Starting Your Digital Transformation Journey

MARIN PASTAR: Welcome to Autodesk University 2021 and my presentation about Starting Your Digital Transformation Journey. My name is Marin Pastar. I'm a licensed architect working out of St. Louis. I've been in the industry for about 20 years. And I work as a Global Technology Leader for Vertical Information Modeling at Jacobs.

Jacobs is a global organization of about 55,000 people. We provide various types of solutions for our clients across the built environment, transportation, water, environmental solutions, health and finance facilities, digital across markets. And we're able to do that by simply challenging state and reinventing tomorrow.

So quick agenda about what we're going to be talking about today here. We're going to keep it fairly simple and fairly relaxed. We're going to talk about defining the problems and some of the common industry challenges we're trying to solve. We're going to talk about developing solutions and the change management process that's involved with that overall process. We're going to talk about leveraging the data that we have and the kind of optimized state of what we're trying to achieve.

But before we even get started with some of the industry challenges I want to go back and provide a little bit of a background as to why we need the digital transformation to begin with. So, one of the biggest challenges today is this digital disruption that's happening all the way around. This digital disruption is a change that occurs when new digital technologies and business models affect the value proposition of existing goods and services.

50% of business leaders said they can already identify digital disruption occurring in their industry. And 70% of business leaders said they anticipate it will impact their industry in the near future. That data actually is a couple of years old. But it is still very valid to today's date. What I'm trying to make here is digital instruction doesn't need to be a negative thing. It has such a negative connotation to it.

But it literally enabled companies like Amazon, the world's most valuable retailer that owns almost no inventory. It enabled companies like Airbnb, the accommodation provider-- well, it's not just an accommodation provider-- that owns no real estate. Facebook the world's largest media company that produces no content. And largest taxi company in the world, Uber, that owns almost no vehicles.

Again they leverage this digital disruption process and change to their benefit and they're reaping the benefits of it. And then creating what they do. Now another statistic again, four out of 10 market leaders will be displaced in the next three years with digital disruption. Again, a bit of information that's a couple of years old. But I think it's still very valid.

These companies are going to be the companies that do not embrace digital disruption, companies that are fairly complacent with what they do, how they do it, and companies that are resistant to change. And they are going to be displaced by companies that do embrace digital disruption, companies like Google, like Apple, like Tesla, like Netflix, like Amazon, like Microsoft. And even those companies that I just mentioned right now, if they don't stay on top of their game, if they don't embrace digital disruption, if they become complacent with how they do things today, they may find themselves amongst those four companies that are going to be displaced by others that do.

So again, back to the challenges. Back to defining the problems. We can't really start solving any problem until we understand what the problem is to begin with. So some of the problems that are currently affecting our industry and challenges, we have a state of very disjointed design and construction process. The very lack of design, constructability in overall. And this oftentimes leads to project delays and change orders.

Another challenge that's very prevalent in our industry is very slow project delivery and lack of prefabrication. And again, I know I generalize here. There's a lot of companies that do a great job with super fast track projects. But again, oftentimes there not and we find ourselves a very slow project delivery and lack of prefabrication. This leads to duplicated work and errors and work redo.

We have a big problem of decreased quality, lack of coordination for all the deliverables, which leads to ultimately the delayed handover and very unusable deliverables at the end of the day. We have a big problem of lack of overall data strategy for organizations, which doesn't give them any ability to provide any data informed decisions. And ultimately there's a big challenge of the rising cost of design construction operations, which leads to the increased total cost of ownership.

Now, the big part about the total cost of ownership. The total cost of ownership, 75% of the total cost of ownership is actually after design and construction. And our ability to help our clients decrease the total cost of ownership drastically drops throughout design and construction phase. So what this tells us is we have a responsibility. We have an active duty to provide our owners, our clients, much more out of the design and construction process than just a set of plans and the keys to the built environment we provided them with.

We have this ability to help them and we absolutely should. Now if you think about, again, those companies that do embrace the new way of doing things you know, why are they successful? And a little while ago when I was doing my research for this, you know, I went to Apple's website and looked about the iPhone.

And they say about the [INAUDIBLE] thing about the iPhone. Again I'm a Samsung user. So I'm not an iPhone user, not an endorsement for Apple. But just look at the process of why they are so successful. Key words in their verbiage that said hardware and software are designed together. The teams collaborate in doing so.

This seems to be an obvious way to work. Again, if it works for Apple why doesn't it work for our industry. Why shouldn't we think and embrace this type of way of working together towards a common goal?

You know, years back, Steve Jobs, he didn't intend to create a better phone. That wasn't his goal. His goal was to create a platform to leverage his digital disruption. His platform just so happens can make phone calls and many other things.

