Names behind the numbers: Ian Pegg

While waiting for a job interview in 1977, BCIS data solutions architect Ian Pegg overheard his prospective colleagues discussing statistical questions in the next room, quietly confident he could answer them. A recent graduate with a degree in quantity surveying, Ian had spotted the job advert shortly after BCIS’s then-chief executive gave a talk at the University of Reading, where he was studying.

Almost 50 years later, Ian’s work remains part of the bedrock of the BCIS service today. It’s quite the journey, from a keen interest in computers as a teenager to helping establish one of the most important data repositories in the built environment.

‘I’d started playing with computers at school. The maths department had a link to the local council computer and I was one of a couple of guys who formed a computer club. Again, when I went to university, I took advantage of the maths department’s terminals to look at a bit of computing.

‘If you’d have asked me as a student, what would I like to do, in my grandiose plans, it would have been to computerise the construction industry. And in a tiny way, I’ve done that.’

~ Ian Pegg, data solutions architect, BCIS

Ian joined BCIS as a technical consultant, combining the early years of his career with evening classes in London to gain his professional qualification in statistics. The late nights paid off, and he became a Chartered Statistician alongside qualifying as a Chartered Surveyor.

He gained practical experience of private practice with an associated firm but spent much of his time working on BCIS’s cost and tender price indices and analyses using existing methodologies.

At BCIS, his early contributions included work on the BCIS Guide to House Rebuilding Costs in the late 1970s, which, like many of his projects, laid the groundwork for services still in use today, including the ABI/BCIS house rebuilding cost calculator. Ian recalls working with colleague Joe Martin and the Association of British Insurers to develop early models, producing basic house rebuilding cost rates for the public alongside more detailed versions for surveyors.

One of Ian’s most significant contributions was the development of BCIS Online, a service that subscribers continue to use today.

Its origins lay in a project commissioned by the Property Services Agency (PSA), then a government organisation responsible for construction and property services. The PSA asked BCIS to develop a computerised database for its cost analyses. When the project was complete, the agency offered BCIS the software, giving Ian and his colleagues the opportunity to develop it into a service for subscribers.

‘We spent quite some time working out how we could develop it into something that was useful to our subscribers. We started off with the idea that they would use a microcomputer as PCs hadn’t been invented at that point. They would connect up over a modem, interrogate the system, download the data they needed and work on it offline.

‘We therefore needed to develop some software for the microcomputer to display and manipulate the data they downloaded which turned into a significant suite of software over time. This work translated into the launch of the BCIS Online service in 1984.’

Ian went on to support successive generations of the service and the technology behind it, from early computer systems and the PDP-11/44 to MicroVAX machines, and eventually the transition to internet-based services and SQL servers.

As technology evolved, so did the opportunities to make BCIS data more accessible and meaningful to subscribers.

Ian helped develop web services that allowed BCIS data to be integrated directly into customers’ own systems via third-party software applications, removing the need to manually re-enter or import information. It was another step towards making cost data a more seamless part of everyday workflows, helping industry professionals access the information they needed without having to move between different systems.

Alongside his work developing and maintaining services, Ian has played an important role in the data and analyses underpinning them. He has also authored papers on tender price studies, the development of BCIS Online and trends in average prices, sharing his knowledge with industry audiences in the UK and internationally, including at a conference in Paris.

It’s this combination of technical expertise, statistical knowledge and understanding of the industry that has made Ian such an important part of BCIS’s development over nearly five decades.

Ian describes BCIS as one of the cogs that keeps the wider built environment turning. It’s an equally apt reflection of Ian’s own contribution behind the scenes.

Looking back to his student ambition to computerise the industry, Ian might modestly characterise his part in achieving it as ‘tiny’. But the services he has helped create, and the ways in which they have evolved, tell a different story.

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