Thought Leaders from FXCollaborative and Esri at Geo Week 2023

Can you imagine a world where automation and efficiency form the backbone of architectural practices? Let's explore this exciting intersection of tech and architecture with our guest, Brian Stridam, the Digital Practice Manager and Senior Associate at FX Collaborative. Brian's passion for data and technology and his unique perspective on teaching will guide us on a journey through his career, from tech-enthusiast to a leader in digital practice.

But we're not stopping there. We're also hosting Micah Kahlo, the AEC Technical Director at Esri, who's ready to share his insights on the role of GIS in digital transformation. From his humble beginnings as a GIS Technician to leading digital transformations at Arcadis and now Esri, Micah's journey is filled with lessons to inspire us all. Prepare for a deep dive into how location forms the core of design and construction and the critical role it plays in integrating data and executing new projects.

Hang on, there's more! We're wrapping up the episode with Mike Kahlo, also an AEC Technical Director at Esri, who's going to unveil the fascinating world of graph databases and their revolutionary impact on digital twins. Here's a chance to grasp the power of location in digital transformation and understand the immense potential of GIS and BIM integration. So, sit back, tune in, and get ready to be inspired, informed, and intrigued by the captivating world of digital transformation.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Hello and welcome to Future Construct. I'm Mark Oden, the CEO of them Design Zinc. We're here at GeoWeek 2023 in Denver, colorado. I'm joined today by Brian Stridham at FX Collaborative. He's the Digital Practice Manager and Senior Associate there. Welcome to the show, thank you. Thank you for having me. This is great, fantastic, brian, I'd love to understand you a little bit about your history and what brought you to FX Collaborative.

Speaker 2: 0:33

Yeah, that's a long story. I'll try to sum it up. So, basically, I always loved signing things, I always loved making things and my father was a mechanic his whole life, so he loved using his hands, right. He asked me to help him build a house in South Africa and I went over there and I said all right, I'll stay here, I'll help you build for three months if you pay for my tuition for Motorcycle Technician School. He agreed by the time we were done there in three months, I turned around and applied for Architecture Schools and, funny enough, my cousin is in Seattle. He also is an architect. So I felt at that point, okay, I can do this right. And I went through school, did my five years and I got a one class on Revit and I said, oh, this is a game changer. I never touched AutoCAD again From there on out I just worked from single person firms to like 30 people and I just really loved the technology a little bit more than the documentation.

Speaker 2: 1:27

And I find an opportunity at FX. At the time I was at FX Collaborative and from there I was starting as a digital technology specialist. I quickly turned that around to be not need a big manager, this is a bigger job Within the next couple years. We transferred to digital practice so digital practice as an idea and did so. I was now the digital practice manager and from there I just branched out from BIM and I said, all right, I got the BIM thing, let's figure out something else. And I just got sucked into data big data From there on out. I just loved understanding how data works between people.

Speaker 2: 2:04

We're a bit of a mid-sized firm about 120 people, and we do lots of different types of architecture and that means that we need to be really nimble, so that means we have to be very efficient. So that made it more important for me to try to push data across the entire office, not just what I do for them in BIM QC.

Speaker 1: 2:20

That's a fantastic history and thank you for sharing a little bit about yourself and both FX Collaborative. I understood when you said digital practice that that may have been something that you were very passionate about and defined at FX Collaborative. Can you help give me a little bit of context behind the digital practice and what that brings to the firm? Sure?

Speaker 2: 2:40

So we started out with probably a couple people. Right, we had IT manager. We now have a CTO, who was just my director at the time, but now CTO I'm digital practice manager, so the three of us kind of run the game on kind of digital practice as of a couple of years ago. We also pulled in a couple of partners into the fold in addition to a couple of champions, so people that are actually just working on project teams, but they also help us out with other initiatives that I don't have time to do, or it's their specialty during or computational analysis and things like that.

Speaker 2: 3:11

So that's kind of our team that we were slowly pushing into. We have three studios. We're pushing into three studios and getting people more educated in technology because that's what I love doing. That's all I ever did, naturally. I did it in school. I was 10 years old and everybody in school, they went back to school, so I just naturally would tell people that's interesting, let's talk about that. We get into something and I carry that with me into my career, where I really enjoy educating people and helping them, because I learned from them too and I never got certified for anything. I literally took it at one class and read it. I taught myself everything. So to me that was just really great and I really wanted other people to appreciate that as well.

