Enabling Innovation Everywhere We Go
Busy people often feel like they need to be in two or three places at one time – parents of active school age kids, hospital nurses and construction jobsite superintendents to name a few. That has been the case for the Kahua team over the last few weeks as we have participated in multiple industry events that took place the same week.
UNITED KINGDOM
At construction conferences Project Controls Expo and London Builds, we saw that the need for flexible, collaborative construction management software is truly universal.
Project Controls Expo events take place in the U.S., the U.K., Asia and Australia, bringing together an audience focused on cost and schedule. In London, it was great to speak with folks from National Grid and other utility providers about infrastructure projects taking place in the U.K. under programs similar to America’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. The creation and funding of the UK Infrastructure Investment Bank provides stability to the funding of projects important to that country achieving goals outlined in the National Infrastructure Strategy.
Kahua has a growing presence in the U.K. Our ability to work in any language or any currency allows this (Kahua is currently deployed on projects in over 60 countries), but security has become the No. 1 concern for our clients and partners everywhere. We spoke with a rep from the Royal Air Force who had recently learned about Kahua through counterparts in the U.S. Air Force. The USAF Civil Engineer Center is standardizing on Kahua and works directly with the RAF on projects in the U.K.
“When it comes to cloud computing, we cannot compromise, and what Kahua has done for our counterparts in the U.S. and Canada is very impressive.” — RAF Construction Rep
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CANADA
In Toronto last month, I joined our Canadian business team for Infraday Central Canada, which featured over 30 infrastructure agencies in discussions on the future of infrastructure, mobility and transportation in Ontario & Quebec. We were met by several Kahua partners, a couple of whom joined me on the main stage for a conversation about digital transformation.
I moderated a session titled, “The Key to a Successful Digital Transformation – Throw Out Your Requirements,” which was the brainchild of our friends at KPMG (click here to view the presentation). I was joined by Arthur Terechtchouk of Superset and Steve Risi of KPMG. Calling on their firsthand experiences, they shared best practices based on successes from previous Canadian infrastructure client projects.
“It was a pleasure to participate in a panel with KPMG and Kahua to outline our strategy and experience with digital transformations. With so many capital projects underway across Canada, it is easy to understand why ‘Digital Transformation’ is a topic the industry wants to hear about.” — Arthur Terechtchouk, CEO at Superset
Kahua’s Canadian business leader Brett Burmeister echoed the sentiments above about the value of the people on your project team.
“The audience here understands that it’s the right combination of people, processes and systems that make implementation successful. Kahua – with our partners such as KPMG and Superset – makes this possible for our Canadian clients.”
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UNITED STATES
Las Vegas hosted the Design-Build Institute of America annual conference. The crowds are back to pre-pandemic levels and enthusiastically participating in these large conferences. At DBIA, three themes echoed through the presentations: “Innovate, Educate, and Collaborate.” These are areas that resonate at Kahua.
Following one of our core principles, “Continuous Improvement,” we sent two staff members to their first big industry event.
“As a first-time attendee to DBIA, what helped me the most was visiting the booths and engaging with other vendors with curiosity. It was fascinating to learn more about the unique challenges of the construction industry and the solutions to mitigate them.” — Jessyka Evans, Industry Marketing Coordinator
“I learned from interacting with other attendees and started building relationships. It was exciting to be part of it.” — Ken Pia, Industry Marketing Manager
DBIA continues to be an important event for Kahua and our many owner and contractor clients. Which contracting method works best continues to be an important topic for our industry and Design-Build is only gaining momentum. But the consensus is that if you do not build a good team of professionals, it will not matter which contracting method you choose, and you will not have a successful project – at least not as successful as we would all hope for.
Nashville was host to this year’s Society of American Military Engineers Small Business Conference. Our government business leaders were present with many of our federal agency clients. Kahua Sales Client Executive Andrew Denney reported that the crowd was the largest ever for this event.
“It was great to see the larger MilCon community being back in person, sharing the same space together as a community of providers supporting the mission. Government agencies were out in force with representatives of varying rank attending from each organization. We heard in the keynote address that 4,500 people attended this year’s conference, an all-time record attendance for a SAME event.”
Kahua Senior Client Executive David Emfinger indicated that some of the topics are ageless and familiar to any architect/engineer/contractor audience but that the topic of cloud security is becoming increasingly important.
“A common theme across the presentations and chatter up and down the aisles was that agencies are again being tasked with doing more (funding an influx of projects for severely outdated infrastructure) with less (labor and material shortages). The only way this can happen is government working with large and small businesses to deliver and innovate.”
David also offered this insight into the fast-coming security requirements that tech providers like Kahua will need to follow.
“The most discussed item I heard on the stages and from multiple different partners and services companies was CMMC 2.0. (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification). It is a revamped certification for information technology services firms currently being re-written and expected to come out next year. It is led by the Department of Defense, but other federal and state agencies are expected to follow. Services firms will have to be certified, and they are expecting to only be able to use Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) systems.”
As the only fully functional Program Management Information System on the market which has achieved FedRAMP certification, Kahua’s clients have a leg up on the rest of the industry.
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We continue to be involved in the important groups that serve our industry because it is, after all, our industry. We are an important part of it, and we want to improve it. We will continue to report back on what we hear and see. It is just one more small way we try to enable the industry to innovate, in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and wherever else in the world Kahua is.
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