This post explores how the building industry’s persistent mismanagement of information, through disorganized, siloed, and inconsistent data practices, undermines efficiency, transparency, and overall project success.
Data Structure and the Phone Book
I have many friends and business associates who take great delight in criticizing the building industry—and architects in particular (a bit of bashing I admittedly enjoy myself). Their complaint usually goes something like this: I can’t believe it—during a building project, stupid sh#t keeps happening. Often the same stupid sh#t happens more than once. How does this keep happening?
Crude delivery aside, the criticism has merit. The traditional building process suffers from numerous systemic problems. A full discussion would require more than a single blog post, so for now I’ll focus on one core issue: the mismanagement of information. An analogy I came up with back in the 1990s still captures the problem perfectly—and, thanks to the industry’s remarkable inertia, it remains just as relevant today.
The analogy revolves around the phone book—yes, that enormous object from a bygone era that many of us used as both a directory and a doorstop. I often used a real one to demonstrate my point.
When conversations turned to the building process, I’d toss a phone book to someone and explain that its contents represent every piece of data contained in all documents for a new project. Then we’d simulate “project data retrieval” by looking up a name, number, or address. Depending on the person, this took maybe 10–20 seconds.
Next, I’d remove the spine and spread the pages on a table, only slightly disordered. Now the search took closer to 45 seconds.
Then came the escalation: mix up the pages; cut them in half; tear them into pieces. At every stage, the task took longer. The total amount of data hadn’t changed—every bit of information was still present—but the data structure had collapsed. Minutes earlier, we could look up anything instantly. Now, thanks to the destruction of “structural integrity,” no one could predict how long it would take to retrieve even a single piece of data—if retrieval was possible at all.
Silos, Obfuscation, and Secrecy
In reality, the building process is even worse than the phone book analogy suggests. In the analogy, the data—though shredded—is always present and technically accessible. In real projects, information is often intentionally hidden. Obscuring knowledge can offer a competitive advantage, and the industry is full of walled-off data silos. Companies are frequently rewarded for guarding information, even when that secrecy harms the project.
To make matters worse, a phone book is static. Building data is not. Project information changes constantly—new inputs, new decisions, new revisions—often from dozens of different stakeholders.
To complete the analogy: it’s like trying to find a name in a phone book where all the names and numbers are constantly changing and every page has been shredded, scattered, mixed together, and hidden in a hundred different places.
So yes—the critics have a point. Welcome to the real world of building.