"When I give, I give myself." -- Walt Whitman

Big Dig Tragedy Compounded by Lack of Digital Documentation

Posted on Monday, July 24, 2006 10:00 AM

If you still need a reason to invest in all-digital workflow documentation, look no further than the current mess regarding Boston’s Big Dig. After a section of tunnel collapsed recently, killing a motorist, investigations were launched. But the investigators are being hindered in this digital age by an old foe—paperwork. As the Boston Globe reports:

The Turnpike Authority and Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, the engineering management firm that oversaw the Big Dig, were supposed to make sure pull tests were conducted on all of the nearly 13,800 bolts in the I-90 connector, including about 1,150 that were attached using epoxy, a high-strength glue. Federal investigators are seeking records of those tests.

``We are at [Turnpike Authority] offices searching their records for the test results," Robert Johnson, spokesman for the US Department of Transportation, said late yesterday. ``At present that is 62 boxes of records."

If there are 62 boxes of records just for test results of epoxy-based bolts, imagine the mountain of such boxes for the entire project. In this day and age, there is no credible excuse for having such paperwork available only on paper—even if that excuse turns out to be government regulations.

Adobe and its army of partner developers and consultants stand ready with PDF-based solutions for design-to-deploy digital documentation workflow, as does Autodesk with its DWF alternative. Such technology is already mature enough to erase layers of headache and the inevitable mismanagement, delay and obfuscation such mountains of documentation can create. As this publication and others have explained for years, digital documentation reaps benefits in all stages of a project; the larger the project the more profound the benefits.

The failure of one section of the Big Dig tunnel is a tragedy that must be understood and solved, but the failure to apply existing best practices in digital-based documentation is a tragedy that will continue to haunt this project for generations.

  --RSN

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# re: Big Dig Tragedy Compounded by Lack of Digital Documentation

7/24/2006 2:16 PM by Evan Yares
No digital document management solution can possibly overcome the interoperability problems created by underlying proprietary data formats that are designed to serve the needs of their software developers rather than their users.

I'm talking about technical issues here. For example, the Microsoft DOC format has content and presentation so muddled as to make extraction of semantic data nearly impossible. The AutoCAD DWG format includes custom "ARX" objects that cause intractable interoperability problems for Autodesk itself. The ACIS SAT format renders some critical surface data parametrically rather than explicitly, making downstream use without an ACIS license far more difficult than it needs to be.

If all I had to deal with in my career were the negative effects of data formats that were designed with little forethought about interoperability, that would be plenty. Unfortunately, I also have to grapple with vendor policies that exacerbate the technical issues. I'd say I do a pretty good job of focusing on constructive solutions, rather than just getting pissed-off.





# re: Big Dig Tragedy Compounded by Lack of Digital Documentation

7/28/2006 7:20 AM by Mood
This is not a tool availability issue, but a lack of visibility and the desire to invest in the technology. It's much too easy to take the printed material, toss it a box, and wait for the aftermath. After all, when the bomb drops it's probably some other group of poor schmuks like me who get to deal with these issues after it's too late. Until engineering & construction companies who are constantly pressed on project margin recognize the importance of the people, process, and technology investment required to do it right, this won't be the last time we read a similar story.

# re: Big Dig Tragedy Compounded by Lack of Digital Documentation

7/28/2006 8:45 AM by Lost in N. Boston
I'd bet that these documents weren't CAD documents at all. Most likely Word or Excel sheets printed out. There was no requirement to do anything with the results once they were printed out. The odds of the paper being looked at again, ever is really small. Only if there was a lawsuit or disaster, which is what of course happened. This isn't an iteroperability issue. It's an economic one.

And, it's pretty cool that you're able to blame Autodesk for a project that used Intergraph's software.
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