Jun 11 2008

Strategy for Sustainable Construction

HM Government, in association with the Strategic Forum for Construction, has published its Strategy for Sustainable Construction (PDF, downloadable here; press release here) today.

I have had a quick scan of the 64-page document and have noted that it now refers to the impacts and opportunities associated with information and communications technologies (ICT). This topic was omitted from the draft strategy consultation paper last year, prompting a written submission from [my employer] BIW (see ICT is the key and Greener than thou posts). As a result, Chapter Five on “Innovation” now has a paragraph on ICT on page 19:

The Government Chief Information and Chief Technology Officers’ Councils have produced two toolkits for Green Information and Communications Technology (Green ICT). A Green ICT Scorecard is available to aid the review and improvement of existing installations and there is also guidance, materials and information on best practice for the construction of sustainable data centres and the procurement of Green ICT.

This paragraph has a link to the Chief Information Officer Council section of the Cabinet Office website, but there is no obvious mention of any of these Green ICT documents, and the site’s search engine does not identify them either. (Update (16 June 2008): On reflection, I think this paragraph does little to help the UK AEC industry understand how its ICT teams might be able to contribute; surely, it could have been more prescriptive? Only if you examine the separate Construction Commitments from the SFfC do you read “IT-based collaborative tools and communication technologies will be exploited”, for example.)

Over the page, on page 20, there is a list of Actions and Deliverables, and the first item relates to the National Platform for the Built Environment:

Complete and publicise the National Platform’s Strategic Research Agenda shaping medium to long term research priorities in Reduced Resource Consumption; Client orientated value; and information technology and automation. The aim is to promote awareness and engagement with the research agenda and influence Research & Development (R&D) direction and support.

This action (for the National Platform and the Knowledge Transfer Network for the Modern Built Environment) is to be completed by September 2008. I was a member of the ICT and automation working party that completed its report last year, including recommendations for wider dissemination of its findings (see my ICT in the construction industry post), so the completion actions here presumably refer to the other two elements.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/06/strategy-for-sustainable-construction/

Jun 10 2008

Sustainability Now – well, July actually

Sustainability Now, Building‘s (and Building Design‘s) latest foray into the virtual world, championed by ZeroChampion blogger Phil Clark, is set to take place from 8am to 8pm over two days early next month: 1 and 2 July.

From your home or office computer, you can visit this unique FREE online event and have the opportunity to:

  • Network with like-minded professionals;
  • Hear from industry thought leaders;
  • Visit the exhibition;
  • Take part in Q&A sessions.

Live online seminar topics include “EPCs – Surviving Them Now and Assessing their Impact” and “The Cost of the Code for Sustainable Homes”.

As a long-suffering construction industry marketeer and (latterly) an ICT enthusiast, I will be interested to see how this event works out, and what the online buzz (if any) is about it. Will we, for example, see delegates blogging and ‘tweeting’ (see post) about the event and generating further registrations, or will it be more self-contained with interaction confined to the online events and exhibitors themselves? There could also be some interesting comparisons with the Think ’08 event last month (post).

Over a month ago, with minimal marketing, the event had already achieved over 1100 registrations, and it appears to have at least half a dozen exhibitors lined up. I look forward to the website being updated over the next couple of weeks with details of more exhibitors and a fuller programme of speakers and subjects. It should be a highly topical event, particularly as the UK AEC industry and its trade press should have sustainability high on their agendas following tomorrow’s planned publication of the UK government’s strategy for sustainable construction.

Another thought: could the forthcoming BuildingSMART event or the annual IT in Construction conference also one day become virtual events?

Related post (04 June 2008): Greener Than Thou

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/06/sustainability-now-well-july-actually/

Jun 09 2008

Another collaboration blog

Thanks to an incoming link to my recent sustainability post (Greener than thou), I have found a new collaboration vendor blog. A former acquaintance of mine, Joe Croser, now “Global Marketing Director for Bentley‘s Platform Product lines and Subscription offerings” has started blogging in his own Collaboration Corner. Welcome to the blogosphere, Joe!

Related post: Another provider blog (01 May 2008)

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/06/another-collaboration-blog/

Jun 06 2008

Construction and Web 2.0

I attended a meeting of one of Constructing Excellence‘s Collaborative Working Champions groups yesterday, and one of our debates concerned discussing and communicating the benefits of collaborative working.

Some of the group were surprised that related issues (for example: Egan’s recent speech) and themes (technology, people and processes) were already being discussed on social media such as blogs, and this prompted me to show some of the other tools that could be used. After the meeting, I sent a link-filled email around the group reminding them of what we’d talked about; one recipient suggested I share it here – so (slightly edited) here it is:

… I showed a few ideas on use of social networking tools (sometimes known as Web 2.0), and may have overwhelmed some people with a stream of over-enthusiastic techno-babble, so I thought it might be useful to summarise some of the key points….

