Oct 29 2007

Goldfish coincidence

Last year, UK collaboration vendor ePin updated its website and I remarked upon its use of goldfish images. I have just been forwarded an email from Emap Glenigan, the business information people, and noted that they also employed goldfish imagery. I am none the wiser about what the images are supposed to convey – being a fish out of water isn’t usually supposed to be a good thing!

Update (30 October 2007): Flicking through IT Showcase‘s magazine this morning on my way to the tube station, I noticed that accounting software firm Mardak is using a goldfish in its display advertising – no sign of any fish on its website though. Update 2 (9 November 2007): I notice that online meeting specialist Glance Networks also employs jumping goldfish.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/goldfish-coinci/

Oct 29 2007

RICSetendering.com

RICSetender bannerAlmost exactly two years after it published its own guidance note on electronic tendering (see my critique), the RICS has launched its own online tendering solution, imaginatively branded ricsetendering.com, with full-page advertisements in UK trade journal Building and banner ads on Building‘s website this month.

The solution is run on the OGC framework platform provided by BravoSolution (part of Italcementi), and is managed by Building Cost Information Service – a commercial arm of RICS. The OGC link will obviously appeal to many public sector organizations, and to those dealing extensively with the public sector, while the RICS endorsement will obviously count for a lot among some QSs.

To use RICS eTendering for tendering purposes, you need to register as a buyer, and the service is based on a pay-per-tender basis at a cost of £500 per tender (plus VAT). Training is available – in-house training is provided at £900 per day, though there’s a special offer of a full day’s free training, worth £900, until 31 December 2007; workshop courses are also available priced at £300 per delegate.

Clearly, the RICS now feels that it can overlook some of the shortcomings it originally identified with web-based e-tendering systems, such as high mobilisation costs and technology upgrade requirements (or, more likely, the counter-arguments I made back then proved correct).

This development immediately puts the RICS in direct competition with a number of established systems, including some run by established vendors of construction collaboration technologies (formerly known as ‘project extranets’), including 4Projects, Asite, BIW [my employer] and Sarcophagus – who, in May 2006, announced their own system’s compliance with the RICS guidance (see posts).

These offer one major advantage: integration. From what I can read on the RICS site, RICSetendering.com is not integrated with other project information exchanges; documents and drawings therefore need to be copied from one system to another to populate the tendering process. By contrast, BIW: Tender Manager, for example, allows teams to use the BIW collaboration platform to develop tender documentation which, once the tender process is instigated, is seamlessly, securely and confidentially accessed by potential bidders. Moreover, given the extensive take-up of collaboration platforms by many supply chain companies (both buyers and suppliers), the training requirement to use their related e-tendering tools will be much less; this is probably one reason why the RICS is pitching in some free training to get new users up to speed.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/ricsetenderingc/

Oct 29 2007

Website woes

Last week was a bit of a nightmare. The main BIW corporate website, www.biwtech.com, suddenly became unavailable due to a server problem at the hosting company used by our website designer (important note: the production servers delivering BIW’s collaboration applications are, of course, totally separate – with a different company, Attenda – and have remained online throughout).

The hosting company – Webfusion – denied it was their fault and, totally unimpressed by their obstructive and unhelpful attitude, we eventually insisted that our web designer move the site to a new hosting company – a process finally completed on Friday. There are still a few glitches, but at least it’s back up again.

I am not the only person who’s been frustrated by Webfusion, it seems. A quick surf around some of the webhosting review sites and discussion forums soon revealed a deep undercurrent of dissatisfaction. See what I mean at Tech-forums.net, webhostingjury.com, ciao.co.uk, net4nowtforum.co.uk and reviewcentre.com, for example. It’s easy to be lulled into a false sense of security by the glossy marketing promises of a hosting provider’s own website, but – as I now know – it’s also worth looking at what their customers say about them.

A website outage is obviously a problem, especially if the business is concerned with Software-as-a-Service. I made this point last year when 4Projects ‘ website went down briefly, adding (a few days later, in the context of an outage at Salesforce.com), that I might be tempting fate by talking about it. While on the subject, I did try to look at fellow collaboration provider ePin’s website over the weekend and again this morning….

Update (2100hrs GMT, 29 October): ePin’s website is back live again.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/website-woes/

Oct 26 2007

Laiserin looks at contract conflict

Jerry Laiserin is an American writer on AEC software who has written many thoughtful pieces relating to collaboration. I was therefore delighted when I read last month that he was to become a contributor to Cadalyst. I have just read his first contribution, AGC Dispute with AIA Represents Deeper Rift, and it confirms my view.

He looks underneath the roots of a dispute about a standard form of contract and identifies that the issue is more about protecting the roles of some professionals at a time when technology is offering opportunities to improve the flow and management of information within the project team. As he says: “everyone who supports ‘the way we’ve always done things’ must share responsibility for the present state of affairs“. He goes on:

“all parties … need to address … a realignment of compensation and risk to reflect the value of information added to a project by each participant. One way of correlating information and risk is to recognize that greater information reduces uncertainty. Reduced uncertainty, in turn, represents decreased risk. Therefore, as project information increases, project risk should decrease. What remains in question is whose risk is mitigated by which information created by which other parties — and how much compensation does that mitigated risk deserve?