Elon Musk, you know, he didn't come out to say, hey, I'm going to make a better car. He leveraged his digital disruption. He created a platform. Just so happens you can drive this platform or it can drive you. They built an environment, the buildings, the facilities around us.

Again, we shouldn't be just looking after how can we build a better building, right? Buildings, this is so much, much more opportunity in this platform than just cars and phones. Again, the facilities around us, these are building blocks of the cities. If we were really creating a platform for social interaction and the built environment around us, and the opportunity is massive if we know exactly what to look for.

But in order to achieve that in order to create that platform we do understand kind of the current state. Where are you right now at that state? What is your current benchmark? What are your goals? What are you trying to achieve?

What are you trying to do. Maybe develop a strategy of how to do that. You need to answer those questions, who's going to lead me there? What do I need to do? When do we need to do it? How are we going to do it?

And most importantly, the biggest question we need to answer is the question why. And the answer to question, why is what keeps your doors open. This is what the most critical part of information that we need to answer that will drive everything downstream from that. Why do you do what you do?

And when we answer those questions, we're literally looking at a very, very owner centric kind of circle of solutions with a goal of providing and doing more work, providing better work with better quality and using less resources and in less time with less waste. For one of the clients I work with, again we looked at their operational state of how they delivered their built environment around them.

And very quickly we came to a realization that they had kind of a siloed approach of what they were doing between their real estate, technology services, PD&C, facility management, [INAUDIBLE]. This is a health care facility, health care operator. And again, they all worked with their different databases, different systems, everybody thought they were doing a great job within their own department.

But it was very, very disjointed. And the big problem was our industry of design, construction, handover operations, us being so disjointed, we were just feeding this joint information into these silos and it facilitated the creation of the silos. So again, we asked the big question, what if we can optimize?

Well, we can create a design and construction process that's focused on your hand over of your facilities and our operations. Ask the right questions of what you need at the very end. What if you again, in order to facilitate that, they needed to come together into a unified leadership with the right stakeholders at the table to be able to accept the new way of doing things.

We helped them normalize all their data and databases. And we created it and help them understand what type of systems they can use in their common data environment to be able to reap the benefits of kind of this optimized state they find themselves into. So the big part of the reason why I'm mentioning this is what we really need to focus on in this order is first of all, focus on the standard.

Focus on the processes of how you do things. Focus on the workflows or exactly how you get it done. Focus on the roles and responsibilities, governments, who's going to be in charge of all this?

And focus on the tools and systems, the common data environments. And as we're going through and trying to understand how to best optimize this entire process and everything you do, we're looking for optimization opportunities for standardization and how to fill those gaps along the way. So next phase is we're going to talk about how to develop these solutions and help implement them.

So as we go through the understanding of how do you develop solutions, I like asking a question you know, what if you could do a lot of these different goals that you have? First of all, what if you could help to define the problem? What if you could truly understand what it is that you're trying to do.

What if you could truly understand the deliverables, the data standards, and the type of information you need and the type of deliverable you need at which stage. What if you could predefine and optimize on how to connect the dots between the design, construction, operations, maintenance, manufacturing, everything that's pertinent to your type of business.

What if you could streamline your operations and look at a holistic way of everything you do and streamline that process rather than going through one silo to another, which streamlines your operations and operations statements? What if you could optimize your cost and time, improve your deliverable speed, improve your speed to market, and really look at ways to optimize your capital expenses? What if you could enable digital twins?

What if you could understand what digital twins are, what you can use them for, and how can they help you do your business? What if you could leverage that big data that you received at the very back end, which if you define what it is and how it can help your bottom line. The big answer to the question is you absolutely can do all those things.

But it comes with a price. You need to challenge how you do things today. You need not be afraid to challenge everything you do and how you do it. And you need to look into opportunities to reinvent what you do.

And that is not an easy thing to do. Change is very scary to a lot of organizations. But luckily there's a formula for change. In order for change to happen, there needs to be several different factors present. First of all, there needs to be a dissatisfaction with how things are right now.

Secondly, there needs to be a clear vision of the art of the possible, right? What is possible out There and there needs to be a very clear definition of the first concrete steps, those short term, quick wins, how you get there and what you need to do to achieve that change.

If the product of all three of those main factors is greater than the resistance to change, you have a very good environment to be successful and change how you do things. Now, it's not always easy to get to this level. If you're going to be achieving that change, you need to understand what you're changing from and what you're changing to.

And if you try to jump through three different steps of change very quickly, the likelihood is it's not going to be very successful. You need to understand your maturity level of where you are right now and what is the appropriate next step for where you need to go. So again, very quick questions to ask.

And there's a lot of different types of digital maturity assessments we can go through. But a very basic, are you still trying to gather information about what happened. Why did it happen, kind of this reactive stage of gathering information, kind of this hindsight, if you will.