The starting point was an email linking to three blogs (isite and Extranetevolution – both written by current collaborative working champions – and Elemental), from which we progressed to talk about how we might use blogs to discuss and disseminate CW Champion messages (potential platforms here include TypePad, Blogger and WordPress, among others), and then threw Facebook into the mix. Alternatives to Facebook for managing our affairs might include Google Groups or Yahoo Groups. …

We considered airing some of our debates on existing web resources – for example, Building magazine’s forums – and we talked about the potential of online events v real events. I mentioned a recent Web 2.0 “unconference” in Ireland attended by isite’s Martin Brown – another is planned for September (see PodCampIreland) – and virtual worlds such as Second Life. I talked about social search and tagging tools (eg: Wikia, Digg and Del.icio.us) to show how social tools can be used to help edit and sort online information; Wikipedia got mentioned, of course…. We also mentioned personalized home pages (such as iGoogle), and I demonstrated a ‘social’ browser, Flock, that incorporates feeds to and from Facebook, TypePad, etc, integrations with tagging tools and, perhaps most useful of all, an RSS feed reader (ie an online tool that automatically alerts you to news from websites, blogs, etc that you have selected as being of interest – other online feed-readers are included in iGoogle, see also Newsgator and Bloglines). For those interested in ‘micro-blogging’, I also talked about Twitter – a tool that allows you to send updates via your mobile phone or various web tools – and I ‘Tweeted’ while we were outside in the car-park during the fire alarm!

To be honest, I could have gone on for longer, but – as suggested – I got the impression that some people’s eyes were beginning to glaze over with the sheer diversity of online social tools available (so I didn’t get into sharing images – Flickr, Piczo – or videos – YouTube – or mash-ups, widgets, etc, etc).

Of course, I am not suggesting that all these tools could be directly employed to manage construction projects, but – in the right context – some of them certainly could. Some architects are using Second Life, for example, and I could foresee project managers maintaining site diaries as blogs, perhaps augmented by a Twitter feed to remind themselves (and to alert followers) of things spotted while walking around their sites. In the meantime, I seem to have stimulated some interest among individuals who – until yesterday – were almost oblivious to the emergence of social networking tools (excepting Facebook and Wikipedia, of course); some even committed to setting up and using some online tools ahead of our next meeting in November. I’ll be interested to see what happens….

Related posts: Web 2.0 and construction collaboration (17 March 2008)

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/06/construction-and-web-20/

Jun 05 2008

Service-driven innovation

The SCRI Forum at the University of Salford is holding a one-day workshop entitled ‘Service-Driven Innovation’ on 26 June.

The majority of the value in our built environment is not concerned with the capital cost or even life cycle cost. It is concerned with the activities which go on inside and around our buildings. Understanding that value is generated by our built assets in this way means we need  to better understand how end users engage with our buildings. Whether it is the performance of commercial assets, such as supermarkets, which are concerned with the behaviour of  customers, or more  complex notions of value for users of schools or offices, Service-Driven Innovation looks at the issue of how we create value by truly understanding our end users and delivering built assets that meet their needs.

If this description grabs you, register on-line here. SCRI’s Norman Gilkinson tells me this event should be of interest to clients, organisational management, constructors, professionals and local authorities. It may well also appeal to those who followed the 2005 BE Valuable initiative, headed up by Richard Saxon – his report remains (for me) one of the most valuable (ha!) and thought-provoking industry documents to emerge in recent years.

Update (09 June 2008): For those of you in (or able to get to northwest England), another SCRI email tells me about a forthcoming dinner and debate on Friday 4 July:

“Smart Clients, Smart Buildings, Smart Industry: This House believes that the UK construction industry is innovative enough to deliver the projects of the future.”

After-dinner speaker will be UK TV personality Johnny Ball, once a regular fixture on children’s television, presenting popular science and technology programmes for children and young people.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/06/service-driven-innovation/

Jun 04 2008

Autodesk UK house-building research

The latest Autodesk UK press release claims an independent survey it commissioned reveals that IT – and construction collaboration technologies, in particular – will be the key to the success of the UK house-building industry (a sector currently plagued by a host of uncertainties, not least a dramatic drop in demand – see Brian Green’s recent Brickonomics posts, for example).

Autodesk’s Hard Hats and Laptops survey (no details on the size or composition of the sample) found that, despite a “typically cautious” approach to new technologies, 71% of respondents stated that IT was key to both their business and delivery to customers. The survey also uncovered inefficiencies:

  • one third of senior and middle management did not know how much their companies spent on tendering (and “46% of tendering activity costs over GBP5,000 per project”)
  • a quarter of senior management said that printing and postage costs amounted to £30,000 annually, while 31% did not know how much it was costing their company
  • 33% of middle managers had serious concerns about poor collaboration between suppliers and contractors (“42% of firms of 2,500 employees or above cited collaboration as one of their top three business issues”)
  • 48% of senior managers had major concerns about lengthy planning processes.

