Buddy Cleveland's Blog

Water - not a drop to lose

Buddy Cleveland [Bentley] — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 01:14:00 GMT

Water. Is there anything more fundamental to sustaining life on this planet? Human survival, our livelihoods, and nearly all modes of economic production depend directly upon water. However, in spite of the fact that we inhabit a water planet, fresh water is not an abundant resource the world over. Less than 3% of the water on the planet is fresh water. Over 80% of this fresh water is locked away in glaciers and ice sheets and therefore not readily available to us. If you do the math, only 0.5% of all the water on the planet is available for use by man, and nearly all of this water is beneath the surface of the earth in the form of groundwater. Water scarcity, whether through drought or inadequate distribution can lead to disease, famine, and even armed conflict. Unfortunately, based on UN population projections, it is estimated that by 2025 more than 2.8 billion people in 48 countries will face water stress or scarcity conditions.

Source: World Business Council for Sustainable Development

According to the United Nations and World Health Organization, there are roughly 1.1 billion people in the world who do not have adequate access to clean drinking water. Over 2.6 billion people, nearly half the world's population, do not have access to adequate sanitation. Even where fresh water supplies exist; it is often rendered unsafe through contamination by human waste, untreated industrial waste, and agricultural runoff. Tragically, again according to the UN, "Polluted water is estimated to affect the health of more than 1.2 billion people, and to contribute to the death of an average 15 million children every year." Clearly, clean water, free of waste and contaminants, is an absolute necessity for a sustainable, thriving and equitable human society.

Global Drinking Water Coverage

Source : WHO-UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme

Global Sanitation Coverage

Source : WHO-UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme

The key to meeting the global demands for clean water is infrastructure - water treatment and distribution systems to deliver clean water and sanitation systems to manage sewerage and storm runoff. It's no surprise that for many of the non-governmental organizations working in the developing world, such as Engineers Without Borders among many others, a majority of their projects are related to meeting basic water and sanitation needs. Effective management of fresh water resources as well wastewater contribute directly to two of the fundamental and inseparable elements of global sustainabililty - sustaining human society and sustaining the environment.

Given clean water's fundamental importance to human society and its preciousness as a natural resource, we really don't have a drop to waste. Yet, the amount of clean water lost from our water distribution systems is astounding. According to the World Bank, over 32 billion cubic meters of treated water annually is lost from distribution systems due to leakage (that's 8.54 trillion gallons for the metrically challenged). A further 16 billion cubic meters is unaccounted for each year due to theft, poor metering or corruption. In the developing world, the amount of treated water lost can approach 60% of the water entering the distribution system. On a global basis, the estimated cost of the treated water in this way is $14.6 billion annually. In the developed world, roughly 15% of the water input to their distribution systems is lost. In the developing world the average is 35% but can be as high as 60%. A little math results in the conclusion that 26% of all the treated water in the world is lost each year. What do these numbers mean in terms of real lives? Well, if we could recover just half of the water lost in this way, we could serve the water needs of an additional 90 million people with no further investment in new water systems or further tapping into increasingly scarce sources of water. The negative impact of water loss doesn't end with water that doesn't get delivered. Consider the environmental and cost impacts of constructing the treatment facility capacity and the energy required to produce treated water that, in effect, is simply pumped right back into the ground. Further consider the broader impact when small leaks go undetected and become catastrophic failures, such as the recent water main break in New York City in May of 2008. Water loss may sound like a simple maintenance issue but it is far more than that - it is a significant global issue related to one of our most vital natural resources.

