9 minute read
The briefing
Remote working
The New Normal
MIDDLE EAST Dustin Parkman, VP, Project Delivery for Bentley, speaks to Big Project ME about why the US tech giant decided to waive subscription fees for its ProjectWise 365 cloud service from April to September 2020, and how this step will influence remote working positively
In April 2020, in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Bentley Systems, the global provider of comprehensive software and digital twins services, announced that it was opening up its ProjectWise 365 cloud service, including waiving subscription fees through to September 30, 2020, as part of its efforts to virtually connect infrastructure project participants forced to work from home.
Leveraging Microsoft365 technology and office productivity tools, ProjectWise 365 extends the reach and accessibility of BIM and infrastructure engineering data to facilitate collaboration and design review across the ecosystem of project stakeholders.
As an “instant-on” cloud service accessed through a web browser to simplify design review, transmittals, RFIs, information sharing, and issues resolution, ProjectWise 365 is perfectly suited for quick adoption while working from home, eliminating the need for error-prone combinations of generic technologies such as “drop boxes” and PDF, Bentley Systems says.
Therefore, Big Project ME spoke to Dustin Parkman, VP, Project Delivery for Bentley, to understand why the tech giant decided to take this step and discuss the benefits he hopes this step will bring, not just to the tech giant, but to the global construction industry as well.
Quick adoption
As an ‘instant-on’ cloud service accessed through a web browser, ProjectWise 365 is perfectly suited for quick adoption.
1,000
Number of companies interested in the cloud service
How successful has the opening up of the ProjectWise365 service been? Very successful. To date over 1,000 companies have expressed interest in using ProjectWise 365 on their projects. With our quick-start program and instant-on cloud access, organizations and project teams can immediately use and benefit from the service. ProjectWise 365 gives project teams an easy way to store, access, and share project information as well as to mark-up PDFs for collaborative design reviews complete with comprehensive issues tracking.
Further, these same users can eliminate email-based workflows and manage contractual exchanges including transmittals, RFIs, and general correspondence. With comprehensive reporting, project teams will gain insights into these deliverables and ensure timely responses. ProjectWise 365 helps the entire project team increase efficiency, reduce errors, and save time creating and responding to contractual deliverables.
What feedback have you been getting from customers utilising the service? How has it helped them? The feedback has been positive. ProjectWise 365 is extremely easy to learn and use. Project teams can maintain productivity with quick access to the latest project documentation and continue their on-going collaboration with the entire project team regardless of location.
With ProjectWise 365, these organisations and their teams quickly made the adjustment in this new workfrom-home environment, which can potentially save hours that can be lost when using other solutions that require more complicated IT configuration and setup. These customers and their project teams not only see the value of instant-on cloud solutions in times like these but have the confidence to use ProjectWise 365 on future projects.
How has technology helped construction companies ride out the COVID-19 storm? Many industries, including engineering and construction, were forced to find new technologies to help them adjust to this new way of working. ProjectWise 365
is helping engineering and construction companies, and their supply chains easily transition their projects to the cloud for immediate access to their models, documents, and data from their entire project teams while working from home.
Important features in ProjectWise 365, like issue tracking, and RFIs allow engineering and construction teams to not only immediately share their documents, but post and communicate important information to the entire team so that work can continue without interruption.
How will the utilisation of construction technology during this crisis impact the way construction companies operate in the future? Engineering and construction companies can only benefit from what they learned during this crisis. Construction projects tend to have a large expanded supply chain, which can make it difficult to ensure that all team members have immediate access to the latest and most accurate information.
Will we see more remote working and digitisation as a result? Without a question, remote working will likely continue resulting in a new norm, with a mix of office and remote environments.
With technology like ProjectWise 365, the industry recognises the benefit not only during a crisis, but long-term as well, including the ability to share their work more efficiently, perform collaborative reviews, address project issues, track project metrics, and create deliverables on future projects with ease independent of their location.
This recent experience will provide more companies with the confidence that they can not only be successful, but can increase the overall performance of their projects by breaking down some of the barriers in the past to include a more expanded and diverse project team.