The survey revealed low awareness of collaboration solutions such as Autodesk Buzzsaw (and only a third of those aware of collaboration solutions had ever used them), with most (99%) still heavily reliant on email to manage information flows, despite the limitations recognised by 47% of respondents, and with 41% having issues managing the control of information, internally and externally.

No surprises in this survey, then. What it shows is a lot of, as yet, untapped demand for collaboration solutions in the housing sector – just as there is across great swathes of the UK AEC industry.

Challenging time to sell collaboration to house-builders

Like most sectors of the UK construction industry, the house-building sector is highly fragmented with a large number of small and medium-sized businesses. At the volume end of the market, several of the larger house-builders, property developers and housing associations do use construction collaboration platforms (Crest Nicholson, Ballymore, Dandara and Land Securities feature among [my employer] BIW’s customers, for example, 4Projects’ customers include John Laing Partnerships and Sanctuary Housing, and East Thames Housing Association and Notting Hill Housing are CTSpace customers), particularly for their larger-scale developments – which will often incorporate significant infrastructure works and require coordination of other non-housing elements (eg: retail, commercial, community buildings, landscaping, etc).

However, technology take-up has been much slower in other parts of the sector, partly a consequence, I think, of the relatively small scale and simplicity of many of their housing development projects. Here, house-builders may feel that a collaboration platform would be overkill for a small scheme involving just a few units of relatively simple design, constructed by a supply chain that doesn’t change much from project to project, with most of the team used to working with each other. A vendor operating in this market needs, first, to deliver a simple solution that can be readily adopted with minimum fuss by all parts of the supply chain, and then to show that the benefits (cost and time savings, quality improvements) of better information management outweigh the costs of changing the way the team has got used to communicating. This will be a difficult task at a time when house-builders, already operating at low margins, are reading headlines like:

  • Batten down the hatches here is a construction recession warning
  • Bleak Bank figures confirm downward trend in homebuyers
  • Is the UK following the US into a housing market collapse?

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/06/autodesk-uk-house-building-research/

Jun 04 2008

Greener Than Thou

CAD Insider Roopinder Tara attended last week’s Bentley bonanza in Baltimore (see my post) and, in a post Greener than Thou, has been wondering about how green a CAD company can be when, after all, its design software will be used to create edifices consuming large amounts of natural resources.

Bentley’s Joe Croser told him it’s about sustainable infrastructure:

“A green building can take the place of a not-so-green building . A roadway can be created using more environmentally friendly materials. Energy analysis can reduce thermal load and lower dependence on air conditioning. And so on.”

But, like Roopinder, I still wonder about just how green any technology can be. He talks about the Toyota Prius, for example, and all the efforts we can make to be “good green citizens”, but asks “are we doing as much as is needed?”

I take a similar view to Bentley in that I regard AEC ICT as a potential enabler of greener projects, but I think we have to recognise the significant impacts that ICT itself has on the environment.

BIW [my employer] recently contributed an article, ICT input critical in drive for greener economy, to the first issue of Eco-Executive magazine in which we outlined some of the issues.* For example, we highlighted ICT’s poor green credentials: its high demands on energy and natural resources to manufacture hardware, its high levels of energy consumption during operation, the frequent over-specification and under-utilisation of hardware, and the polluting impacts of ICT hardware disposal.

Nonetheless, we went on to argue that ICT also offers companies great opportunities to green their operations through process improvements (eg: greater re-use of information and better knowledge management), through designing buildings for sustainability, through support for home working, and – from a Software-as-a-Service (saaS) perspective – through reducing in-house ICT hosting and infrastructure costs.

SaaS-tainability

Externally-hosted, web-based solutions mean no (or low) in-house IT hosting, support and storage requirements – widespread use of SaaS applications could dramatically reduce the scale of in-house ICT resources, with a corresponding reduction in hardware, personnel, energy use and other overheads.

The SaaS approach also concentrates all the hardware and software in facilities that makes optimum use of energy to power the hardware, provide cooling, etc – ‘economies of scale’. Thus, while such server-farm facilities are very demanding in their own use of power, they will still consume less energy than customers trying to maintain their own separate ICT infrastructures.

