non-kobe Fanboys out there so um get Kobe construction operations building information exchange essentially um a basic data model for transferring data from one stage to the next and it was set up to extract metadata from outside the Bim model so Bim becomes a primary way of managing metadata and we take metadata out of the Bim model and put it in a spreadsheet now that was set up many years ago but the data model is really quite basic in many ways it um was only set up for buildings and there was a paper done many years ago back in 2013 I think around Kobe for all whether or not that's going to solve you know how this could be used for many other types of Industries it's not appropriate for what we need these days back when Kobe was invented people were using Nokia 3210s the world has moved on nobody wants to use the Nokia 3210 anymore and I don't think things like Kobe are necessarily ideal solutions for what we need going forward excellent um another question here uh from Eric bajega online the transition to an open data Centric industry requires agreement between many parties to start instigating the transition I think that's that's very fair the next question I'm going to throw to each of you who should facilitate the journey and how do we avoid the interest or the sort of challenge of self-interest and gain versus what's best for the industry so Ian I might start with you as the person furthest from the construction sector and then come back to James and then Simon sure thank you so it's it's a really important question because this this this emerges again and again in different sectors recently we tried to do some work in circular economy and came unstuck because we couldn't get data from different providers we had during the fires in New South Wales we tried to access data from different commercial mobile phone operators and came unstuck because there was a real sensitivity about sharing coverage and you you can pick example after example after example and part of the answer has to be that we need to create that safe space so that's that's really very important no one's got to get into trouble no one will be commercially disadvantaged by sharing data there are some technological ways that we can address that sometimes we don't need to see the data I don't need to see that a equals one in your data set I just need to know whether a is greater than b or a is equal to b or a is less than b and sometimes that's enough and so being able to change what we mean by sharing I think is really quite important and using data but there's always concern about consequences of what happens if you know that a equals B then you could do something in terms of commercially disadvantaging me and so on so being really clear about what we can and can't do with the insights we generate from data or the data products we generate is really quite important New South Wales is about to create a connectivity index across all of New South Wales which says this is the mobile phone coverage I've got these are the other sorts of coverage I've got this is how reliable it is this is whether it's real time or not and this is this is the number of alternative sources I've got that's really really powerful if we can do it and so we're going to work through that safe space idea to try and create that index for all of New South Wales and then set aspirational targets and the difference between the two is the market creating opportunity everyone wants that market creating opportunity no one really wants to share their data so we're working through that exact idea right now to see whether or not we could engage in an environment where people don't give up commercial Advantage don't disadvantage themselves don't put themselves for Unnecessary homes and part of the answer is thinking differently about how we actually share the data James yeah to some extent it's it's a bit like you know the 11 secret herbs and spices you know um we all derive value from the data that we generate in particular and probably unique ways I think sooner we can get to some some consistency in that then the better we'll all perform um that sounds very uh aspirational and democratized at the end of the day we have an economy full of businesses that go head-to-head in competition that that's going to remain but I I think the role here sits with you know a somewhat impartial body and and that's where I think you know this conversation led by standards Australia is hugely valuable um there are other cross jurisdictional agencies that can play a leading role but then who and where and how individual businesses derive value from the from a consistent pool of data that we're generating you know that becomes the competitive Advantage but but there is a role for agencies outside of individual Enterprises to to really take a lead here excellent Simon uh right okay um so the question being I'll look at because the questions just put up the screen but the part which I'll tackle is how does this become well how do we stop you know different organizations just trying to I guess take ownership or use a commercial advantage to uh dominate um I um I look at this as a bit like um uh in construction we'll talk about design build and then you get a thing at the end um so you know if we just sort of talk generally Architects tend to work in design Space Engineers tends work in the construction or the build space and at the end you get a new building or a railway or whatever um in um sort of business change but also in data specifically we have Architects and Engineers as well data architects who will work on a conceptual data model then you have your engineers your data Engineers will work on the logical and physical data models they work out how to build the database how to operate it and I think um you know we know Architects and Engineers we know how to build physical things but there's all these other Architects and Engineers that we need to bring into our space who come from data management and I think where I want to try to explore things is that data management is a discipline in its own right I mentioned Dharma International earlier and I think those are the kind of things that are going to help us to democratize the I don't know all the expertise around what good data management looks like so maybe that's a thing we can explore over the next few months excellent now questions from the room here we've got some roving mics if you wouldn't mind John just introducing yourself to the people on line when the mic comes John Levy I represent Master Builders Association on coupler standard I can see in New South Wales in the last two years three years we have come a long way by establishing a building portal you know to do with class too and that kind of thought a lot of work was designed and we were designed practitioner and a design practitioner Act firstly we can see that could be a good platform for the building industry to expand close the board and that kind of tie up a lot of building information together and I could see as well from the standard point of view and I mean last