Most water utilities have adopted operational strategies to address this problem, such as managing the system pressure to attempt to minimize the amount of water lost through leakage while still maintaining adequate service. However, these strategies have limited effectiveness and don't address the root problem. It may be stating the obvious, but plugging the leaks would seem to be the most direct approach to solving the problem of water lost through leakage. However, that's not as easy as it sounds. As water distribution systems are largely underground, locating the leaks extremely difficult. Visual inspection is not possible without digging up the piping. Many leaks don't manifest themselves in any visible way, such as water bubbling to the surface, and may go undetected indefinitely. Even when water does the reach the surface, it may be nowhere near the actual leak. There are a number of technologies available for detecting leaks without digging, such as a variety of acoustic methods and step-wise testing of individual segments of the piping systems. However, these approaches are not 100% effective in pinpointing the leaks and still require fairly exhaustive examinations of the water systems and are therefore expensive and time-consuming.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, in the U.S. alone, investments of an additional $11 billion per year over the next 20 years is required replace water systems near the end of their useful lives and to meet current and future federal water regulations. Can anyone reasonably expect that these investments can be afforded? Or, that we have a sufficient pool of qualified professionals to perform the work? If you believe that the likely answer to these questions is "no," particularly in light of current economic uncertainties, then what is to be done? Clearly, meeting the demands for infrastructure coverage and quality within limited budgets with limited resources requires innovation.

At Bentley, we are attacking these issues for water systems on multiple fronts - better analytical tools for determining the location of leaks; optimizing the instrumenting of water systems; developing and evaluating effective pressure management strategies; and long-term asset management solutions. One particularly innovative tool is the Darwin Calibrator which employs genetic algorithms to identify the most likely leakage hot spots in the water system by calibrating the analytical model of the water system to the real-world measurements of pressure and flow within the segments of the distribution system. A paper presented by Bentley's Applied Research colleague, Dr. Zheng Wu, and Paul Sage of United Utilities in England received the Honor Award for Applied Research in the International Water Association (IWA) Project Innovation Award 2008 competition for the European region. This capability allows utility owners to target their detailed inspection and repair much more effectively than with traditional methods. Innovative tools such as the Darwin Calibrator increase the return on investments in water system maintenance by reducing the cost to locate problems and investments in capital improvements as well by focusing those investments on the highest priority requirements.

Fixing leaky pipes may sound pretty mundane and routine; it may not sound like the coolest thing for an infrastructure professional to be working on. But solving the problem will require much more than money - it will require all the creativity and innovation that our infrastructure professionals can muster. The benefit of fixing a few leaky pipes is immediate and its impact on sustainability is significant. Eliminating the water loss problem in the next water system will likely have a greater net impact on global sustainability than the next green building or the next wind turbine. Sounds pretty cool to me.

Tough weekend for U.S. infrastructure in the media

Buddy Cleveland [Bentley] — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:27:00 GMT

This weekend seemed to be a pretty tough weekend in the media for the infrastructure here in the U.S., or more specifically, our national will to improve and sustain our infrastructure. The first blow was delivered when, on Saturday morning, I read a short article by Nathan Thornburgh in the July 14, 2008 issue of Time Magazine, Nation Building. The focus of the article is the lack of progress in the rebuilding of ground zero where, now seven years later, "every part of the project is over budget and behind schedule." His main point is that the problems at ground zero are symptoms of the broader problem when it comes to America's infrastructure in general. He cites a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce report which concludes that the U.S. transportation infrastructure is more vital than ever to the success of nearly every segment of the U.S. economy but that "business as usual" in terms of how we invest in our transportation infrastructure is simply indadequate to meet future demands. The fact that the "Americans lose $9 billion in productivity from flight delays alone" was also mentioned. He concludes this happy story by comparing the state of infrastructure in the U.S. with the explosion of new infrastructure and infrastructure investment (with the usual qualifications about China's political system) in terms of global competitiveness -- "The global economy rewards countries with the concentration and focus to build quickly and solidly." This brief, but sobering, article ends with a fairly ominous quote:

"It's not too late for ground zero to be a showcase for American engineering, efficiency and ingenuity. Anything less risks sending exactly the wrong message."

The next blow came when I sat down Sunday morning to read the New York Times. There was a front page article by the Times' architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, titled In Changing Face of Beijing, a Look at the New China. The article cited a number of the incredibly impressive, and sometimes controversial, architectural projects in and around Beijing. The projects cited were the Beijing Capital Airport Terminal 3 (Foster+Partners used some Bentley technology for the conceptual design); the new National Theater near Tiananmen Square; the new headquarters building for the Chinese television authority, CCTV; the National Stadium (a.k.a. the Birds Nest) built for the Olympics; and the National Aquatics Center (also designed with the help of Bentley products). Having just spent 8 days in Beijing a couple of months ago and seen most of these structures in person, I found the article very interesting. You could immediately tell where the author was coming from by the opening paragraph:

"If Westerners feel dazed and confused upon exiting the plane at the new international airport terminal here, it's understandable. It's not just the grandeur of the space. It's the inescapable feeling that you're passing through a portal to another world, one whose fierce embrace of change has left Western nations in the dust."

