Return to National Alliance home page
1/10/03
APPROACHING CONVERGENCE
The Need for Coordinated Action to Strengthen
Public Safety and Economic Competitiveness
Tom Joachim, President & Robert Wible, Executive Director
National Conference of States on Building Codes and Standards
CONVERGENCE – The act, condition, quality of approaching the same point from different directions – tending toward a meeting or intersection. (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary)
Over the past 15 years, a diverse array of national initiatives have been launched by forward thinking individuals and organizations to help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our nation’s building design, construction, regulation, and operations processes. This past year it has become apparent to us that several of these initiatives are beginning to converge. This paper, by one of the organizations participating in a number of those initiatives, lays out the evolution of that process and invites public and private sector support for coordinated action among those initiatives to achieve the common goals of enhanced public safety and the economic competitiveness of this nation.
THE CRITICAL ROLE OF OUR CONSTRUCTION AND BUILDINGS INDUSTRY IN A TIME OF NATIONAL NEED
Our nation’s building construction industry is a $1.1 trillion dollar a year domestic industry. It represents over 12% of our gross domestic product and provides the infrastructure within which most of our national wealth is either generated or housed and in which all Americans live, work and play. Its health either stimulates or hinders economic growth; the economic competitiveness of our cities, states, regions, and nation in the global economy; and the health, welfare and life safety of our citizens.
Also, because of its vital importance in the physical safety of our people and the economic vitality of our nation, in the wake of 9-11, our buildings have become the targets of terrorists.
Despite the pivotal role that our construction and buildings industry plays in our nation, it remains one of the most fragmented, least efficient, and poorly understood segments of our economy. Over 44,000 jurisdictions at the state and local government regulate building design, construction and renovation through a confusing, diverse, and, at times, conflicting array of codes, standards, rules, regulations, and procedures. Economies of scale, reduced life cycle costs, enhanced operating efficiencies achieved by other industries, such as automobiles and aircraft, through the effective application of information technology to the design, construction and operation of such products, have not been achieved in the U. S. construction industry.
DIVERSE APPROACHES
Over the past three decades, different segments of the construction community, from federal agencies and research labs and state governments to alliances of building owners and construction firms, have undertaken initiatives to improve efficiency within their respective areas of concern in the building design, construction, regulation, and operation processes.
Within the private sector, numerous trade associations and professional societies pursued programs designed to improve regulatory or construction practices. The Building Roundtable in New York City and later the Construction Industry Institute (CII) have brought together some of the nation’s largest firms to address the problem of construction inefficiencies, while codes and standards bodies have looked at ways to work with federal, state, and local governments to adopt and administer more uniform construction codes and standards.
At the federal level, forces, such as the need for greater energy efficiency in buildings, better preparedness and response to natural disasters, access for the disabled, affordable housing and the economic competitiveness of our nation in the global market place, have caused Congress and the White House to transform the missions and programs of a number of federal agencies. These included: the Department of Energy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the Architectural Transportation and Barriers Compliance Board, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture's Rural Housing Service, and the National Bureau of Standards, which in 1992 became the National Institute for Standards and Technology.
In addition, in the 1990’s the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Technology and its Construction and Buildings Subcommittee began a concerted effort to better coordinate across the federal level of government construction and building research and development activities and explore ways to partner with state and local governments to enhance the efficiency of the construction industry as well. During the 1990’s market forces were making elected officials at the state and local level more aware of the costs to them as purchasers and operators of buildings caused by countless regulatory and construction inefficiencies.
With federal support or funding and contributions from public and private sector organizations by the late 1990’s a number of programs or initiatives were launched to address segments of the construction inefficiency problem facing the nation. These included: the work of the National Institute of Building Sciences on greater use of information technology among federal construction agencies and in building operations, the creation of FIATECH (Fully Integrated Automated TECHnology), the Civil Engineering Research Foundation (CERF), and American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) efforts to enhance greater efficiencies in construction practices, and the work of the National Conference of States on Building Codes and Standards and its 55 national partners in the Streamlining the Nation’s Building Regulatory Process initiative.
FORCES ACCELERATING CHANGE - E-governance and Challenges of Economic Competitiveness
In the late 1990’s advances in the application and use of information technology to increase operating efficiencies across the private sector increased the pressure upon all levels of government, federal, state, and local to reassess their operations.
