TECHNICAL | DATA & DIGITAL
IS BENCHMARKING THE ANSWER?
Martin Paver is immersed in project data and its challenges. He heads Projecting Success, a training and advocacy body, focused on ‘Transforming Project Delivery’ through accelerating the construction industry’s engagement with data analytics. A core issue, he contends in the growing era of digital construction, is the debate needed over data gathering, ownership and governance. For T&T, he discusses the approach for data to be an accessible, shared and powerful resource to leverage benefits in project by considering the merits of data trusts
In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, data has become an invaluable asset. Organisations across various sectors are constantly seeking ways to extract meaningful insights and unlock the full potential of their data. But who owns the data? Who has rights to access it? Does it give one party a commercial edge over another? If the data has been created as part of a public project, should that data be available to be leveraged as a public good? Let me start with data ownership. In UK law, data is
not a property, cannot be stolen and data is not subject to a common law lien. Data cannot be owned. If it can be protected, what action could be taken if I add noise to the data and multiply each data point by a value, where only I have the key? Or what if I train my model on ‘your data’ and my model becomes more intelligent. In theory, I could harvest data from wherever I can get it from and use it to optimise my approach to tunnelling. There are means of protecting the data such as non- disclosure agreements, but data ownership is a topic fraught with legal complexity. A way of avoiding it is to ensure that data is locked
behind firewalls with no third party access. This may protect vested interests, but it isn’t good for society. We have a collective interest in driving down the cost of projects, so we can deliver more infrastructure, with a greater level of investment certainty.
Another way of getting over the commercial
sensitivity of data is to use benchmarking services. They have been used in the oil and gas sector for decades. Performance Forum is one example, a joint industry project to measure project performance at start up. Other companies, such as Independent Project Analysis, have developed their own proprietary data sets, capturing decades of experience. The methods are well known, but the end product is a closed data set. In 2018, the UK Infrastructure Projects Authority (IPA)
launched the benchmarking hub for tunnelling data. Their mission was to create a forum to capture high level tunnelling metrics such as cost vs diameter of tunnel or production rates. A welcome step forward for the industry, but I would challenge whether this is heading in the right direction. It will create another closed dataset, with aggregated insights. In an era of advanced data analytics and artificial
intelligence (AI), we need access to data to train those models. Not just the high level metrics, but the detail to underpin them. From risks through to ground conditions, schedules to costs, logistics through to methodologies. But if all this data is put in the public domain then tunnelling organisations will be mindful of commercial or reputational damage. By opening up cost data, they introduce collusion risks. The answer is often to revert to what we know... benchmarking. But I would argue that we must be bold and
challenge the status quo. To drive up productivity, reduce carbon, improve investment certainty and so much more. Isn’t that in the interests of the clients who fund these projects, society and shareholders?
Above: Hackathons test and compete on data solutions for project problems 36 | December 2023
WHAT COULD THE MIDDLE GROUND LOOK LIKE? This is where the concept of a data trust comes in. In 2017 the UK Government-sponsored AI review announced that to grow the AI industry in the UK, organisations required better access to data, with its key recommendation being the development of data trusts for data sharing – and this point was reinforced later in the National Data Strategy, in 2020. More recently, Parliament’s publication on sharing public sector data made the case for intermediaries, including data trusts.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53