Speaker 1: 3:51

What's your approach to helping individuals and groups in a training setting, but also helping them be the best they can be?

Speaker 2: 4:01

Train the person. That's it right. If someone doesn't want to learn, there's nothing you can do to help them. So for me, it's trying to find the thing about them that they're going to want to do and really just push that, push it hard and get them involved in more than one thing at a time so that they can kind of see where things are going, rather than maybe falling back and saying that didn't work out and I'm just not doing anything else. So I try to kind of push people in multiple directions at the same time. Whenever I see them either struggling or I see an opportunity where they took the initiative to do something, so I said, oh, I took the initiative to do something. Well, let's see, maybe you like this, because I thought I found a connection between that for me, so maybe I can work for you.

Speaker 1: 4:40

Very cool, and how have you applied that experience to FX Collaborative Well?

Speaker 2: 4:46

I created our first Dynamo Discoveries group that's what I called it and I've never used Dynamo before, so I taught myself a few things and I wanted to basically be more lazy. So I wanted to automate some stuff that I didn't want to do and through that I kind of gained some ideas about standardizing and being a little bit faster at things. So I started pulling people in that were interested in being fast, or people that would come to me and say, hey, is there a better way to do this? And then so I just started the group. I pulled in some people and now they're doing the things on their own. They're creating their own scripts and doing their own stuff with Dynamo In addition to BIM leads.

Speaker 2: 5:24

So for me, having someone on the team who is my eyes and ears because I have 120 people, 90 Revit users it's a lot of projects I can't be a never seen one so for me to be able to kind of mentor somebody as a BIM lead and have them understand what I need and then they teach me what they need and that makes me a better manager. So we've definitely supported and branched out a BIM lead role on every single project and I think that has bled into sustainability lead in your project. Because our firm is heavy on sustainability on our projects. That accessibility lead that was huge. I mean having someone specifically talking about and looking for accessibility issues in a project on top of sustainability, and then someone for BIM for me I mean I just love the way that that has just percolated across.

Speaker 1: 6:11

Yeah, that's wonderful. I'd love to talk a little bit about sustainability and how sustainability applies to BIM or where the two of those intersect.

Speaker 2: 6:19

Oh, you're talking about big stuff here. Let's see, all right, okay, so for us it's really important to understand the big picture at the beginning, right, because once you've gone to SD, the building is pretty much what it's bulk is going to be. So we have a separate sustainability analysis group, environmental group, and they've been trained on different analysis tools through Grasshopper, rhino and all of that. So it's like really early design. Or we also have people just do zoning, they do early, early design. So we pull those people in to understand how to use those tools and then that then feeds into either a consultant or just even the team itself to help them remember and understand the things that they need to know from that early analysis. Perfect, perfect.

Speaker 1: 7:07

So I understand you'll be presenting here at GeoWeek. Would you help us understand the topic and a few key takeaways that you'd want your audience to take away?

Speaker 2: 7:13

Sure. So the title is digital data driven digital practice and the idea behind it is how we as a smaller firm or commit size small firm, have tried to be as efficient as possible with getting information from and to people, and it highlights also my BIMQC dashboard, which is the most developed portion of our data driven analysis so far, and for me, the takeaway there is I hope the takeaway from that is that people understand that it's people first, it's not technology first, and as soon as you understand the people and understand what you want to do, all the other stuff can come into place as soon as you have the resources.

Speaker 1: 7:57

Yeah, that's fantastic, and I love how that drives back to the keynote, the original kickoff keynote. Would love to talk about what you also observed here at GeoWeek, what your learnings were and what you'll take back to FX Collaborative Sure.

Speaker 2: 8:10

Besides there being a million ways to scan something which I don't personally have very much experience in, but I do have a few projects that are using point clouds and scanned it in and all that. So we understand that we could be broad, but to see how many kinds of technologies there are, whether they're walking or droning or whatever but there's one in particular that I really like and I forgot the name.

Speaker 1: 8:32

So yeah, brian, you had mentioned it was Erebus earlier.

Speaker 2: 8:35

Yes, so this company. From what I got from their great presentation was that they're kind of AI driven point cloud development, so it's a plug-in for Revit, which for us is huge because that means that we have less magnets to deal with, right, the stuff that I'm doing high maintenance, this no maintenance, so fantastic, and the idea of it is that they don't do the modeling for you, and we've been interviewing a lot of and using a lot of different companies, because we do have to have a lot of existing conditions models developed for us, but they're not really done in a certain way that we really want as an architect, so for us to see something that makes us go faster, maybe possibly in modeling it ourselves.

