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The chief value officer: enabling a better built environment?
Will Mann Editor
David Philp is the new chief value officer at Cohesive, joining forces again with Mark Bew, who he worked with on the UK BIM Taskforce. Will Mann hears from both about his new role.
What exactly does a chief value officer do? It’s the first question CM puts to David Philp, who started in this role at Cohesive Group just before Christmas, after eight years at Aecom. He was recruited by CEO Mark Bew, whose PCSG consultancy was acquired by Cohesive in 2020, and who of course worked alongside Philp on the UK BIM Taskforce in the heady early days of digital construction in the UK.
David Philp: “Our ‘value lab’ will let clients explore, map and discover journeys that put value as the north star.”
“The CVO will help create value for our clients across the life cycles of their built assets,” Philp says. “And that will go beyond simple metrics like cost, for example, ESG is key for most clients these days. Using life cycle data, we will provide a clear line of sight for our clients, so that their investments deliver the best outcomes and therefore value.
“Mark and myself are passionate about creating a better built environment. We both have an interest in ‘donut economics’, a framework for sustainable development which combines the concept of ‘social foundations’ with ‘planetary boundaries’. The CVO role will be an enabler of that.”
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So where does tech come into this? Bew explains: “We’ve been involved with tech in the construction sector for a long time. But tech has got more complicated. And for our clients, those owner-operators of assets, their businesses have become more complex, more competitive, more challenging from a regulatory viewpoint.”
Using tech to solve problems
“These CEOs need some help to understand the complications of tech. They have some knotty problems to unwind. So the CVO will help them use tech to solve these problems and release value: better fiscal, sustainability and social outcomes.
“We talk about problems clients want to solve, not tech they want to buy.”
Cohesive now employs nearly 1,000 staff and comprises nine companies, which collectively look after the entire life cycle of an asset’s data, Bew explains.
“That means investment, design management, procurement, delivery, commissioning and operations. We’re now looking to understand the value of those investments and implementations. We’re not so good at measuring things yet in this industry. We’re creating all this data, but we don’t do much with it yet.”
Bew wants to change that. The scale of Cohesive’s engagement with clients is now extending across most of the asset life cycle, he says.
“We’re finding that developers, for example, want to focus on what they’re good at, which is being developers. So, they’re outsourcing data management to us. We then supply the data which allows them to make decisions that deliver better value, such as creating more tenant services or improving their maintenance programmes.”
Value lab
Cohesive has a ‘value lab’ which clients can use to understand how investments effect outcomes.
“It will let our customers explore, map and discover journeys that put value as the north star,” says Philp. “A lot of clients are now asking how they can achieve more with their existing asset portfolios. So, we can offer them a sandpit to test ideas at the very beginning.
Mark Bew: “In construction, we need to come at problems from a different, data-driven mindset.”
“I want to cultivate curiosity. We want to engage with everyone across the life cycle of an asset – investors, estates management teams, end user groups – and find out how can we solve their problems and achieve value for them. We might say to a client, do you need a new asset? Or can you repurpose an existing building?
“And underpinning that, data will help us make informed decisions.”
Tech transformation
Bew and Philp were among the early evangelists of digital construction in the UK, a decade or more ago. How far do they think the industry has come on its tech transformation journey?
“There are cynics and there are those who think tech can do everything,” Bew says. “David’s role is to explain how tech is relevant and can help different people.
“But the tech transformation is undoubtedly happening. I was chatting with the driver of a Tesla taxi in Australia recently, and the reason their cars have been successful is because they were designed by a software company. The designers came at it from a data viewpoint, rather than a Victorian engineering mindset. Which is also why traditional car manufacturers have struggled to create electric cars. And we need to think like that in construction – come at problems from a different, data-driven mindset.”
Philp’s new role aligns with his work on the CIOB digital panel, he adds. “The CIOB has always been a great advocate of value and helped develop the value toolkit,” he says. “They’ve also been working closely with the industry’s biggest clients and are one of construction’s biggest professional bodies. So the CVO role fits very neatly with much of the CIOB’s work.”
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