Virginia Tech Vecellio Professor of Construction and
Engineering Management Jesus de la Garza has brought in $4.5 million in research funding
to study construction-related topics and is internationally known for his work on the use
of information technology in construction management.
He is just the kind of person Anderson & Associates CEO Ken Anderson would have sought out when Professor
de la Garza joined the Tech civil engineering faculty in 1988. But he didn’t have to
– Dr. de la Garza called him. As anyone who has talked 10 minutes with Ken Anderson
knows, the A&A founder has long been proactive in using technology to improve the
efficiency of engineering practice. So when de la Garza began looking for professionals to
collaborate with, Ken Anderson’s name came up.
"We’ve been collaborating for 18 years
now," de la Garza said.
One of their first projects was a cost-estimating
system built on top of CAD design tools, enabling a preliminary estimate to be obtained as
soon as a project design was completed. They also developed early video-conferencing
capabilities together, putting cameras on computers so that A&A employees and clients
could interact personally while working on a computer application.
"This is commonplace now but it was years ahead
of what anyone else was doing then," said de la Garza.
When de la Garza received a $3.4-million grant from VDOT to monitor the cost savings
and effectiveness of the Public-Private
Transportation Act (a state program allowing unsolicited private contractors to
implement interstate highway maintenance projects), he wound up hiring A&A to evaluate
and record the condition of highways maintained by a PPTA contractor.
"We needed a consultant with engineering and
technology competencies. We selected A&A through a competitive process, based on their
technological expertise," he said.
A&A employees collect the highway-condition data
on tablet PCs; the data is transmitted to Virginia Tech for analysis and posting on the
Web in easy-to-digest, graphic form through A&A’s WebGIS system. Professor de la Garza’s
"A-team," undergraduate and graduate students play a very important role in this
end of the endeavor.
The fifth year program continued in full swing even
through 2004-2005, while de la Garza was on leave from Tech directing research funding for
the National Science Foundation’s Information Technology and
Infrastructure Systems Program. He continued to commute to Blacksburg weekly from Washington,
DC to administer the VDOT study and to meet with the nine undergraduate and graduate
students he advises. Those Friday trips put 75,000 miles on his odometer, about four
straight months of driving time or about 25 coast-to-coast trips across the U.S. -- a lot
of interstate, even for someone whose specialty is highway asset management.