Speaker 2: 9:12

I think it's huge and I'm really looking forward to actually talking to them more and maybe do a bit of a demo with them.

Speaker 1: 9:18

Very cool. I'm sure they would appreciate that. What do you see as the future? What do you see next year at GeoWeek? Maybe that might pop up. Super trick question.

Speaker 2: 9:30

Robots. I'm thinking I really want to. I guess one thing that I really would like to see I focus on micro. Right, a lot of people here focus on macro and then other people just take it to the wall with it. I would love to see a bit of more bridging on the micro and macro. Only because I'm able to talk about it so much, because I'm kind of in the dirt doing it, where a lot of other companies are choosing big top solutions to make those solutions done. I kind of want to see a little bit more melding of that. Very cool, but everything just seems pretty fantastic here.

Speaker 1: 10:10

Wonderful, yeah, I agree completely. Well, brian, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Yeah, it was great, and good luck at your presentation. Thank you, hello and welcome to Future Construct. I'm Mark Oden, the CEO of BIM Designs Incorporated. We're here at GeoWeek 2023 in Denver, colorado. I'm here with Micah Kahlo, the AEC technical director at Esri, yep. Thank you for having us. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, absolutely. I'd love to hear more about your background, micah, and how you ended up at Esri.

Speaker 3: 10:48

It's kind of a windy tale. I worked in AEC for a long time. I started out working in GIS actually Georgia GIS Clearinghouse and then started working at Bechtel Savannah Riversite with Bechtel for 8, 10 years, something along those lines, and did a little stint at government to try to do some GIS stuff. I realized it was a little bit slow from my liking and went back to the commercial side with Arcadis In Arcadis I spent almost 20-plus years there, started as a GIS technician, worked my way up through and in the end was running client-facing IT and digital solutions for clients and working on the overall digital transformation of Arcadis.

Speaker 1: 11:29

That's a very impressive career. And then at Esri, your focus is the AEC industry.

Speaker 3: 11:34

Yeah, so we had talked at Esri quite a bit and obviously my original background is GIS. I was doing a lot of different technology things and at the time we started having some conversations with Esri about what their focus was. Esri had always been obviously a big part of what we do in AEC, but it was oftentimes services-driven. It was maybe for the water industry or for the transportation industry or local government, which, where Esri played a big role in the AECs, were kind of not looked at as AECs. They were looked at as part of some other sector. And so I think Esri started to really realize that the AECs were evolving through all this digital transformation stuff that was going on and some of the opportunities and the technology as it's evolving, and they started to see them as a potential sector, somebody that needed focus and a different focus, because AECs are so project-focused right, it's not like government where we're running a utility for the next 150 years. So made a number of conversations, really interesting stuff back and forth.

Speaker 3: 12:34

Over time it got kind of up and down and then at the time they announced the Ezri and Autodesk partnership and once that partnership got announced we started looking at talking a little bit more seriously about what Ezri wanted to do with the partnership, and so we got into a pretty significant conversation.

Speaker 3: 12:52

We made some right moves on the hiring. My boss, kathleen Culey, came over from Rockwell Engineering who did a lot of the original connectors in ArcGIS or in AutoCat Well, I should say Civil 3D and in Infraworks, and then we acquired Rockwell and about the same time when Kathleen became the director, I was all on board because it was really interesting. I felt like from an industry perspective I could start to make a lot of the changes that I wanted to make, that I had seen where industry had had problems over the years and when I was doing all the digital transformation stuff, it kind of made a lot of sense to get out of the industry as a whole myself and start to try to influence from a data and technology perspective, and I thought I'd have more impact for the next hopefully 15 years when I before I retire.

Speaker 1: 13:38

Very cool, yeah. What are some of the changes that you've been able to influence?

Speaker 3: 13:42

We started to really push hard on the understanding and the idea of projects right. So AEC is project driven, it's commercial driven, it's profit driven, it's about winning work and doing work and running their business, starting to try to elevate the GIS programs. One thing we noticed about, like the digital transformation stuff, is that a lot of the companies start to panic and jump on board and start to move down the direction and they initially think it's all about technology and then they start to quickly realize it's really about business transformation and technology kind of comes as a backstop to that to help it. Well, gis was kind of getting left behind and I see this in many of the big AECs and sometimes even in the small ones where they're hiring in these digital people. They're bringing somebody from Accenture or the Lloyd, they're doing all this really interesting stuff. They start hiring data scientists, data engineers and they start to pull away from the core engineering applications and the GIS and the GIS folks are just kind of heads down making maps and getting billable work done and I think that we've kind of lost all that institutional knowledge that GIS has learned, because in a lot of ways GIS in a lot of these cases is the original digital transformation.