Are you in the stage of predicting and prescribing what will happen or even how can you control what happens, in this optimization and insight stage? Or are you already in the cognitive analytics of basically making it all the right decisions based on all the data that you have, right? Will be achieving this foresight, this transformation process.

Note that along this stage, the closer you get, the higher the maturity level, the maturity levels your complexity of solutions and process needs will greatly increase. And you need a lot more resources to manage this high complexity. But also to offset the complexity and resources, you're driving a lot more value, the more digitally mature you are.

But it's super important to understand what is your starting point? Where are you starting from? Because this change implementation process, I mean, it's very systemic. It seems very simple. But it's fairly complicated to implement, right?

First you need to discover the current way of how you're currently doing it, not changing it, not challenging it yet, just discovery. Again, understanding where you currently are and how you do it. Brainstorming about better ways to get things done, right? This is where you're challenging that status quo.

Then you go into the proposal stage. You're proposing the different product solutions to optimize how you do things right now. Then you're going into execution. You're dedicating some big funds and you're developing those proposed solutions, workflow standards, whatever it is that it's pertinent to the way you do things.

Then you're going through implementation, and most importantly the big education process, the operational organizational and change management that will affect everybody in the organization more than likely. And then you evaluate my original findings. I expected this to happen. Is it happening?

Am I achieving those goals that I set up early on? And the likelihood is the answer is going to be yes, to an extent. But we didn't get all the way there, which is perfectly fine. Because then you iterate. You go back to the beginning and you do it over again. You take that as your current state and you keep that improvement process.

But the customer adoption process is very, very challenging, like I said. You need to make sure that the right stakeholders are involved. And these are the kind of drivers, the stakeholders, a big awareness campaign of what you're trying to do. Implementation campaign, measuring the success and incentivizing and supporting.

And a big part in every single one of these, I'll call them buckets of efforts, is developing a playbook. Playbook serve to understand how you do things and have a clear plan and a strategy to do something. So for example for the awareness campaign, you can have a product awareness playbook for what you're trying to achieve if you're developing your product or process, your billing report and enabling some material development to educate everybody about what you're doing.

You're setting up those KPIs and measuring, capturing that information of how you're performing. And then you're maintaining and supporting. And again every single one of those blocks is broken down further into the actual tasks of height. It's a very agile process of development and implementation of digital transformation.

So stepping back kind of a higher level of this overall digital transformation journey, you have got to go through all of the curves and bands of digital transformation. You've got to first of all establish that clear business case, that why and driver. What are you trying to achieve?

You've got to define those clear deliverables along the way. What are you trying to gather? What will help you get there? You got to define insights you've got to create those metrics of key performance indicators, what you need to measure to be successful to meet the stakeholder expectations,

And you've got to choose the right technology stack, right? You got to understand which platforms, tools, accommodate environments you're going to use in order to achieve what you need to do. Absolutely important is to identify those champions that will help you get there along the way and then connect your data and use it.

Once you have information about how you're performing, use it to your advantage. Use it to drive adoption. Manage that change to your benefit. Then at the very end is where you can start developing and deploying those solutions, your digital twins.

Again, I get asked all the time can we have a digital twin, clients asking you know, let's have a solution. Let's have a digital twin of this. That's not the right stage. Everybody wants this instant solution, but it's going to fail unless we have all these other components in place and fully understood and deployed before we are ready and digitally mature to accept solutions.

And this is the biggest kind of the pitfall of this entire process. If we start at the end, and if we start by deploying solutions without truly understanding everything across, the likelihood is, and this is what I advise my clients and my owners, you're going to spend a lot of time and money.

And ultimately if everything is not in the right place, you're not going to get any benefit out of it. It's going to be a big failure. So I strongly advise trying to kind of go for the shiny products, if you will. Go for the digital twins. You have got to understand the strategy of why you need it and how to get there and who's going to lead you before you're truly ready to reap the benefits of the end game.

Once you finally do go through the entire process, you can start thinking about putting your data to use and reaping the benefits. And again, going through the process again, understanding where you are and how can you get even more out of it. Once we truly have that platform, the single source of true, kind of the common data environment of everything that will enable everything you do, excuse me, there are a lot of different opportunities to use that information and that data.

If your solution is a digital representation of the physical world around you, you have opportunities to create different types of event simulation benefits. You can understand what's going to happen to your environment and how you can leverage it to your benefit. Understand it in the low risk environment and simulate things.

You can use it to provide digital access to all that adds built environment data, to any asset information, to anything you really need. As long as you have the clear definition of what your common data environment is making sure everything is in the right place, and it's only in one place and in providing streamlined access to it.