year we have come a long way as well that we introduced stand access to a standard all all stand under the uh the National Construction code for the price of cup of coffee for small businesses which is great achievement so could we see something like that building portal be expanding across the board in the construction industry and tying all the information together with standard with National Construction code and all the government agency likewise Council and National elect Land Title which is already digital thank you when you decide so you're in class to residential construction correct are the building commissioner's work yes practitioner act and if that goes across the board it's going to be a great Initiative for the building and construction industry as far as information and transformation to digital which is any form on site can access everything on his mobile phone or computer and all that data safely saved like we come a long way with my gov and that that will come back up with gone that for about a year and how much information that captured in New South Wales or across the country so if we something at that base it could be great achievement for the building industry thank you um I'm gonna take that or Jonah I'll jump in I'll start it um yeah look I think um yeah it's a great question so thank you um like the the building portal is definitely a window of things to come it's a sign of we want to have more online platforms for being able to manage data on mass to be able to query data the one thing I'd say with that portal though it's more work can be done for The Upfront design of the data so um you know at the moment um there's you know a lot more capability that we could inject by designing what entities what libraries of attributes um what ways we can query data to have all sorts of dashboarding sitting on top but it's um it's a definite um it's all progress and I think it's um it's it's a brilliant start to um where New South Wales government should be going and I might answer John from standards Australia's perspective so um this is an uncomfortable conversation for us in one sense um no no I'm not not your question at all but this digital engineering conversation is a little bit uncomfortable because for 100 years we've developed our standards in a particular way um the level of metadata in our team is working really hard at the moment to enrich that metadata that sits behind the content is um it's emerging um and in order to sort of operate in a digital engineering environment you need to the sort of standards and codes to all be aligned I know talking to James the the state and territory variations to that is challenging if you're working at sort of scale across the country let alone the globe so is do we want to answer that question that you've posed you know should we have that platform absolutely but we we're nowhere near that conversation yet and what we want to do over the next few months is to really work with people deeply in the construction sector and people peripheral to it to work out how this might work and at the end of the day people might say you know what no there's nothing to do here everything's fine we don't think so um we think that the more that we can have these types of conversations the stronger the outcomes will be are there any more hands in the room or will they go back to some of the online questions and down the back uh hi there my name's Nick I'm a research officer here at standards um it was briefly mentioned before that contract relationships in the construction World tend to be particularly adversarial one of the things you hear about blockchain technology is that it can enable Smart contracts self-executing contracts that aren't subject to a central Authority um but with so many things in the blockchain world it's it's hard to tell just how valuable or practical that really is so my question for the panel was what value do you see in those Technologies are people in construction adopting those Technologies do you wanna yeah oh look I good good question there is no shortage of beneficial technology out there blockchain being one of them um uh at the end of the day there are humans uh in the room um so you know I think as much as anything it's it's not a technology conversation it's a it's a behavior and culture shift that we need to look at um having made the statement you know our industry has had a history of sort of adversarial uh forms of contract that that is definitely shifting we're seeing we're seeing better forms of contract across the industry uh every day so we're moving and Technology can accelerate some of that blockchain might be part of it I think the last two years you know the last three I want to I want to reprise the last three years none of us want to go back there but that has that has kind of forced us to examine some ways of working and and we need to take the good bits out of what we've all experienced over the last three years in terms of ways of working and Agility and and so on and move forward with the good bits of that stuff so yeah again so I didn't mention blockchain I wasn't going to be the first person to mention blockchain but since you brought it up uh so the smart contracts part is probably poorly named because ultimately all you ever really do is confirm a little transaction as opposed to getting a lawyer to say yes or someone to agree or disagree but blockchain is actually being used right at the moment some of you will have heard about the New South Wales Building Commissioner has uh instigated a blockchain system to underpin the supply of all the components in a building ultimately to build a trust index when grenfield Tower happened in the UK the team that I was running with New South Wales government was given the task of trying to identify buildings at risk of flammable aluminum non-compliant aluminum cladding was the term that we used and we used all sorts of data sets to try and identify buildings But ultimately fire and rescue went out there and tested every single building that we identified and our hit rate was okay it wasn't great but it was okay because the data sets we had were actually not that good and not that Reliant and we were really imaginative about the data sets we used partly we couldn't Source Beyond where materials landed in Australia we couldn't Source back to the origin the intention is now to actually Source things right back to the origin and follow every single component that goes to a building so in instances like that blockchain is quite useful work's been done by KPMG and when I said you ain't seen nothing yet when you realize what you can do when you start to digitize all the components of a building and all of it all the Providence and connect them to all the suppliers you suddenly create this incredible ecosystem where you've got much much more data than you ever thought you could possibly have and you've got much much more ability to do things with that data than you would have thought previously and throw some some Ai and connect that to another system and connect it to