Data is a tool to get answers, insight and bring people together for a common purpose.

A par in golf is excellent, but when filling out a PAR (Payroll Affidavit Report), New York State/City jurisdictions do not benefit enough.

The data set they are collecting is limited and tied to nothing really, except minority reports.  By adding task and area (in some agreed upon form) to the report, government 's conceptual estimating on future projects would improve, scheduling knowledge will increase, and the Owner would now be in control of the data for Facilities Management (FM) purposes at the end of the project.  (Who installed what, when)

A PAR for us is a printed report that has data on it that gets physically sent to the governing authority and is not connected via API's, XML transfers, ODBC data dumps, .csv dumps or FTP transfers, to a an analytical database.  We send it via U.S. mail, slow postal if you know what I mean.   We do not know what the governing authorities do with the books of reports and whether they use them. (i.e. no feedback)  These huge reports are unnecessary paper with limited data.

This past Thursday I met with New York City-Queens Council Member Elizabeth Crowley to show her, and her assistant Moira McDermott, that actual, as built data about our physical in place assets, is coming, for both existing and new assets.  Councilwoman Crowley understood this reality as a woman who worked in the trades as a glazier, painter and part of DC9, the New York Painters local.   She also studied architecture in school.  Work is tracked, quality is affirmed, and the property sets installed by subcontractors are clearly defined.

We must break the ice together, let the data come out in its correct form, both timely and accurately, and grow the industry without just protecting "turfs".  

I think the delightful lady from Queens gets it, we'll see....our first carpentry job was installing  $139 worth of kitchen cabinets at the DuPont Gas Pavilion in June of 1964 at the New York World's Fair.  Now 48 years later we are buidling the core and shell of One World Trade Center (Freedom Tower), quality of perfomance, integrity and accuracy in information management matters (with nearly $10 billion of work in place).

We have the data (the check) from the Queens 1964 World's Fair project bronzed on the wall in my Dad's office.  We were known at the time as "Score Carpentry" and many people still remember us as Score.

Things are coming full circle now, there are birdies out there for all of us, if we we can just make a PAR matter! (learn the other par from watching the British Open)