Left "in the dust"? Ouch! He doesn't stop there however. He concludes the article by pondering a bit about what it all means:

"It remains to be seen where this will lead. For centuries, architects have aspired to create buildings that enlighten or transform civilization, only to see them remain isolated splendors, with little impact on society at large. That may prove to be the case in China, too. But there is no question that its role as a great laboratory for architectural ideas will endure for years to come. One wonders if the West will ever catch up."

"[I]f the West will ever catch up."?? Ouch again.

The final blow came on that Sunday afternoon when I was watching Fareed Zakaria's new show, GPS, on CNN. At the end of the show, Fareed had a short segment about the anniversary of the start of construction of the Hoover Dam, which has long been a symbol of America's ability to do the big things. He then went on to cite the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) infrastructure report card and the $1.6 trillion investment required just to bring our existing infrastructure into fully operational and safe conditions. He also compared the investments in infrastructure as a percentage of GDP between the U.S. (2.4%), Europe (5.0%), and China (9.0%). As in the case of the first two examples, the show was ended with a somber and sobering statement:

"Projects like the Hoover Dam will become symbols for an America that could once think big and build tall. An America that is no more."

So, what kind of reaction should we Americans have? Well, we could certainly get mad, beat our chests about how great the U.S. is. Maybe we could come up with the infrastructure equivalent of "Freedom Fries." Yeah, that'll show 'em. We could get analytical and point out that the U.S. still has the largest GDP of any country, more airports, more miles of roadways, and even more miles a railways than any other country on earth. We not only built the Hoover Dam, but the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, and the Sears Tower. Oh yeah, and we put a man on the moon and won the Cold War. Okay, okay, they get it. Unfortunately, none of these reactions addresses the problem. Maybe we should just get busy. I take the observations from these three media sources, not as criticisms or death knells, but as challenges -- challenges that we've risen to over and over in the past. But make no mistake, rising to our infrastructure challenges and the multitude of interrelated challenges we face (e.g., energy, dependence on foreign oil, sustainability, etc.) will take enormous political will. It's time we stop showering our political leadership (on both sides of the aisle) with low expectations. It's time for the bully pulpit to be used for more than ideological platitudes, scapegoating and fear-mongering. Given a challenge and a tangible, pragmatic plan to meet that challenge -- even a plan that requires sacrifice -- the American people will usually respond. We should expect (and therefore elect) political leadership that will acknowledge and confront the challenges we face rather than they deny that problems exist; that will be honest about the true costs and ask us to make the sacrifices required to pay those costs rather pretending everything is painless; and rally the population with confidence and hope for their individual futures rather than fear of what might happen. It's a tall order, but then it is time to think big and build tall.

"We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill...What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him."
- Victor Frankl, 1946

Removing barriers to interoperability -- there are only winners

Buddy Cleveland [Bentley] — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:08:00 GMT

I assume you have all read about the announcement by Bentley and Autodesk regarding the agreement to expand the interoperability between the software applications provided by the two companies. If you've been on vacation or otherwise "disconnected," you can read about it here.

I am quite certain that there will be (in fact, there has been already) speculation -- informed and otherwise -- regarding why Autodesk agreed to this, why Bentley agreed to this, who wins, who loses, who gains what advantage where, and on and on. This might provide short term subjects for industry blogs and perhaps some interesting and amusing reading. But beyond some short term amusement, this sort of speculation entirely misses the point. There is a really big winner and, frankly, the only one that counts -- the community of infrastructure professionals that both companies serve. As referenced repeatedly in the joint announcement (linked to) above, when interoperability gets better, the users communities of both companies and the industry at large win.

From the point of view of Bentley and Autodesk, we will continue to "win" (whatever that means), as we always have, by providing value to our infrastructure users through our products and services. The magic behind improving interoperability is that it doesn't enable one company or another to gain a larger share of the pie in a zero sum game. Rather, it creates a large pie by increasing the overall benefits our users realize from their investments in technology from both companies.

