The RDI manifesto

Six principles for judging whether construction technology has moved from capture to evidence, action, and measured outcome.

Six rules for RDI

These principles are the test for whether a claim, workflow, or system belongs inside RDI.

01
Construction should be run from reality, not recollection.
Project decisions should start from what actually happened, not only from what was reported after the fact.
02
Evidence should be continuous, time-aligned, and location-aware.
A useful record carries enough context to support responsibility, sequence, conditions, and consequence.
03
Intelligence is not complete until it changes a decision.
Detection, search, and dashboards are incomplete if they do not help someone decide, act, close out, or learn.
04
A workflow is incomplete if evidence stops at a dashboard.
RDI requires ownership, assignment, escalation, closeout, or preserved learning when the evidence matters.
05
Value must be measured by outcomes, not feature usage.
The unit of value is the workflow outcome: confidence, evidence, capacity, risk, quality, cost, safety, or progress.
06
The framework should be open enough to critique and improve.
Shared language becomes stronger when practitioners can challenge definitions and add missing workflows.

Use these questions to test whether a technology claim is really RDI.

Test 1: Capture

What reality is captured?

Test 2: Ground Truth

What makes it trustworthy?

Test 3: Interpretation

What meaning is extracted?

Test 4: Action

What action is routed?

Test 5: Command

What outcome is measured?