In response to these challenges, while some large firms successfully applied CAD operations and fully integrated design techniques to radically reduce the time it took them to design and build new facilities, federal, state, and local governments hired chief information officers and initiated restructuring of their bureaucracies to streamline government - making it more effective and efficient and responsive to change. Former Chairman of the National Governors Association and current Utah Governor Michael Leavitt, best summed up the challenge facing government efficiency by noting that his industries were telling him that in the global economy: "If we miss a single product cycle we are dead." State governments now had to use I.T. to improve the efficiency of their operations including regulatory oversight.
In response to these market forces, jurisdictions in Silicon Valley California and elsewhere in the nation began to reorganize themselves to effectively use information technology to streamline their building regulatory processes reducing regulatory overlap and duplication and unnecessary delays in the permitting, plans review, and inspection processes. Those efforts demonstrated the dramatic savings (up to 60% of previous regulatory costs) that regulatory reform could provide the construction industry.
By early 2001, over a half dozen national initiatives were underway in the public and private sector to apply information technology to the building design, construction, regulation, and operation processes to improve efficiency in the nation’s construction and buildings industry. These included the following:
While the parties involved in these initiatives often overlapped and certainly were aware of each others efforts, they all were progressing along relatively diverse paths, sometimes even competing for the same limited public and private sector resources of time, talent and funding.
Then terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
9-11 - PUBLIC SAFETY & COMPETITIVENESS AS CATALYSTS FOR CONVERGENCE
The events of September 11, 2001, resulted in our President placing our nation on a war footing to prevent, protect, and mitigate the loss of life and property from future terrorists attacks. That action added a new urgency to the need to enhance both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the design, construction, regulation, and operation of the targets of terrorism - our buildings and critical infrastructure that shelter our people and make our economy run.
In addition to enhanced safety, 9-11 challenged our nation to make changes in our economy to increase its effectiveness and efficiency and offset the costs of enhanced homeland security.
In 9-11’s wake, the previously listed national initiatives to improve various aspects of the construction and buildings industry in this nation turned their attention towards actions which their efforts could take to enhance our homeland security and the economic viability. Numerous conference calls and meetings were held and offers made by these initiatives to the White House to provide support for the war on terrorism.
In addition, in late 2001/early 2002 The Infrastructure Security Partnership (TISP) was established providing another national initiative where the need for changes in the construction and buildings industry is being discussed. Now comprised of over 150 national organizations, federal agencies, universities, TISP shares membership among all of the above initiatives and provides a venue for coordination of public and private sector resources in support of national (state and local) homeland security efforts.
This past summer and fall NCSBCS participated in a number of events that were sponsored or cosponsored by members of the seven above national initiatives and saw that these efforts were beginning to converge. Among those sessions attended by NCSBCS were:
TOWARDS A SHARED VISION FOR ENHANCED PUBLIC SAFETY AND ECONOMIC COMPETITIVENESS
Each of the above sessions generated very similar recommendations regarding homeland security and the built environment. These included the need for coordinated public and private sector action to make changes in the construction industry. From the mutual co-sponsorship and participation by initiative members in these events, it appears to NCSBCS and others that a common or shared vision for the future of the nation’s construction and buildings industry may be possible to emerge. A central element of that vision would be the effective use of interoperable information technology to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the design, construction, regulation, and operation of buildings - enhancing both public safety and homeland security and our economic vitality and international economic competitiveness.
THE WORK AHEAD – A CALL FOR A COORDINATED RESPONSE
In meetings held on December 16, 2002, and January 6, 2003, in Washington, D.C., officials from several of the organizations (NIST, NIBS, NCSBCS, FIATECH) participating collectively in several of these national initiatives discussed the need for a formal dialogue among these efforts. That dialogue would consider the feasibility of taking a coordinated and holistic approach towards the future direction and support of these initiatives to enhance the efficiency of the nation’s building design, construction, regulation, and operations process by streamlining and making greater use of information technology. A follow-up meeting with the leaders of other initiatives is planned by this group for February 2003.
As one of the participants in these meetings and as secretariat to the National Alliance on Building Regulatory Reform in the Digital Age, NCSBCS is posting this article on its website to invite comment from both the public and private sectors of our nation’s construction and I.T. communities and elected officials regarding the need for these and other national initiatives to come together to undertake a coordinated approach towards making needed changes in our construction and buildings process. In addition, the Conference seeks input on any other national or regional initiatives that should be included in this effort.
Please provide your input to us by contacting the Executive Director of NCSBCS by email at rwible@ncsbcs.org or call at 703-481-2035 with your comments.