Example Property Essay

It is a truth ubiquitously attested-to from all engaging in the relevant research pertinent to the topic of this report that the construction industry is ripe for change.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that itis ready for revolution. Construction alone, seemingly, as opposed to nearlyany other industry that one could think of it the industrialized and digitizedWest, has been able to operate in a manner much less than conducive for contemporarybusiness. It is remarkable to consider how unlike other industriesconstruction really is in its current operations. Whether one considers anymajor industry today, they will all be unlike the construction industry in avery important way.

For example, consider general or specified retail, thedevelopment and manufacturing of computer hardware or software, the serviceindustries of law or medicine, or any other major industry, and one readilysees that they all frequently engage in innovation as it is proper to theirrespective industries and they certainly employ the important business tacticknown benchmarking. However, with regard to construction, the voices areunanimous in their consent that for some reason or another this particularindustry has been slow to innovate and aggressively improve itself in a worldwhere every other company or industry seems to do this very thing.

A Brief Survey of Recent Projects Designed to Address the Problem

It would seem that it is widely acknowledged these days that innovationin construction is long overdue. For a number of years Purdue University hasmaintained a website concerned with presenting concepts of EmergingConstruction Technologies. The Division of Construction Engineering andManagement of Purdue University, specifically, has been the collaborative tospearhead this project.Additionally, there is a Centre for Innovative and Collaborative Engineering atLoughborough University, which maintains a website for discussing issuespertinent to the construction industry in the U.K. specifically and also justgenerally.

The University recently launched a project to extend from April, 2004 to March,2007, which would explore the reasons why there is not a strong culture ofResearch, Innovation and Development (RID) within the constructions industry.There is also a Construction Innovation Forum (CIF), which annually tries toaward various individuals for excellent long-range achievements in innovationin construction.

It remains to be explored in the remainder of this essay just whichare the most important ways in which the industry of construction, and the relatedindustries of surveying and property, have not yet innovated, though perhapsthey should have. It is now appropriate to explore some concepts with which wewill be working throughout the essay, and these are the concepts ofinnovation and benchmarking.

Discussion of Innovation

In2003 Kristian Widén wrote an important article addressing the general issue ofinnovation within the construction industry and explored why the industry haddone so poorly in enacting innovation. It was necessary for Widén, as it ishere, to begin by discussing the nature of innovation. Widén offers severaldefinitions from a number of sources and notes at the end of the section ondefining innovation that the one thing all the various definitions have incommon is that in innovation something new is created, a product or a process,and put to use.There is also an attending reason why any company anywhere would ever attemptto be innovative - it would be for the good of the company. This perceived goodby the company will either be for an increase in competitiveness with rivalcompanies or for, what Widén calls a survival strategy. Accordingly, if there is noperceived reason why a given construction company should attempt to beinnovative, it is likely that no attempt at innovation will take place, giventhe fact that innovation always costs - and usually costs in terms of time andmoney.

Widénnotes that historically, with respect to other industries, it has been theclients themselves who imposed the necessity of proper motivation forindustries to innovate. If the client did not require it, in short, it wouldoften be the case that no innovation would take place. Again, there is a senseof necessity here. If the companies within the industry (e.g., in construction)are feeling no need to innovate from the client (i.e., there is nopressure exerted on the companies to innovate), then the status quo will bemaintained indefinitely. This is not because there is no innovation takingplace within the acts of the construction industry themselves.

Certainly, thevery nature of construction is such that it requires with each new project somemanner of innovation. There are invariably unaccounted-for problems andobstacles that arise with each new project, thereby requiring of the industryto be to some extent innovative in dealing with new and unexpected obstacles toproduction. Also, Widén says, there is a constant tendency within the industry towardinappropriate forms of co-operationon presumably all levels, not the least of which are the various time andspatial conflicts that arise with sub-contractors and the re-schedulinginvolved in the given project (again, when the unforeseen things occur). A further note that Widén makesis that whatever innovations do occur on an individual project, they are oftennot carried over into subsequent projects. The innovations of construction are,perhaps peculiarly, reversible, and not irreversible as in some otherindustries.

Benchmarking Within Industries and Its Practical Effects

One aspect of this reversibility of innovations is somewhatconnected to the concept of benchmarking in business. At this point, it isnecessary to consider just what benchmarking is, as it relates to industriesand capitalism. Benchmarking as a concept might be best thought of as thatvehicle that moves companies in the same industries forward and in roughly thesame technological directions. According to the American Heritage Dictionary ofthe English Language benchmarking as a transitive verb is defined in this way,To measure (a rival's product) according to specified standards in order tocompare it with and improve one's own product. This definition places theconcept of benchmarking squarely within the realm of capitalism as one company adaptsto the advancements/improvements that rival companies in the same industry aremaking while still more or less observing the norms of the industry in whichthe company finds itself.

That is, the extant standards within the industry inquestion are used to measure a rival's product and to compare it with one's owncurrent product and to make the recommended adjustments to one's own productsor service in order to increase competitiveness. Although the definition doesnot explicitly state this, it would seem to be implied by the norms ofcapitalistic economies as they are found today that benchmarking occurs in theprovision of products or services.

There are practical effects that occur in capitalist economies whenbenchmarking occurs, especially in the realm of goods which are offered to thepublic. Let us consider a brief example as regards cellular telephones.Originally, a cellular phone was much like a cordless phone from the home withthe exception of being able to have a much broader range of signal. Aparticular feature of both types of telephones at the time of the advent of thecellular phone was the Caller ID feature. It was possible in the late 1990'sto add this feature for an extra charge to one's service enabling an individualto see from what number the call was coming.