So while all the bloggers, pundits, and industry observers have a field day dissecting this announcement, I'm sure that when all the dust settles one thing will be absolutely clear, dwarfing all other opinions and points of view -- this agreement is absolutely huge for our collective users in the infrastructure industries. The executives from both companies who made this happen are to be commended for their foresight, perserverance, and commitment to the best interests of the industries we both serve.

Finally, from the Bentley point of view, this is entirely consistent with the concepts we presented at our recent BE Conference regarding "Sustaining Infrastructure." As point out by numerous speakers a number of times, one of the three critical elements of Sustaining Infrastructure is nurturing and sustaining the infrastructure professions. The world will simply not be able to improve and sustain either our society or our environment without a growing, energized and committed community of infrastructure professionals. One way to expand the capacity of this community is to make them more productive (see pages 18 & 19 of our Sustaining Infrastructure whitepaper). Improving interoperability improves productivity at all levels -- practioners, teams, projects, enterprises.

"[T]he most devastating threat to truth in the world is the overweening claim to the absolutely true. In the certainty of the moment, the humility of the enduring question is indispensable."
- Karl Jaspers, 1951

On the Politics of Breaking Through

Buddy Cleveland [Bentley] — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

It's probably obvious by now that I've been thinking a lot about topics like sustainability, the role of infrastructure in society, and climate change for a while now. Along the way, I've read a bunch of books on these and other topics. I'll have to admit, I didn't get through all of them -- some were pretty dry and uninteresting and some mainly pointed out the problems without offering much in the way of solutions. On the other hand, I did read some pretty outstanding, insightful, and useful books. One in particular was "Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility" by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus. Now, don't take the phrase "the death of environmentalism" the wrong way. Both the authors have backgrounds as environmentalists and their politics seem to be somewhat to the left of center. What makes them different however is their approach to dealing with the problems of sustainability and climate change. They completely discard the old politics of environmentalism and come at it with an approach that is very pragmatic and quite refreshing. I've referred to this approach previously as "pragmatically working the middle" between the ideological (and unproductive) extremes on either side of the of the argument.

Right in the beginning, the authors propose that there are some preconditions that need to be satisfied in order for people to "think environmentally." Their "break through" insight is that before people can begin thinking seriously about the environment in broad terms, they need to achieve a minimum level of prosperity:

"Environmentalists like to emphasize the ways in which the economy depends on ecology, but they often miss the ways in which thinking ecologically depends on prospering economically. Given that prosperity is the basis for ecological concern, our political goal must be to create a kind of prosperity that moves everyone up Maslow's pyramid as quickly as possible while achieving ecological goals.."

Speaking specifically about the American experience:

"What explains the postwar increase in recreational boating, camping, and hiking is not atavism--it's affluence. The satisfaction of the material needs of food and water and shelter is not an obstacle to but the precondition for the modern appreciation of the nonhuman world."

This insight -- that thinking ecologically depends upon economic prosperity -- might seem a little counterintuitive at first. After all, you can point to the fact that it's the world's poor that live in the most ecologically distressed conditions. But the authors make the point that:

"When environmental leaders respond that the poor suffer the most from pollution and benefit the most from environmentalism, they continue to miss the point: however bad the pollution and loss of nonhuman natures may be, hunger and insecurity are almost always more strongly felt."

Sustainability to the billions living in abject poverty is about keeping themselves and their families alive a little longer. I really don't imagine they are concerned about the carbon spewed out from a power plant if it powers a pump that brings them clean water for their family and allows them to irrigate the crops they raise to feed themselves. I don't think they lose any sleep if a new school or medical center disturbs the habitat of the local flora and fauna, endangered or otherwise.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus also have little patience for dividing the world between humans and nature. For the authors "[w]e are Nature and Nature is us."

"Ecological thinking at its best sees complex relationships and interactions among industrial plants, workers, health care, energy, and pollution, and economic growth as no less part of the planet's ecosystem, and no less natural, than a rain forest...Once we abandon the belief that there exists a nature or market separate from humans, we can start to think about creating natures and markets to serve the kind of world we want and the kind of species we want to become."

