The Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge: Supporting ASCE’s Grand Challenge

ASCE’s Grand Challenge to civil engineers is to significantly enhance the performance and value of infrastructure project over their lifecycles. [1] ASCE wants to drive transformational change in infrastructure projects from planning to design to project delivery. How does ASCE move from the strategic vision to the detailed implementation? The paper’s objective is to answer that question in part by highlighting the role played by proposed changes to the civil engineering knowledge framework, specifically, ASCE’s Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge (BOK) as it undergoes revision for a Third Edition. Knowledge may be the most strategically significant resource the profession can possess. The traditional view of civil engineering has always been about the importance of knowledge and its application to solve challenging problems. Civil engineering's role in the economy is to create, transfer and apply knowledge for the betterment of society. Civil engineering's ability to manage its knowledge is a result of its continuous effort to engage in learning. The authors argue that ASCE’s ability to deliver on the Grand Challenge is supported equally by its unique knowledge base and depends on the profession’s ability to create, innovate, and apply this knowledge throughout project and asset life-cycles. The roadmap to successfully answering the Grand Challenge includes (1) taking appropriate levels of risks, (2) being proactive, (3) being innovative, (4) developing, maintaining and using dynamic core competencies, (5) building sustained competitive advantages, and most important of all (6) creating value for our stakeholders. [1] The authors argue BOK3 should incorporate changes that are driven in part by a clear desire to fulfill the Grand Challenge, specifically in outcomes Design, Project Management, Risk and Uncertainty, Engineering Economics, Sustainability, and Professional Responsibilities. The BOK3 should specifically include language on how it supports the Grand Challenge. The core concept in these BOK3 changes are to recognize a knowledge-based view of future civil engineering practice where civil engineers develop solutions to the ever increasingly complexity of delivering 21st century projects. This paper discusses the specific linkage of the BOK3 to the Grand Challenge and the development of select outcomes supporting this linkage. ASCE’s Grand Challenge and other Strategic Foundations ASCE’s Grand Challenge to civil engineers is to significantly enhance the performance and value of infrastructure project over their lifecycles. [1] ASCE wants to drive transformational change in infrastructure projects from planning to design to project delivery. How does ASCE move from the strategic vision to the detailed implementation? The first part of answering this question is to look at how our concept of infrastructure and its function has evolved over the profession’s history. Infrastructure been characterized as the mechanism that delivers the "fundamental needs of society: food, water, energy, shelter, governance” and “without infrastructure, societies disintegrate and people die.” [2] As a society, Americans enjoy the use of "highway, waterway, air, and rail systems that have allowed the unparalleled mobility of people and goods. Water-borne diseases are virtually nonexistent because of water and wastewater treatment, distribution, and collection systems. In addition, telecommunications and power systems have enabled our economic growth." [3] Therefore, for any society, its economy is "inextricably linked with the infrastructure that supports it (and) the social, political, and economic structure of a society can magnify or mitigate the effects of a failure in infrastructure and vice versa." [2] In the 21st century, the complexity of these infrastructure demands will require the use of new engineering management forms such as civil infrastructure programs to align multiple projects on major objectives, transfer knowledge between projects, adapt strategies to subtle shifts in goals or objectives, mediate conflicts between project sponsors and stakeholders, and deliver more specialized forms of management controls. For large-scale societies, these demands for civil infrastructure require analogous institutions to sustain and regulate it and deliver needed infrastructure. [2] These are not all to be found in a government organization and the United States economy could not have “developed without the co-evolution of professions such as civil engineering.” [2] Civil engineering as a profession seeks to sustainably deliver programs and projects for the progressive well-being of humanity and often expresses the nation’s aspirations for its infrastructure [2]. The intent and purpose of the profession is to deliver products, services and projects in a manner that meets or exceeds stakeholder expectations thereby earning social trust and gaining recognition as environmental stewards. To generate this value and social acceptance, the civil engineering profession must be able to identify, create and continuously manage professional knowledge, the most strategically significant resource any profession can possess [4]. Therefore, the practice of the civil engineering discipline by civil engineering professionals under the overall direction of a professional society such as American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) acting as the organized civil engineering profession, impacts the health and vitality of a nation as no other profession does [5] The second part of the answer lies with the most strategically significant resource that the civil engineering profession can possess, knowledge. The traditional view of civil engineering has always been about the importance of knowledge and its application to solve challenging problems. For civil engineering, competition will become knowledge-based and the sources of the profession’s competitive advantage will shift to knowledge-based capabilities in the 21st century rather than solely from physical models or systems as it was for civil engineering in the 19th and 20th centuries [4]. The question of civil engineering being able to develop, maintain or nurture and exploit its competitive advantages in the 21st century depends on the profession’s ability to create, diffuse and utilize knowledge throughout the project life-cycle. In this sense, knowledge is central to how civil engineers practicing in project organizations and project management offices, control complexity, organize data, produce information and knowledge. This knowledge is also key to solving engineering problems, sequencing critical decisions, sharing and reusing knowledge thereby allowing the civil engineer to demonstrate mastery of the professional's role in project execution and delivery. The third part of the answer lies in the recognition that the project is the primary vehicle for successfully delivering civil infrastructure. Civil infrastructure like canals, railroads, bridges, etc. quickly became singular and substantial ventures for their sponsors. Not all succeeded in these endeavors as the state bankruptcies in the 19th canal building in the young United States demonstrated. Even at the height of the industrial revolution and rise of the modern society, less than a dozen nation states built large-scale infrastructure. Even in the 21st century, infrastructure is still viewed as a hallmark of advanced economic development. Crucially, the unique character of these undertakings marks an "explicit and deliberate disconnection from history and future" in order to create the exceptional circumstances that facilitate the accelerated delivery of this infrastructure given its heavy cost and long schedules [6] This investment also required organizations to manage the "unprecedented scale and complexity of the challenges with regard to capital investments, public attention and stakeholder participation.” [6] During the duration of this infrastructure effort, large-scale organizations must be built, and specialized labor recruited and mobilized. The sponsors must secure funding and negotiate with multiple stakeholders while contending with the daily direction of the endeavor [6]. Once the endeavor has been accomplished, the organization is dissolved in what has been termed "institutionalized termination." [6] These efforts to accomplish the national ambitions for infrastructure gave rise to the modern vision of projects and were a driving social factor in at least two ways; creating an environment which fostered first the rise of the civil infrastructure occupation and then the engineering professions as well as the related industry and professional communities. As such, the notion of project allows a society to organize and manage its infrastructure endeavor as a distinct set of given tasks, separate from the continuity of past/present/future as well as an artificial constraint on its institutional life such as a countdown clock. [7] [8] This constant pressure to deliver infrastructure effectively and efficiently has forced the development and evolution of the project as the primary vehicle used by the civil engineering profession for successfully delivering civil infrastructure. The role played by the civil engineering profession in delivering civil infrastructure for the nation's well-being requires the application of civil engineering discipline knowledge to be practiced by highly credentialed and sometimes licensed or certificated civil engineering professionals. It also requires civil engineering professionals to increasingly practice in conformance with established/codified sets of practices in the form of professional bodies of knowledge such as ASCE’s Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge. The fourth part of the answer lies in the advocacy efforts that are made by the civil engineering profession to address the Nation’s needs for its well-being in terms of civil infrastructure. One such form of expression by the eng