another system all of a sudden you realize that you are really at the edge of an incredible data series of oceans and you can start to do some pretty amazing stuff around how you would manage and control buildings how you'd manage control cost how you manage your control interaction with those buildings and the point that I mentioned earlier about cyber security and privacy a smart building or a smart city or a smart environment uses a lot of data about people and if you've got a gdpr type restriction on use of that data a simple model just doesn't cut it when you think about this little bit of data intersecting with that little bit of data in this context in that place so all of a sudden these these incredible possibilities open up when you start to digitize and that building Commissioners experiment with blockchain starts to really pull some really powerful threads which opens up a whole new world of opportunities and that really takes us back to this question about well it's not it's not an iterative change that we're talking about here it's a system change so all the good work that goes on Downstream in different elements of the construction sector today needs to be sort of rolled up into a bigger question um and then in I assume that there are other sectors that deal with people's personal information and deal with data at scale and we might be able to rely on some of the protocols that already exist or do we have to invent some new ones you're just saying that to make me happy Adam so I spent a lot of late nights working with the world of jdc ones sc32 specifically working group six looking at data usage we're looking to release a standard about all data usage of all kinds and the considerations for use what you need to understand about data to use it for the purpose you're about to use it for and the guidance restrictions prohibitions you put on data products we'll have it middle of next year fingers crossed we'll have it middle of next year but it also ties in with a whole lot of Standards which are coming down about metadata and again that's from the world of sc32 JTC one se32 work in group two are putting out a whole stack of new metadata standards and ultimately it's metadata that matters about the data all data sets are incomplete all data sets are imperfect all data sets are less than 100 quality but if you you know how it got to you if you can assess its Fitness or purpose and you can build the structures around it for for appropriate further use of data and data products you're off to a much much you're in a much better position for actually dealing with the digital part of what we're talking about excellent um last call for questions in the room if there are any burning hands there's a burning hand over here thanks Rory Ryan from New South Wales government and it's great to see some familiar faces I had a question on the concept on sort of the national agenda if I can be you know sell forthright I think New South Wales government's doing some great things I obviously know some of the other states are doing some wonderful things as well what's the way that we can though make sure that we We join this up um you know so that we we get the best value the best buying for the whole of the country um a bit of further one so yeah good save Rory um I uh you know it is a really uh challenging question but um what I'd say is um when you're trying to make change like in my experience when I was trying to make change when I was in New South Wales government myself um I found that you could put most people that you're trying to influence in one or two camps either they're technical but they're not very influential they're also influential but maybe not very technical and if you can try to find both happy days because then you can do great things but you are trying to influence both camps and trying to communicate on both levels to make that change happen I think we are going to have to build the right narrative that starts Landing or really connecting with both influential and Technical people if the message is just influential but it's fluff it doesn't go anywhere if it's technical but not compelling it's great you can be the smartest person in the room but you never make change because you can't influence anyone so we need the right narrative that that really cuts across both Technical and influential and yeah I'll be happy to road test it on you um James do you have a perspective on on that question as well yeah I think there are some good current examples where government particularly at state level are collaborating sharing best practice from from their various agencies or um you know um I'll call out the construction industry leadership Forum as an example you know some some really good joined up thinking from industry and and state government across various jurisdictions across the country so I think we can create the environment and the forums to have knowledge sharing conversations and learn from each other I'm firmly of a view none of us can crack it alone it requires Collective thinking to to move this forward and and Simon made the point you know we we did this with safety we we know we can do it we know we can you know some of this is about sort of democratizing the the knowledge and and setting it free and seeing how far we can move the industry forward so there are examples there are reference points out there I think we just need to go again excellent excellent so we've got 54 seconds left on our live stream um and there's two questions that we didn't get to that came in online one was about sort of how do we value data and then the second question was what sort of incentives um can we find from governments to help the industry move along this journey um which are really good Segways into how we wanted to close out this discussion today so we have given you no answers today around digital engineering that was never the purpose um the purpose of today was to bring the leaders together in in person and online to socialize a concept about what it is that we might want to do next and we've got a we've got a plan over the next three months to to really do three things so to look at what other sectors have done to crack some of these nuts to look at what's happening around the world um with with others in the the engineering sector and then to look at how we can bring in all the really good work that's going on in some of the iso committees around Bim and some of the JTC one committees that are going on at the moment and bring it all together through a process of convergence and to do it with all of you so thank you all for joining us today for those of you online enjoy your afternoons evenings and mornings for those of you in the room here we'd love to stay and have a chat and standards Australia very much looks forward to hosting this conversation over the next few months thank you all foreign [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] no I don't know what you've been told [Music] [Music] [Music] and I would rather fly so low the Snow White she did right and her life [Music]