Speaker 3: 14:51

We are data driven from the beginning, right. We were all about kind of scaling, we were about being collaborative and web based. I think now that BIM has come along, we're starting to see that community move from CAD, which to me was kind of the equivalent of Adobe Illustrator, up to a BIM, a model-driven process, right to build something, and so now that puts them kind of on an equal footing in a data-driven approach and then that aligns us with all the other data-driven things that are out there, things like your billing and your ERP and your finance and your project schedules. So I just see that as a really interesting opportunity to bring all that together.

Speaker 1: 15:25

Fantastic. So what are some of the the tools at Esri that are helping bring those those topics together?

Speaker 3: 15:30

Well, obviously, at our core it's the platform. Right, I say platform, I know we don't like to use that ecosystem, whatever we're kind of calling it today but ArcGIS online and enterprise, or at our core, whether you're on-premise or whether you're wanting to do a SaaS solution, and then everything else is really an application that hangs off that center, which is kind of the data management and the web kind of component of it. Things like ArcGIS Pro for the professional, even things like ArcGIS for AutoCAD, or this ArcGIS connector in Civil 3D that Autodesk has created, turns those products into potential editors, just tools that edit geospatial data, and they can interact with it. And then, vice versa, we can now read that BIM information over onto our side and then from there, I mean, I guess the biggest thing that we do in AEC, the truly the biggest thing, is field.

Speaker 3: 16:17

Aecs are about providing services and businesses. So if you really look at what we have the most of, it's going to be field data collection, it's going to be our survey one, two, three applications, field maps, quick capture and now kind of the whole image and reality stuff is really starting to change that whole game, right, but that's our focus, right, it's the, it's the applications and then, as you move off of that, you start to get to well, the ability to make a map and an app, put it out on the web, combine it with a dashboard, put it in in JavaScript, make it into. We have a lot of our AEC companies are also our partners, which is kind of unique inside of Esri. A good majority of them are partners and they're creating solutions where they're embedding the Geospatial inside of their applications that they're delivering on.

Speaker 1: 17:01

Beautiful. Thank you so much for that explanation. Here at GeoWeek, I've heard a lot about location and the importance of location and how location isn't just XYZ, and I'd personally love to learn more about that. Yeah, I think we've.

Speaker 3: 17:14

You know, obviously, there's been a new term that's pushed out into the market and everyone's all buzz and are talking digital twins. And then they argue over the of what it actually means. And you know, it's just, really, in all honesty, it's a marketing term that sets the trajectory of what we're all are being going to. In a lot of ways, when you start to talk about these things, location is at the center. Right, we're standing in a conference room in the Denver Convention Center, at GeoWeek, in the city, in the county. We have location. Everything around us has location. Right, this room, the air temperature in it, it's everything has location.

Speaker 3: 17:47

So, when people start talking about bringing things together people and process and building things and sequencing and staging areas and supply chain, those are all location problems. Now, is location everything for everyone of those problems? Absolutely not. But location is fundamental to joining that information together. Right, it joins unjoinable data. So for us, we focus heavy, heavy on the idea of location is what's important. Right, we can't do design work in a vacuum. If you're designing a new building or a bridge, you need the context of what that bridge is going to affect, how the traffic is gonna be controlled when you're building it, how the traffic's gonna flow when we go over it? Are there any environmental impacts that we need to be worrying about? You've gotta use location in order to get to that, to get out of designing in the vacuum right and for me, that's the biggest thing that we push for by using location.

Speaker 1: 18:42

And thank you so much for that explanation. And we're talking about the GIS and BIM and how those things are coming together. So is location at the center point of that integration.