We spent so much time and effort trying to locate data, simply solving that problem for some clients yields tremendous operational efficiencies. Again, some of the use cases may be operations and maintenance, facilitating a very intuitive work order and proactive maintenance process, to where you have total control of your enterprise assets.

And our use case may be that, and we talked about that prescriptive and cognitive analytics. Again, once we have all the information in the right place, we can track the performance and we can make those right decisions backed by the data that we have. And we can collect all the sensor information from the environment around us.

And again, I can't be very specific here, because we don't have a client that we're talking about here. These are all the options. But the specific use cases depend on what you're trying to get out of it and what you need. But again monitoring real time performance, dashboarding and being able to provide input based on outputs based on the inputs.

Providing many different end user type applications. Again, there's so many different opportunities here to leverage it. Are you a hospital system? Are you a university? Are you a federal building? Are you a port of entry?

What drives your business? Are you an airport? There's so many different use cases and many different users, passengers, students, facility managers, real estate operators. Again, there's so many different abilities to tap into the same environment, same data, and create different end user applications in the same common data environment.

If you really need understanding of where all your assets are, provide geospatially driven wayfinding towards each and every asset that you maintain, that may be the driver of your operational efficiency. And you can certainly achieve that again, once you have a platform in front of you.

And again, there's many different ways to augment what you do create many different augmented reality patent applications to streamline what we do. Perfect example, we just watched the Olympics not that long ago and you notice the entire Olympic Village was sort of a digital twin.

We were the end users. We were the people watching at home. And you had a great idea of all these facilities, maps, locations, you know, all the venues. It increased and improved our viewing ability and engagement into that process. Our end user experience was much enriched by the fact that they had that kind of accommodated data environment, if you will. And they presented it to us in a very visually pleasing way.

again hopefully I'm kind of driving the notion here that there are many, many opportunities and many applications. But all depend on what you're trying to get out of it. One of the clients really wanted to create and connect multiple different data sources into a single, user friendly geodatabase that would help them track all their assets.

So for this lines we connected all of the accurate as geometric 3D models. We tied them together with all the AEC data, all the COBie asset information that we gather along design and construction, and all the design and construction information, all the metals, all the R5 logs, all the operations and maintenance materials, any of the handover materials. And we connected it together with their operations and maintenance, CMMS platform, the maximum driven platform.

Again, together each and every one of these locations has in hosts some sort of information. But together they're federated into a single user experience, into single common data environment to make sure that everything is very clear of where the source of truth is, how you access it, and making sure it's all connected together. And creating again, a platform for future implementations, future use cases, connecting it to building automation systems, IoT sensors.

And even though that's not a goal right now, it certainly becomes an opportunity and ability once you have this platform a basic platform of information. One of the clients really wanted to have total control of all the real time performance data from all their assets. So again we enrich their entire environment with a lot of different sensors.

And we created the ability for them to have a control center to track all the real time performance of assets. And of course, we set up a lot of different rules, you know the water scenarios. If anything goes out of balance, it's very connected of how it almost maintains itself.

This was very, very important to them. And again by understanding what they're trying to achieve, their asset livestock, supply chain, life extension, cybersecurity, operations, maintenance, energy planning, resource utilization, asset uptime. These were the KPIs that were important to them to begin with. So again, you start with understanding, what are your business drivers?

And then you create a solution, you manage a solution in this case, to be able to achieve those goals, so clear vision of what you need to do that started with a kind of a very holistic enterprise asset management and strategy development.

But this is not just our industry. Again, there are many different applications, many different industries out there that can benefit from this. One of our clients achieved 98% availability through their operational efficiency. So very much improvement availability and lowering their operational cost expenses.

More clients are consolidating redundant capabilities, driving increased utilization of facilities resulting in absolutely massive financial savings. Again, these were the primary drivers that mattered to them. It's all about what makes sense for your organization. You know, driving operational efficiency, increasing capacity in this case by 20%, tremendous savings in capital expenses and operational expenses.

My point is this, again, I keep reiterating that point. We have a massive opportunity to leverage information and leverage better processes to drive these operational efficiencies. But they're not available to anybody unless we challenge what we do today.

And if we go kind of outside our little silo of what we do, we need to look holistically and look for opportunities to help ourselves, opportunities to help our clients, and literally look for those opportunities and responsibility that we have to literally lead the way through this entire process.

And it's no longer acceptable to just do what we're contractually obligated to do and just do our job and get out, right? If we understand what the opportunities are, we can truly go outside the box and really help our clients to enable their beyond. That's our responsibility. That's our charge.

And that's what we're striving towards is making sure that we leverage all the different disruptors and all different technologies and all the different capabilities to connect all the information that we have and create a better optimized environment for everybody that's a user. With that, I will thank you for your time. And I am very looking forward to the live discussion. Thank you very much.