In the end, their appeal to pragmatically "break through" is an appeal to politics -- yes, that's right, politics. But politics in the true sense of the word, not partisan and ideologically driven arguments that pass for politics today.

Anyone who wants some arbiter that is above politics is either appealing to a theological authority or misunderstands what is meant by politics...If politics is our self-governance as a species, then it is the highest form of collective authority there is. The truth of the collective is that it is multiple, contradictory, and divisive. There is no single public interest. To deny the multiplicity, as many neo-Rousseauians do, is to miss something fundamental about politics. Politics is about making decisions.
...
[W]hat we need is not a new religion, especially not one grounded in a theological view of a harmonious nature. What we need is new politics, one capable of fully appreciating humans as evolving beings filled with messy contradictions, emotions, and rationalities who are constantly adapting to transforming their environments and their realities.

I really enjoyed the book and culled many important insights from it. The authors have created an organization called the Breakthrough Institute. Their web site includes news, articles, and other resources related sustainability and their approach to achieving it. If you read the book and find that their point of view resonates with you, you'll probably like their blog as well. It's informative in any event.

You may or may agree with the authors' politics, but it's difficult to deny the pragmatism they bring to the discussion. In other forums, Shellenberger and Nordhaus have argued for a significant, focused, and long-term investment in clean energy. They've proposed an Apollo project type of government investment. Others will argue for a more market-oriented approach. Some will argue that such a project should include not only renewable energy sources but others, such as nuclear and clean coal. Other argue that renewables should be the only focus. All these are reasonable differences to discuss, so let's engage our political processes -- real politics, that is -- to make some decisions and move forward. It's time.

More than green...

Buddy Cleveland [Bentley] — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:15:00 GMT

It's been a little more than a week since our keynote sessions at the 2008 BE Conference in Baltimore -- plenty of time to decompress and reflect. I've had the opportunity to speak to a number of people regarding my keynote on Sustaining Infrastructure, so I thought it would be useful to respond to some of the comments I've heard or read as well as re-emphasize some of the points I was attempting to make.

Sustaining Infrastructure vs. Green

One common theme among a lot of the reaction I've heard to BE in general is the tendency to conflate Bentley's concept of sustaining infrastructure with green. To do this is a significant misreading of what we mean by sustaining infrastructure. Now, don't get me wrong, green, no matter how you wish to define it, is incredibly important and is something Bentley is undoubtedly committed to, both from a corporate point of view (e.g., reducing our own carbon footprint), as well as what we enable our users to do through our software products. However, sustaining infrastructure is a far broader concept. By almost every definition, green is focused primarily, if not exclusively, on the environment. However, as we outlined in our BE Keynotes and described in our Sustaining Infrastructure whitepaper, the sustaining infrastructure concept includes three important dimensions:

Sustaining society
Sustaining the environment
Sustaining the infrastructure professions

Any commitment to sustainability must include a commitment to sustaining society. From my personal point of view, this translates to a commitment to work toward providing every person on the planet with the possibility of realizing a quality of life the includes clean water, sanitation, food, access to critical services (such as education), physical security, and economic opportunity. While concern for our fellow human being is perhaps reason enough to commit ourselves to the well being of all people, there is more to this than simple altruism. As convincingly argued in their book, Break Through, Michael Shellenberer and Ted Norhaus make the point that there is a strong correlation between quality of life and concern for the environment, that "thinking ecologically requires prospering economically." For many of 4 billion people living below the United Nation's Human Development Index threshold for "High Human Development," particularly the 1.2 billion people living on less than $2 a day, sustaining themselves and their family for another day, week or month overwhelm any concerns about the global environment or climate change. Simply put, a true global commitment to sustainability requires a global community living with a reasonable quality of life. Thus sustaining society and sustaining the environment go hand in hand and are completely interdependent. The corollary is that sustaining infrastructure must necessarily be about growth and not strictly about imposing limits. Smart growth to be sure, but growth nonetheless. As our VP of Corporate Marketing (and silky baritone), Chris Barron, says, "green is a passive state of being, but sustaining is an active and ongoing process."