It is also worth considering the potential impact of web-delivered applications and data on what type of devices are used by end-users. With software and associated data sitting ‘in the cloud’ (ie: hosted on a remote server and accessed via the internet), there is less requirement for users to have large numbers of processor-hungry applications and related files sitting on their hard-drives. Assuming the availability and capacity of broadband connections – especially wireless (3G, GPRS, WiMax) – continues to grow, then users may start to employ simpler, smaller, lighter and more portable devices requiring less power, less maintenance and which become obsolete less quickly. Moreover, such simpler devices are also more likely to be available for home users – making regular remote or home-working more economically viable.

And, yes, this could even extend to CAD. Earlier this year, I wrote a series of articles about the potential for CADaaS (see posts here, here and here); there are already companies (eg: Onuma) offering SaaS-based BIM (building information modelling); and just last week, I wrote about architect John Tobin’s “BIM 3.0” vision: “a net-centric database … where BIM models … are constructed and populated collaboratively in a web-hosted 3D environment accessed from anywhere.”

One final thought: When I viewed Roopinder’s post, there was an advertisement alongside it for Hewlett Packard featuring Kung Fu Panda. Ironic that a panda, one of the world’s most threatened and endangered species, its natural habitat ravaged by mankind, should appear next to a post about green technology!

(* The text is also available on BIW’s website here; the article was based on a longer paper submitted as a response to the UK government’s 2007 consultation paper on sustainable construction – see post. This paper will hopefully be developed further as part of a Wiki project organised by my friend Sarah Bowden of Arup; I will post news of this when it gets under way.)

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/06/greener-than-thou/

Jun 02 2008

Adobe starts community drive too

Last week we saw Bentley Systems establish an online BE community (see post); this week, it’s the turn of Adobe to expand its collaboration activities still further.

Webware‘s Elsa Wenzel – see Adobe Acrobat takes big online leap – says “Adobe unveiled an online community Monday with a word processor; file storage and sharing; and deep tie-ins to a newly Flash-enabled Acrobat 9”, going on to describe how “users can store files on Acrobat.com and join each other in virtual meeting rooms to share identical document views in real time”.

Recognising this as a pitch by Adobe into the SaaS v. conventional software v. hybrid versions of both kinds of Office suites battle-ground, the BBC (Adobe launches Acrobat community) says this development “pits Adobe squarely against Microsoft, Google and others keen to bridge the online and offline worlds”.

(See also Sarah Perez’s write-up at Adobe launches online Office Suite and New Flash- Enabled Acrobat 9)

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/06/adobe-starts-community-drive-too/

Jun 02 2008

Blog milestone hit by fire

From time to time I review the statistics for traffic through this blog (see October 2006 here and October 2007 here, for example), and was looking forward to a minor milestone last month, when the number of ExtranetEvolution.com pageloads for the month looked set to pass 4,000. However, a fire at The Planet data centre in Houston knocked out StatCounter.com’s servers and meant 24-30 hours of stats were lost, and – with them – my potential landmark! For the record, excluding the final hours of 31 May, the month saw 3,973 pageloads by 2,475 unique visitors.

Update (03 June 2008) – The Statcounter blog gives a fuller account of the problem. In the meantime, I checked my stats on the TypePad platform (yes, I had a back-up!). It looks like I fell short of the 4,000 pageloads mark by 13.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/06/blog-milestone-hit-by-fire/

May 30 2008

Proto-building, to BIM is to build

I have just opened the latest AECbytes newsletter and read a fantastic article by US architect John Tobin. In Proto-building: to BIM is to build, he incorporates a lucid explanation of a famous Magritte painting, lots of talk about interoperability, and some memorable analogies, stretching from CAD on steroids (BIM 1.0) through The Big Bang in Reverse (BIM 2.0) – when the diverging galaxies of designers and builders suddenly reversed direction (ie: roughly where we are today) – to Post-operability (BIM 3.0).
It’s a terrific article, describing BIM 3.0 as “a full dress rehearsal for construction”. He goes on:

The BIM 3.0 sandbox will probably be a net-centric database, one where BIM models, now proto-buildings, are constructed and populated collaboratively in a web-hosted 3D environment accessed from anywhere. All participants including contractors, trades and owner will understand how to collectively contribute through their own discipline-specific modules.  The architect’s initial proto-building will ideally have continued value throughout design, construction and fabrication efforts. It may alter form and overall content, but it will be a continuum of activity.

He knows that BIM 3.0 is a rather idealistic scenario, but argues that we need to look beyond present-day problems so we can progress towards a better BIM process – both technologically and – crucially – attitudinally. Echoing comments made by other US writers (Jerry Laiserin and Lachmi Khemlani, for example), he says:

“attitudes will also be an important ingredient, one that technology alone cannot overcome. One of the hallmarks of success in BIM 3.0 will be a cross-disciplinary attitude that looks at buildings as a shared enterprise… “

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/05/proto-building-to-bim-is-to-build/

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