DFI Magazine May/June 2020 - 105

* SPE

FUTURE
TRENDS

AL I SSU

CIA

UE

CI

L ISS

GUEST

EDITORIAL

The Tech Future Is Here

What if someone
told you that the
way many of us are
doing business today costs your
organization money, time and quality? That
your organization is rapidly developing a
competitive disadvantage, and that the
owner is going to ask for things you might
not be able to provide?
Many of us have seen fancy-looking
BIM (Building Information Modeling), GIS
(Geographic Information System) and
other computer-based models and have
heard all the promises on how they will
improve product quality and save money.
They look great in a presentation, you might
think, but using these tools out on an active
construction project seems like too big a leap.
These "computer people" are telling us we are
doing it wrong, when we have successfully built
projects together for many decades. So why
change, you wonder.

E * SPE

Construction Technology Changes
The reason, of course, is that
our industry has changed, and
is rapidly changing even more.
We have owners asking for a
level of data that they never
would have asked for 15 years
ago. Computer technologies
have also made incredible
leaps over the last 50 years,
and that affects everything.
The computer on Apollo 11
had 4 KB of random access
memory (RAM). The phone
you carry in your pocket likely
has at least 4 GB of RAM. That's
a million times more than we had in 1969.
As technologies have improved, data is
starting to become part of our contracts
and a key deliverable to clients along with
what is being built.
Storage has grown exponentially as
well. When computers started out with
floppies, they had 80 KB of formatted
storage and were expensive. Today, you can
buy a 4 TB hard drive with about 12.5 million

times more storage for under
$100. We can process and store
data at a rate that would have
been inconceivable a few decades
ago, but the rest of our processes
have not quite caught up.
But that's "just computers," you
might think. A drill rig is still a drill
rig. Is it really, though? While
some things have stayed the same,
it's now common to have computer data gathering, and sometimes computer control, elements
on our rigs. Automated grout
monitoring has been around for
decades, and it often generates
data on a 2-second frequency,
recording depth, pressures and
flow rates that we use during
grouting to make real-time decisions. Just
for a grouting project, this can produce an
incredible amount of data: in 2007, the
Center Hill Dam grouting project near
Nashville, Tennessee, generated data from
more than 10,000 unique grout
stages (depths). Ten years later,
Mosul Dam in Iraq generated
more than 95,000 grouting
records. You can't successfully
manage that amount of data
by hand.
We install deep foundations,
grouting holes and seepage
cutoff walls deeper and with
more precision than ever before.
We have measurements occurring while drilling, inclinometers on our tools, automated
instrumentation that's installed
in the ground reacting to our construction
activities, measurement devices to figure out
precisely where deep foundations are in the
subsurface, digital photos, optical
televiewers, surveys, point clouds - and
the list keeps going. Now, what do you do
when the owner needs to see some of that
data? When the owner asks to see that data
daily to assess the safety of their project
while you are building in the subsurface?

We have owners

asking for a

level of data

that they never

would have

asked for 15

years ago.

Vanessa C. Bateman
Community of Practice Leader,
Geotechnical, Geology and
Materials, U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers

... the hard part is not producing

great graphics, or fancy models. It is

going through our own processes and

organizing ourselves so that fancy

outputs are meaningful.
Data Management by Specialists
The almost unimaginable quantity of data
that is being generated is difficult for one or
even a small team of people to review
unaided. The abundant computergenerated data needs to be understood,
synthesized and turned into information
that we can use to make decisions quickly
during construction. It may be "big data" or
just "big enough data," but we can't manage
all this data with Excel spreadsheets and
methods from even just a few years ago. We
certainly can't manage it all on paper.
Pen and paper are great; spreadsheets
have their uses. But to benefit from the data
visualizations being shared by Internet and
at conferences, we need a little bit of
infrastructure: a database and a plan. It
turns out the hard part is not producing
great graphics, or fancy models. It is going
through our own processes and organizing
ourselves so that fancy outputs are
meaningful. This takes work on the part of
the contractor and the owner, and it
involves adding someone to our team: a
data specialist (or data manager) whose job
is making sure that we are collecting the
right data at the right time, and that it gets to
the right people. Getting the data organized
and compiled is 90 percent of the problem.
DEEP FOUNDATIONS * MAY/JUNE 2020 * 105
DFI Magazine May/June 2020

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