Sustainability Challenge

This brings me to a slide presented in the keynote to graphically depict the "sustainability challenge," which is to achieve a Human Development Index worldwide greater than 0.8 and a Sustainability Index (defined as the global Ecological Footprint divided by the earth's biocapacity) of greater than 1.0.

As I said during the keynote, the countries with high human development, but a low sustainability factor (which is virtually all of the developed world) will "need strategies for increasing their Sustainability Index without comprising their Human Development Index. This might include things such as clean energy development, increasing biocapacity, and reducing their carbon footprint among other strategies." On the other hand, those countries with a Sustainability Factor greater than 1.0 but with Human Development Index of less than 0.8 (virtually all of the developing and under-developed world) will "need strategies, and assistance, for achieving fundamental economic development. Beyond that they'll need strategies for smart economic growth that will enable them to continue to increase their Human Development Index without degrading their Sustainability Index below acceptable limits." The common denominator between the two is infrastructure -- basic economic development requires infrastructure; deploying new technologies for smart growth, e.g., clean energy, will require infrastructure. Of course, delivering and maintaining the infrastructure required to sustain both society and the environment, requires a robust and growing community of infrastructure professionals, the third (and likewise interdependent) dimension of sustaining infrastructure.

To repeat, sustaining infrastructure undoubtedly embraces green but it is clearly not limited to green. To elaborate on a recent comment from Joe Croser, as a company committed to sustaining infrastructure, it is our duty to support economic development in the developing world, as we do through our initiatives with Engineers Without Borders, HOPE Worldwide, The Hunger Project, the Red Cross, and the United Way; it is our duty to reduce our own carbon and ecological footprints which is the subject of many internal initiatives and even impacted the way in which we conducted the BE Conference; and it is our duty to support initiatives to inspire young people to join the infrastructure professions, which is reflected in our long-term support of the Future Cities competition in the U.S. for middle school students, and the Future City 2020 program in India for high school students. However, it is our mission to support our users initiatives in sustaining infrastructure, in all its dimensions, through our software products, our solutions, our education programs, our professional services, and our commercial models.

What has Dostoyevsky got to do with Sustaining Infrastructure?

During my keynote, I proposed that the world's goal for human development should be nothing less than 0.8 on the United Nation's Human Development Index scale. To those who thought this was too optimistic, I asked "who should we say no to?", referring Andrew Winston's "no is not an option" statement. I also said there was great Dostoyevsky quote that also applied, but that I didn't want to seem to nerdy by bringing up, that is, if it wasn't too late (unfortunately, several of my "friends" confirmed afterwards that it was too late - I was a nerd). However, several people have since asked me what quote I had in mind. So here it is. It's from the book The Brothers Karamazov, and the main character, Yvan, is talking to is brother, who happens to be a priest, about suffering in the world:

"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell me the truth."

So tell me, tell me the truth -- when we complain about the World Bank funding another coal plan in India because of the carbon dioxide, to which child to we say, "Sorry, you'll have to wait for that electric pump that will finally bring clean water to your village because we here in the developing world are spewing too much carbon"? When we rail against genetically altered seeds that are more productive and disease resistant because it's "unnatural", to which starving child do we say, "Sorry, you're crops won't yield enough again this year, so go hungry for a while longer"? When we refuse to get aggressive about adapting to climate change because people might get lazy about trying to stop climate change, to which child do we say, "Sorry, we can't provide you that mosquito net just yet because we have to teach people a lesson"? Yeah, tell me, tell me the truth. There's a saying from the civil rights movement that seems to have the ring of truth to me - "Justice delayed is justice denied." Sometimes we just have to get over ourselves.

Focusing on Infrastructure

Buddy Cleveland [Bentley] — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 13:10:00 GMT

In the aftermath of this week's tragedy in Minneapolis, a lot of attention is focused on the nation's infrastructure. As is all too often the case, it takes a catostrophic event to shed light and bring attention to important -- often life and death -- issues. In this case, most of the attention is focused on the 600,000 bridges in the U.S. But our attention can't be limited only to bridges. The state of infrastructure as a whole in the U.S. and in the world at large is of critical importance to our collective quality of life and security.

What is Infrastructure?

