Why we care about Engineering Information (and you should too)

“most organizations are more concerned with how best to control information than how best to share it.”
― General S McChrystal,

I was recently lucky enough to be asked to pitch engineering information management to a room full of laymen, including a member of the Royal family. Name dropping aside, this was actually a pretty tough gig, having your head in a subject it’s easy to forget that it can be hard to grasp.

To me it’s a really important subject but for most people it’s not a problem that even registers on their radar. It was hard to try and break it down to its simplest terms but to get the point across so I went with a simple analogy.

So…

Imagine buying a car and no one tells you how to put fuel in it?

You’d be pretty annoyed, right?

Now imagine you didn’t just buy a car, instead you spent billions buying, say an oil platform, railway or aircraft carrier. You’ve spent all that time and money on a shiny new project and you don’t know all that you need to know about it. That would probably be annoying enough but it gets worse.

What you don’t know isn’t easy things like how to put fuel in it but, really, really important things like how to maintain it, or where you find spares or worst of all safety information, how do you stop it going bang. We can call all this engineering information.

It’s not that no one knows this information, it’s out there somewhere, the person who designed it probably knows, so will the person who built it, it’s just that you, the person who owns the thing and uses it every day can’t find it.

Now you might be reading this thinking, “OK, but how big a problem is this really?

65% of megaprojects fail…

So, nearly 7 times out of 10 when we spend over a Billion, that’s with a “B” and nine zeros, delivering things like power plants and railways it goes wrong.

The PMI estimates that 56% of project value at risk can be attributed to poor communications. So, your project has spent all this money but they don’t talk enough.

This is a really scary stat, according to a leaked report on BP information problems caused or contributed to 15 per cent of incidents.

Last number, the smallest percentage but a pretty compelling one nevertheless, information handover is estimated to cost 4% of capital costs.

UK readers may remember the Buncefield disaster, where an oil storage terminal leak caused an explosion so large that it registered 2.4 on the Richter scale. 43 people were injured and the damage bill ran to around £700 million. The report is actually a pretty good read if that’s your thing but at its heart is a failure in information.

So, if poor information costs massive amounts of money, makes headline news and worst of all puts people’s lives at risk every day why doesn’t it get more love?

The numbers are genuinely vast, yet information remains an intangible thing, it’s difficult to attach a value to it despite the demonstrable monetary cost and the less obvious price that comes from the poor guy on site trying to make sense of it.

Globally, every year we spend trillions of dollars on new infrastructure and engineering projects and a similar huge amount on maintaining what we already have.

Poor information is a trillion-dollar problem

One thing that is often overlooked in all of these projects is the people. No matter how much these projects cost, how much data they produce or how big they are they are built by teams of people all working towards a common goal. The big issue is that these people can be all over the world, they are separated by time zones, organisations, culture and differing priorities. This is the silo effect taken to its extreme.

In spite of all this there is often extremely good knowledge pool between small teams within these projects, what is needed is a way to promote the level of knowledge that these teams have to an organisational one.

Imagine approaching any business and saying I can reduce your costs, decrease your risk and increase your safety? Pretty compelling, right?

So how do you start solving this? Well a good place is to worry about the people and capturing their knowledge in a way that can be shared. Letting them work without worrying that it might get lost when they’ve moved on? Recording and storing all the information in one place and make it easy to find again? Super simple stuff, that’s really the point though.

If you can use technology to allow the people who have this information to work together then you get better information out. This saves money and provides people with a safer working environment. This is what Kraken IM is all about.

Basically, when you’ve bought your new car we want to give you directions to the garage and show you where the filler cap is when you get there. Then when you drive off, we’ll remind you about your seat belt.