Building the Foundations of a Data-Driven Tomorrow

Eugene Seah is the Director of Special Projects at Surbana Jurong with a proven history of working in the architecture & planning industry. He is skilled in Contracts & Cost Management, Building Information Modelling (BIM), Sustainable Design, Business Advisory and Business Development. As a strong program and project management professional, he specialises in Construction Law and Alternate Dispute Resolution (ADR), IT and Computing, Quantity Surveying and Sustainable Building Design and Management.

Q1. What are your roles and key responsibilities as the senior managing director of your company on a typical day?

There never is a dull day for me and I love how we embrace technology, sustainability and other core practices and processes.Surbana Technologies,the team I lead in Surbana Jurong, helps our clients to meet their sustainability and resilience objectives by applying breakthrough technologies and digitalisation, as well as asset and environmental monitoring. With my background in construction law and Alternate Dispute Resolution, I also look for risks in contracts and how we can better prepare ourselves for unforeseeable future events. By creatively considering risks that we are unaware of now, we can account for and build these into project specifications. I have an experienced team of delivery, solutions, business advisory and project management professionals working with me. We enjoy taking knowledge learnt from one industry and applying it to another – I’m proud to have brought my team’s expertise from Construction to Information Technology and vice versa, for instance.

I take a very pragmatic view of when faced with issues and problems.My varied background and education in quantity surveying, cost & project management, construction law, sustainable building design and IT and Computing has helped me to view issues from many angles, embedding digital processes within the DNA of sustainability and technology. The world is now leaning towards Wellness and Well-Being; thus, managing projects and the company must perform a delicate balancing actthat integrates social equity with the bottom line.

Q2: Tell us more about how the last 18-24 months have been for the construction industry and the changes it pushed towards you as the leader of the organization?

When Singapore entered the “circuit breaker” in 2020, we implemented several work from home initiatives that enabled us to continue collaborating on the cloud using our common data environments, including BIM 360 and Projectwise. 

I worked with VRcollab, a Singaporean company enabling cross-border and cross-discipline collaboration for our industry, and I challenged their team to create a project-specific “Virtual Reality Environment”. My team entered that virtual world, where wemet, worked together, and collaborated on key project milestones. It was a virtual environment that was in the cloud and always available, where we could inhabit customised avatars, while walking around the space and resolving conflicts “face to face”. It was a rough and ready tool that we used for coordination, notetaking, and management.

We also had to use digital tools like drones, Pix4D and photogrammetry for our digital training and observations—situations where it would be dangerous to observe from heights were made easy with digital tools like drones and their onboard cameras.COVID-19becamea catalystin driving the adoption of digital platforms, tools, technologies and IoT sensors in the construction industry and helping smart cities bloom in our 24K Integrated Platform.

Q3: What would be a piece of advice for your peers and colleague who are in the same situation?

Answer: I think that strategic planning and having a likeminded team of willing and passionateindividuals who are ready to walk the talk with youis of utmost importance. The industry is complex with many codes of practices to remember, legislations, contractual obligations, rating tools and more. I empathise with my fellow consultants and contractors, whom I meet both in the Phy-gital World (Physical and Digital) and who know the intricacies of the industry.I trust and rely on my team as we face unforeseen struggles together.

We must remember to have fun at work because we will weather stressful times together. In our rapidly changing world, we will often find ourselves not knowing what we do not know and having to adapt quickly. That said, having a team of diverse experts and specialists is reassuring – I trust that we will be able to make the most of our varied strengths, learning together and getting more productive and efficient as a team.

Given the breadth and depth of expertise from our member companies, Surbana Jurong can offer unique multidisciplinary services from design to delivery, and asset and facilities management The needsof each sector are vastly different, with unique challenges we manage on a common data environment. We continue to apply established principles like integrated concurrent engineering, while implementing new concepts like biomimicry and design for de-construction into our processes, allowing our clients to face their sustainability and resilience challenges head on.

Q4: How do you see the future of construction evolving with the arrival of new technologies?

Answer: I feel that in the next 1-2 years we will be entering a phase where we will rely even more on digital common data environments such as VR platforms and the buddingMetaverse as a medium to interact and a place to dwell. Just as my team customised their avatars on VRcollab’s platform, we will build the best versions of ourselves and our world using these platforms, visualisingdata and predicting outcomes in the real world. Our immersion in Virtual reality and Augmented reality environments will be deepened with the use of haptic suites, and we will be moving towards an era where we are a data driven organization and, perhaps, a data driven nation.

Secondly, Building Information Modelling (BIM) will become increasingly important. While we still rely mostly on 2D drawings today, I believe we will start with 3D models in the future, slicing and dicing these models for 2D views and prints. We will change the way we produce BIM models, with ever-increasing quality and novel use cases across various disciplines. BIMs will become more collaborative, inclusive and more informative in the years to come.

In a few years’ time, we will be well versed in the use of computational BIM and we expect Integrated concurrent engineering (ICE) in a CDE to be commonplace. Partnering and collaborating on contracts will be formally and informally used in projects, backed up by technology to support the phy-gital collaboration.

In 10 years, the construction industry in Singapore will see major transformations such as data driven design, using buildings as material banks, reversible designs, designs for deconstruction and the use of on-demand clean energy sources such as hydrogen fuel cells. The construction world we live it will become even more automated with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence helping us make decisions, or at least providing valuable insights to enable better quality outcomes.

But despite all the promise ahead, we need to consider the risks. We will be living in a technology and data-driven environment where we might gradually forget some of our fundamentals and core values. Generations from now, we might come to rely so heavily onartificial intelligence that we unquestionably adopt its recommendations as truth, as it becomes a “black box” that we do not understand. The AI could be wrong due to bugs in the programming, or inherent biases we’re not aware of. Will we retain the expertise and knowledge to override or reprogram it, and to make our own decisions?

Personally, I believe that we should keep our fundamentals and core values close to our hearts and hold on to it. We could arrive at a reality where future generations might not be able to answer core questions and know important fundamentals,after these decisions have become enabled entirely by AI. They might gradually become comfortable with machines making decisions for them. While this may seem like a remote risk, I hope thathumanity continues to treasure our fundamental decision-making skills and our values, far into the future.