Speaker 3: 18:50

Absolutely. It is right when we start to talk about BIM and GIS perfect example of that right. We've struggled on the BIM side of things to make sure that they're using real-world coordinates right. Just that one little step makes all the difference in the world. Because now, if you give me that design in real-world coordinates, I can give you back where the wetlands are, how the people are moving, I can pull in sensor data, I can start to join all this information that could be critical in design or to making a more efficient or effective design in the long run. And, as Jack said today on stage, it's really about that kind of sustainability stuff. And this goes way beyond carbon right. It's about people, planet, profit, purpose or, if you really talk about it, it's the sustainability economics and the environmental right. So putting those things together and thinking about them more broadly, what we do is affecting our ecosystem and we're building new ecosystems, and location is at the center of all that. It's the only way to bring that information together and to really think about it.

Speaker 1: 19:50

Fantastic, thank you for that explanation. So, shifting to GeoWeek you're presenting this week.

Speaker 3: 19:55

Yeah, I did an initial workshop on Monday. It was well attended and we talked a little bit about the. We ran through kind of the process of plan, design and build from a civil perspective. We talked about how we need to be thinking about pulling that data from the EIS, the EIA, the environmental impact assessment or the environmental impact statement, and making sure that it's not just a hand report that dumps on somebody's desk so that the regulator can approve it, but there's a lot of data in there that is needed all the way through to construction. So we talked about pulling that thread of data into design so that design engineers are no longer moving shape files from one point to another and we stop playing this file movement game and start connecting to each other's systems record or common data environments. And then how we pull all of that data forward for the construction team. So when they know, hey, where do the silt fences need to go? What do we need to be monitoring for on traffic? How do we initially bid on this? Where do we know where the utilities are? All that information existed in the preliminary phases of that project, so that workshop really focused on that. In the latter half of it we had a good time. We actually started asking a lot of customer questions and getting feedback Because we're trying to understand what are the true personas in AEC, who are the people and what are the jobs that they're actually doing and where would they use GIS to get those jobs done. So that's a big part of what we try to get to with our customers.

Speaker 3: 21:16

And then, kind of going forward, I've got a presentation, a panel. It's the same topic, right, like how do we stop designing in a vacuum? How do we start to bring location into the picture? I've got two construction firms and a member from the OGC Open Geospatial Standard Committee on the panel. I think we've got a good conversation. That'll go. I really like that.

Speaker 3: 21:36

We're beginning to resonate and talk to more construction people. I think that their understanding of what GIS can do for them is very minimal. They understand drawings and paper drawings and shop drawings and all the stuff that they get, and they're beginning to understand models and sequencing in 40 and 5D. But they do location all the time. They just don't do it in a really organized way very often, and so we're beginning to start to have them in more of our conversations because we're trying to understand what do they need? What are they doing? And for them it's field, field, field, right. Yeah, there's a lot around the back office and the pre-bid and the planning and the finances and that's where a lot of the white-collar guys make their living. But I mean, it's really about the blue-collar guys. They're actually building the thing right, absolutely, as you've heard here today. They're building behind us, right.

Speaker 1: 22:25

Yeah, they're adding a new level to the convention center Incredible, and then we don't even hear it happening. Good mic, I'm very impressed with that, so thank you so much for that. In terms of other technologies or other presentations this week, what are you most excited about or what have you seen that sparked an?

Speaker 3: 22:42

interest. I saw it really interesting. We continue to see a lot of back and forth with Ezra and Autodesk and we're seeing that at the developer level, deep down in the bowels of what they do how they structure file types and how they're doing 3D modeling and open I3S layer. So we're really beginning to see that collaboration with Autodesk grow in a big way and it's really cool to see them developing together and working together.

Speaker 3: 23:03

Other things I'm interested in there's obviously a lot of the vendors.

Speaker 3: 23:06

I personally, if you're out there, I'm looking to understand who's doing GPR and who's mapping that data straight away, instead of creating just lines on the drawing and paint on the road.

Speaker 3: 23:17

I want to see data coming out of that workflow because we could use it to tighten up bids in the long run. And then, for me, I'm constantly looking for who's kind of innovating, who's thinking about things like graph databases to support that digital twin, because everyone talks about digital twin from the nice gaming engine, fancy picture perspective, but the real reality of a digital twin is going to be the graph database, that interconnection of the data itself, not of the Revit file or the Civil 3D or the ArcGIS shape file or any of those things it's going to be about the core data that makes up this building, that makes up the walls, makes up the environment and the soils below us, and how we connect those things has often been a hard way to go and we've done it with numbering sequences and all kinds of other things. I think things like graph are starting to open up big opportunities in that space.

Speaker 1: 24:04

Very cool. Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining us. I'm very excited about your upcoming panel and I look forward to meeting you soon. Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks have a good one.