Preparing for AI
MIDDLE EAST Bernard Roux, vice president and country director at Thales Group, discusses the impact artificial intelligence will have on the Arab World’s smart city ambitions
Artificial Intelligence is the defining technological revolution of our century, impacting all sectors, all fields, all of humanity and modern society. The pace of development has been so rapid that the very conception of AI is constantly evolving and being challenged.
AI can already provide real-time measurement of stress and fatigue, and behavioural biometrics – the way you walk, talk or even type on your phone – are increasingly being used by financial institutions to detect and prevent fraud.
As the world around us becomes increasingly connected, the boundaries of the possible are being constantly pushed back.
For example, research from Gartner predicts that 10% of personal devices will have emotion AI capabilities, such as wearables that are able to monitor a person’s mental health by just 2022.
The biggest hurdle behavioural and emotion AI must overcome before it becomes mainstream is that people are uncomfortable with it.
AI is often popularised in fiction as an existential threat - the notion of machines rising against humans – leading us to mistrust it.
So, it is essential that developers work to ensure systems are transparent, understandable and ethical, where users can see the data used to arrive at a conclusion, can explain and justify the results and ensure that it follows objective
Creating efficiency
Smart devices and buildings not only create efficiencies in the workforce, but they also reduce environmental and monetary waste.
2031
Zayed Smart City is part of the UAE’s AI Strategy 2031
standards protocols, laws, and human rights. We call this TrUE AI (Transparent, Understandable and Ethical).
Artificial Intelligence, coupled with the powerful processing and huge data stores that we now have, is excellent at recognising patterns and extracting information that would otherwise be hidden form human eyes. The challenge is to think widely enough to exploit the technology where it can make the greatest positive changes.
For example, facial recognition programs, powered by AI, will eliminate all issues related to physical fare media, such as loss and theft.
AI could also improve the environmental performance of the transport sector by optimising movements to improve energy consumption during operation. For example, all of Dubai’s metro system is completely automated and driverless. Technology like this was unthinkable just a couple of decades ago, and artificial intelligence has quietly evolved from being aspirational to commonplace to being truly indispensable.
The digital transformation occurring in all parts of our lives has also brought many benefits to the office environment that we now couldn’t imagine living without. Digital office assistants can, for example, tell you which meeting rooms are free, control conference room equipment settings and order supplies based on the frequency of your order history.
Smart buildings and smart desks can not only help create efficiencies in the workforce, but they can also cut down environmental and monetary costs for businesses.
The opportunities of the application of AI in both our personal and professional lives are endless. People have not only been open and accepting of the changes, they have been engaging in the technologies, making them smarter and even more useful.
The use of AI has accelerated significantly recently, not just across the UAE but globally, in a bid to slow down the spread of COVID-19. For example, some countries are rolling out chatbots that help screen potential cases and surface treatments by centralising research data.
Indeed, the use of data and AI can potentially transform the Arab world’s urban hubs into digitally enabled smart cities. The same drivers that have moved companies toward digitalisation – connectivity, machine learning, cloud, secure identity and so on – will move cities toward it too.
For example, Zayed Smart City Project, launched in 2018 as part of the UAE AI Strategy 2031 aims to harness emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence to add intelligence to urban infrastructure and municipal service, and better the lives of UAE citizens.
We are all relying on artificial intelligence to improve decisionmaking, save lives and make the world
a safer, cleaner and friendlier for us all. Having said that, the current state of AI leaves room for a number of problems to be solved in order to continue its effective use. One of these is an extreme shortage of cybersecurity professionals.
In an effort to make up for lack of personnel, many companies are turning to Artificial Intelligence as a sort of multi-functional pocket-knife to better defend their networks. This coupled with companies setting AI thresholds too high or too low can impact the effectiveness of AI. False positives and negatives can waste the better part of a security analyst’s day. In 2020, having an Artificial Intelligence program smart enough to recognize what is a real threat and what is just background noise, will be the real test.
However, as with any application of AI, humans must choose how much room for manoeuvre they’re prepared to give the technology. Artificial intelligence (AI), like any other technology, is neither good nor bad — it all depends how people use it. The role of AI in cybersecurity is a good example: hackers use it to do harm, cybersecurity experts use it to help thwart their attacks.
The new possibilities created by AI are defined not by software and hardware, or numbers and data. They will instead be defined by how they help people lead better, happier and safer lives.
