🗺️Old System, New World

We're surprisingly far behind in some of the most basic, economically fundamental technologies.

Struggling to Interface in a Digital World

The 2016 paper published by NSPE, "Blockchain Technology: Implications and Opportunities for Professionals Engineers" states that, "today, the institution of professional engineering is struggling for an interface with the digital world."

It's odd to think that engineers of all people are struggling to interface in a digital world. While that is less true today than in 2016, the construction industry is still the least efficient among all businesses today.

The rate of acceleration between licensed professional regulations and the remainder of the world is staggering.

This construction industry productivity train wreck exposes us to increasing rates of risk.

Applying for a Professional Engineering License Often Requires Envelopes and Paper Checks

There are still engineering boards -whose primary responsibility is to ensure technical competence in engineering - that still require physical applications mailed with paper checks.

Have you had to dig out your checkbook for a $75 transaction lately? If so, we're willing to guess it wasn't at a place you associate with engineering?

The Security Approach Has Changed Little Since it Was Invented.

Which Stamp is Easier to Steal?

Let's qualitatively examine the security between a physical engineering stamp and a DocuSigned signature as a stamp.

• DocuSign: You'll have to pass through two-factor authentication to log in. To steal this signature, you need the password and the physical device used for the second authentication point (usually a phone).

• Physical Stamp: Google their license, buy a stamp online, and stamp a drawing.

We are not advocating DocuSign as the solution. However, this demonstrates that our industry is so far behind that we'd sooner have the system hacked than learn new engineering techniques which could solve many of our problems. Taken at its extreme, this unwillingness to act could be a violation of the first Fundamental Canon in the code of ethics.

Engineering Supervision Does Not Require Physical Proximity

A surprising number of states attempted to address the growing virtual world we live in and how that even impacts the meaning of "direct supervision." Laws today were written for offices of yesterday when an engineer was physically in the same space with the unlicensed staff.

The regulations in our industry give off a tone of either someone that genuinely wrote them in the 80s and forgot ever to update them or someone that still thinks the internet is a fad.

Either way, it is entirely untrue to say that engineering can only happen when two or more humans physically share a room during the process. Meanwhile, Twitter, Square, Facebook, and Shopify are permanent remote work companies.

A Permanent Supply & Demand Problem

Each state's laws provide authorities to organize a board of directors. The board has varying power, usually reviewing and approving licenses and issuing disciplinary actions.

With one board for each state, that leaves us with only 50 board of director groups to regulate $1.6 trillion every month in building construction. We can't expect that level of responsibility to fall on that small group of people. We have technology that can solve these problems (more on that later)

NCEES reported almost one million Professional Engineering licenses in 2021 with about $20 trillion in construction.

The number is staggering: each engineer represents something in the order of 20 million dollars of construction decisions.

Assuming we live in an ethically perfect world, this is still too much work for one person to manage directly. How can we reliably track this level of complexity in a way such that public safety is dramatically improved?

These protocols worked when the industry's technology was born onto paper and lived on writing until the completion of the project.

Our engineering design data now lives on a transistor state on some computer somewhere in the world and it's never coming back. We have to go find it.