The first few large-scale cellularproviders began to make it an industry standard for cellular phone to have thisfeature and then the rest of the cellular providers followed suit, such thattoday it would be practically unheard of to begin a new cellular service with anyU.S. company and not expect the Caller ID feature to be standard withthe service.This was an example of benchmarking within a specific industry. An example inconstruction could be that universally nowadays in commercial constructionframing crews use nail guns with which to frame as opposed to the commonmethod of only twenty years ago (which was the simple hammering in of loosenails).

Today it would be practically unheard of for a commercial constructionframing crew to not use the nail guns in their framing. Benchmarkingbegins, then, as an attempt to be competitive in recognizing a smart innovationby one's rival companies, but it ends by being a type of standardization oftechnology where every company adopts certain innovations as part and parcel tothe industry in question. So, the levied charge against construction here isnot that sustained innovation does not take place in the industry. It is simplythat it is too infrequent and too slow to happen.

Attempts to Address the Lack of Innovation in Construction et al

Recentefforts to address the problems seemingly inherent in today's constructionindustry have focused on a number of lines. First, there are attempts that takeinto account the fact that there is a lack of specificity and/or goodcommunication involved in client/contractor projects. Second, there have beenrecent attempts at reworking the construction at a fundamental level. One suchof these attempts has been the recent Design-Build phenomenon (which alsofalls into the first category mentioned here too). Another has been aconsideration of Public/Private projects and there merits.

AuthorKristian Widén indicated that two solutions to the current crisis in theindustry would center around more of a specificity and delineating of allexpectations from the client/owner toward the contractor(s). Additionally,Widén indicated that long-lasting communication lines need to be established.Rather than the head of a contractor (or crew) simply popping in, as it were,to the jobsites on rare occasion there should be much more of a long-termrapport established among all major individuals involved in a given project. AsEdward Fisk and Wayne Reynolds concur, they write that the partnering conceptneeds to be revamped today as a means of creating a general environs whereinall parties would work together toward the common goal of efficient and goodcompletion of the project. Partnering is not a contract, but a recognitionthat every contract includes an implied covenant of good faith. While thecontract establishes the legal relationships, the Partnering process isdesigned to establish working relationships among the parties through amutually developed, formal strategy of commitment and communication.

So, in this concept there is embedded several important ideasaddressing current concerns raised by Widén et al. First, there is arecognition of this good faith relationship and it is only as strong as eachparty's commitment to it. It is mutually developed, the authors say. Itis interesting to note that though Fisk and Reynolds are very quick to pointout that it is not a contract nor meant to replace the all-importance of thecontract, nevertheless this partnering has a strategy which is formal. Andagain, it necessarily involves commitment and communication of all germaneparties.

This suggestion would seem to be a much improved model today which isvery casual among all parties involved (which could include client, generalcontractor, various sub-contractors, various crew leaders, and assistants toall of these individuals). There seem to be far too many parties involved in analready complicated process to have it be any other way than the modelsuggested by Fisk and Reynolds. Construction, surveying and property areoverrun with a sense of the casual in the various professional relations amongthe parties. The fact that many aspects of the overall process like changeorders or work to be done and the merely oral contracts existing betweensub-contractors and their crews are enough to establish the casual nature ofmuch of the overall construction process.

The Design-Build phenomenon of recent years has been an attempt atsolving some of the systemic problems in the construction process and hassimultaneously offered itself as a means of achieving innovation in theindustry.The solution to some of the communication problems associated with contemporaryconstruction is attempted to be solved by the Design-Build approach byeliminating, not middle men, but lines of separation between many of the keyplayers. For example, a typical Design-Build firm can have altogether under oneroof and working for the same company the contractor, engineer, and architect effectively providing anowner with a one-stop point of contact to design and build a proposedconstruction project.This one-stop place necessarily increases efficiency and the speed at which aproject may be completed, especially when all of these individuals are trulyunder one roof (i.e., they are all employees or closely connected with theconstruction firm, rather than merely being distant consultants).

However, a weakness of the Design-Build approach has been seen inits difficulty, at times, in dealing with governmental clients. Jeffrey Beardet al. note just such a case having to do with legalities burdening the processof pay to Design-Build firms.For at least this reason, the establishment of attempts by the U.S. government,to use an example, have been offered as private/public efforts at spearheadingthe way into the future of home and commercial building. One such program,which was instrumental in the publication of the two pieces of research by theU.S. Department of Housing listed in the bibliography for this report, is knownby the acronym PATH (Partnership for Advanced Technology in Housing). It isnoted explicitly in the report Commercialization of Innovations: LessonsLearned that public and private must together share the burden of the riskof innovation if the building sectors of industry are to avoid the dampeningeffects of litigation.

Concluding Thoughts

Inwhatever ways private industry is unable, on its own (despite the recent nobleattempts of Design-Build, etc.) to follow the Commercialization ofInnovations report's objectives, it is to be hoped that a union ofprivate/public building schemes will be able to, as the report states,expedite the commercialization of innovation. It does seem clear that majorattempts at bringing to the construction industry (and all closely relatedindustries) long-lasting innovation is long overdue. In fact, as it wasalluded-to earlier in this paper, what is needed is an entire culture thatsupports the advocacy and actual implementation of innovation. With any fortuneand hard-work (both of which entailing implementation) of all or some of therecent initiatives and advisements indicated in this report, it seems that theconstruction industry might at long last engage in genuine aspects ofcompetitive business, including long-term benchmarking and an overall cultureof innovation.