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Technology-Enabled Teaching >> If You Build It, We Should Come
6/28/2005
play an important role in most new construction or renovation projects. Most architecture and engineering firms cannot afford to maintain full-time specialists in technology design areas such as multimedia, cabling, networking, telephony, and wireless. So, wherever there is a gap in expertise on the architect’s design team, a consultant can provide specialized expertise. Consultants are frequently retained on the college or university side as well; IT staffing levels are often barely sufficient to maintain and support current systems, much less provide hundreds of hours to support a years-long design and construction process. Retaining a consultant can allow a campus technology group to have early and continuous involvement in the design process without adding FTEs (full-time employees or equivalents) or having to manage the construction document-and-meeting bureaucracy.Technology consultants can also bridge the gaps that often exist between the campus technology groups, the architects, and the engineers. Campus technology representatives usually know what they and their end users need, but they are not intimately familiar with the construction process, construction documentation, bid specifications, and drawing formats, or with the labyrinthine steps required to get a change made once the construction documents are finished. Architects and engineers often have a generalist-level understanding of the relevant technologies, but not the specialist-level expertise necessary for high-level integration of technology with building systems. The role of the technology consultant is to bring these two groups together, to bring knowledge of what other campuses are doing and how similar technology/design integration problems have been solved elsewhere, and to provide each group with the assurance that its needs are being met. Ken Anderson, a project manager with the national construction management firm CPMI (www.cpmi.com), sums up the consultant’s role: “A good technology consultant ties everything together.”
Also in the picture in many projects is the owner’s representative. This could be a member of the campus administration or facilities department, an architect (usually not from the firm or firms designing the building), or a construction management firm. The role of the owner’s representative is to monitor the design and construction processes, manage budgets and deadlines, and solve problems that arise during the course of the project, doing all of this with the owner’s interests represented first and foremost.
Because technology is often installed toward the end of a construction project (with some systems literally the last to hold up building completion), there is potential for conflict, both in terms of schedules and budgets. Built-in technology may be only 1 to 3 percent of the overall project budget, but if cost overruns in other parts of the building eat into contingency funds, there may be little flexibility available on the part of the owner’s representative to accommodate change requests late in the project. A key to successfully working with an owner’s representative is to let that individual know about technology and related needs early, in terms of time, probable costs, and coordination with other groups.
-Jeffrey Lee, HGA
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