Before diving too far into the issues of infrastructure, it might be instructive and worthwhile to define exactly what we're talking about when we talk about infrastructure. In 2004, Steven Jones of Oxford Policy Management published the results of a study for the World Bank titled "Contribution of Infrastructure to Growth and Poverty Reduction." The purpose of the study was to "present a synthesis of the links between infrastructure development and growth, service delivery and poverty reduction." One aspect the study was a pretty convenient definition of infrastructure for this discussion. Summarizing from the report:

An infrastructure asset is a capital good that provides a service. It's the service the asset provides, not the asset per se, that is important to society. Roads and bridges provide transportation access, power plants and electrical distribution networks provide electric power, water treatment plans and water distribution networks provide clean water, and so on. The process of creating infrastructure assets is typically capitalize intensive in comparison to manufactured goods. As a result, they require a lot of planning (including design) and financing is often an issue.
Infrastructure assets are almost always intended to have long life spans -- measured in decades, if not centuries -- which has implications for the on-going expenditures for operations, maintenance, and upgrading.
Infrastructure assets are very incremental or "lumpy" because they typically provide no services until they are fully complete. You can't get 50% capacity from a bridge or power plant that is 50% complete. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, they ain't done until they're done.
Each infrastructure asset is located geographically on the earth. Not only are they fixed in a single location, the function and design of a particular asset is driven by the characteristics of the specific site -- climate, geography, available resources, connectivity to transportation, and so on. In large degree, every one is unique.

For Bentley and Bentley users, these infrastructure assets and the services they provide correspond to the Asset Classes that Bentley focuses on. But the motivation to focus on infrastructure goes well beyond any dry intellectual definition or the commercial categories to which Bentley vends its software and services. Infrastructure is absolutely fundamental to the quality of life. And we're not just talking about the latest consumer goods -- our society, our economy, our security, our ability to feed and cloth ourselves all depend directly upon the existence and quality of the infrastructure of our communities, our states, our countries and the world at large. In the developing world, how does one "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" when there no clean water, no sanitation, no means of transportation to access or deliver basic needs, and no basic security against random and brutal deaths at the hands of others? In the developed world, the impact on the national morale, psychology, economy and politics from events such as the mere threat of Y2K, September 11, the blackout in the Northeast, Hurricane Katrina and now the bridge failure in Minneapolis -- to name just a few examples -- are measurable and significant.

So how are we doing, infrastructure-wise?

If infrastructure is so important, it must be something we should be paying attention to. So how are we doing? In a word -- poorly. The basic infrastructure required to build economies that allow people grow beyond extreme poverty and subsistence living are lacking for a large portion of the world's population; investments in existing infrastructure in much of the developed world is woefully lacking; global factors such as climate change, population growth and population migration have huge consequences for the global infrastructure; and, to top it all off, we aren't graduating enough engineers and technicians to addresses today's issues, much less tomorrow's as the urgency only becomes more acute. Here are just a few tidbits:

Over the next 20 years, roughly 80% of the world's population growth with occur in countries least equipped to support it. In fact, 50% of the population growth will occur in only 9 countries, only one of which is in the developed world. By 2025, nearly 60% of the world's population, roughly 3.9 billion people, will live in cities. Read more...
Many of these urban areas will be located in coastal regions. Not only will this population growth put additional pressures on the infrastructure required to support the populations -- not to mention the impact on coastal ecosystems -- but greater numbers of people (and their required infrastructure) as risk to severe weather and other natural events, such as hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis, and so on.
By 2025, nearly half the world's population -- 4 billion people -- will face serious constraints on their ability to meet their needs for water. Today, in developing countries, over 90% of sewage and 70% of industrial waste are dumped untreated into waters that results in pollution of drinking water supplies. Today, the 200 million vehicles in the United States consume 11% of the world's daily oil production. By 2025, the number of vehicles in China will increase from 12 million to 500 million. In that same time period, the number of vehicles in India will increase from 5 million to 600 million. Read more...
Okay, enough depressing news about the developing world. How about in the developed world? We must have a handle on the situation, right? Not exactly. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) 2005 Report Card for America's Infrastructure has received national attention recently in light of the tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis. The cumulative grade in 2005 was a solid D (down from a D+ in 2003). The ASCE estimates that an investment of $1.6 trillion dollars over the next 5 years is required in order to receive passing grades in all infrastructure categories. Okay, okay -- civil engineers are notoriously conservative, so we trim a little off the investment number. Alright, the ASCE might have a bit bias and would probably like to see all civil engineers gainfully employed, so let's trim a little more. But I don't care how much you trim -- it's still a huge number.

Hmmm, it's beginning ot sound like a moral imperative...

"Man is biologically predestined to construct and inhabit a world with others. This world becomes for him the dominant and definitive reality. Its limits are set by nature, but once constructed, this world acts back upon nature. In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world the human organism itself is transformed. In the same dialectic man produces reality and thereby produces himself."

- Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann, 1966

An Infrastructure Mission

Buddy Cleveland [Bentley] — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:43:00 GMT

Read Any Good Mission Statements Lately?

I've had the opportunity to read quite a few corporate mission statements during my career. To be honest, I haven't found many to be very inspiring. Quite a sound as if they've been written by a committee, careful not to offend, limit, or exclude anyone. I've seen many where you wouldn't know what the company actually does unless you already knew about the company -- "become the leading company in this industry by producing the highest-quality products with the best service at the lowest prices ", "providing society with superior products and service - innovations and solutions that satisfy customer needs and improve the quality of life", "benefit and refresh everyone who is touched by our business", "to serve our targeted customers with the highest level of integrity and satisfaction bringing solutions that improve business operations and reduce total operating expense", and so on and so on. Huh? (BTW -- these are all actual excerpts from real mission statement from major U.S. corporations).

To my mind, if the mission statement defines the mission for all of the colleagues within a company, then it would seem -- if it's to be of any actual use or benefit -- that each colleague should be able to connect everything they do each day to that mission in a meaningful way. The mission statement sets the context (and perhaps even boundaries) within which all activities of the company should take place. Further, it needs to be a mission that's achievable. Far too many mission statements set objectives that are simply unachievable or, perhaps worse, set objectives so vague that it's impossible to know if you're actually making any progress. In any of these cases -- unachievable, too broad, too vague -- the mission statement becomes completely meaningless, destined for the proverbial round file.

Bentley's Infrastructure Mission

All this brings us to Bentley's mission statement: "To help improve the world's infrastructure." I happen to like it -- a lot. It's pretty simple in its telling, without a lot of fancy words or corporate jargon. It's certainly not self-limiting since infrastructure is everywhere in the world (well, almost, and that's part of the problem and the challenge -- more on this later) and it covers virtually everything built on the earth. On the other hand, it helps establish limits. We're not talking about helping to design cars, coffee makers, wing tip shoes, or computer chips. It doesn't set impossible objectives either. It says "help improve". To "help" is to assist, so we're not doing this alone. We're taking on this mission along with our users, their clients, suppliers, and even other software companies. To "improve" is to make better, so it's incremental. We're not saying rebuild, recreate, or reinvent the world's infrastructure -- just make it better. Finally, our progress is measurable. We have the good fortune to be working within a collection of industries where "improving the world's infrastructure" is done in discrete, visible, and measureable chunks called "projects." Our users improve the world's infrastructure one project at a time and they execute these projects using our software. Every project has a beginning and an end. It has a clearly stated objective (often defined by the content they create with Bentley software). So it's usually pretty self-evident whether a project succeeded it (or not); to determine if it improved the world's infrastructure (or not); and by what degree the project succeeded (or not).

All this is good stuff, but I would argue that a mission that's large enough to be a challenge, limited and framed such that it is achievable, and well-defined enough such that progress can be measured is merely an adequate mission. A really good mission statement is one that is compelling, important, and meaningful beyond the boundaries of ourselves and our organizations. A really, really good mission statement is one that can align and focus our organization and sustain us as a vialble business while at the same time be seen as a moral imperative. Now we're talking about a mission!

So, how does Bentley's mission statement stack up in this regard? Hmmm, let's think about that...

"If you...want to understand what is driving [a person], ask yourself simply how he thinks of himself as a hero, what constitutes the framework of reference for his heroic strivings--or better...why he does not feel heroic in his life. If you...want to understand why youth opts out of the system, find out why it fails to offer them the possibility of real heroism."

- Ernest Becker, 1962