“… As I see it, the point is that all parties to the process must bring a collaborative attitude to the task of crafting documents for a technology-driven, collaborative working environment….”

This underlines the point I make time and time again about construction collaboration: it’s 80% people and processes, only 20% technology. Contracts are a big part of that ‘process’ issue, and can seriously hamper effective collaboration, as Jerry says. However, I have witnessed UK projects which have been able to overcome some of these challenges by adopting more collaborative approaches of the kind advocated by the Latham and Egan reports in the 1990s. For example, BIW [my employer] was involved with the award-winning Andover North redevelopment project, a much admired, innovative (and still all-too-rare) project (see case study) in which, among other things, project team companies co-operated on a gain/pain-sharing basis, with all members committed to working transparently towards the achievement of a shared goal. It’s not impossible, but it does require exactly that kind of collective, collaborative attitude that Jerry talks about.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/laiserin-looks/

Oct 25 2007

Software incompatibility bar to interoperability

In the US, McGraw-Hill Construction has just published its Interoperability SmartMarket Report, providing insight into the interoperability of AEC software applications and platforms (see news release) – a key issue given that “interoperability costs add 3.1% to a typical project budget” (not dissimilar to previous US estimates – eg: back in 2004,a NIST report estimated interoperability cost the US capital facilities industry between one and two per cent of its annual turnover).

The report reviews research conducted by McGraw-Hill Construction Analytics in late Spring 2007, aiming to assess the interoperability of AEC software applications and platforms, and based on a representative sample of 295 architects, engineers, contractors and owners. The study’s major findings included:

  • Software incompatibility is the largest obstacle to interoperability.
  • Costs are another obstacle to interoperability, with the largest expenditures coming from training and time spent on translation when switching to programs allowing interoperability.
  • The costs of not improving interoperability primarily come from manual data re-entry.
  • The most frequently used interoperability software is 2-dimensional CAD. Also important are scheduling software and Business [don’t they mean ‘Building’?] Information Modeling (BIM). In fact, use of BIM is increasing so rapidly that the study foresees a “tipping point” by the end of 2008, when a majority of architects are expected to be using BIM.
  • BIM has emerged as a critical catalyst in the effort to create innovation within the building community.

Norbert W. Young, president, McGraw-Hill Construction says: “The lack of seamless flow of information – or interoperability – is one of the primary factors holding the entire industry back from quantum leaps forward. This study gives us a full picture of the real challenges we face. We need this baseline in order to map out the important work ahead to create solutions for the entire industry.”

Technorati tags: AEC, US, interoperability, NIST, BIM

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/software-incomp-2/

Oct 25 2007

Australian collaboration technology research

An article, Zavanti to analyse use of collaboration technology by the Australia Construction Industry, on Australia’s infolink website says that Zavanti (formerly Powyr) has launched a market research project designed to investigate the use of construction collaboration technologies and project extranets by the Australian construction industry.

It says the study, conducted by John Lowry from Expert Eye, aims to provide a representative, quantifiable measure of the various benefits identified by people with first hand experience of using collaboration tools on live projects, thus providing the first set of objective statistics and figures from an Australian perspective (in this respect, it sounds as though the survey will cover much the same ground as the ground-breaking UK research project undertaken by the NCCTP in 2006 – see post).

The results will form the basis of the paper which will be delivered by Lowry at the CRC for Construction Innovation 3rd international conference in Queensland in March 2008.

The survey is now available online and will be open to participants until mid November.

I had a look through the survey (hosted by surveymonkey.com – already familiar to me from submitting responses to some student projects). While it is very brief and basic (almost solely tick-box type questions), it does at least ask some of the same kinds of questions asked by my friends at Benchmark (now Redshift) when they managed the NCCTP survey. Direct comparisons will be difficult though as this project will have less control over the sample. The NCCTP project was a telephone survey and the researchers were able to screen respondents, establish roles and responsibilities, and ensure a good cross-section of different disciplines. However, put that minor niggle aside – if you are an Australian extranet user, complete the survey.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/australian-coll/

Oct 24 2007

Aconex court case – latest

Somebody asked me today if the Aconex dispute with one of its shareholders had been resolved (see previous post). The answer is no, at least not yet. Court hearings were held on 9, 10, 12, 15 and 16 October, and the next hearing is scheduled for 2 November. A final ruling may, therefore, still be some weeks away.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/aconex-court-ca/

Oct 19 2007

Facebook and BIW comparison

I had an interesting message from a BIW user and EE blog reader via Facebook. She made an interesting comparison (partly in relation to the email-type application embedded in BIW’s collaboration platform):

“This morning I … had this thought that Facebook is similar to BIW in a way. FB is heavily emphasizing usage of ‘team-mail’ (if I may:-)), whereas in the industry the team-mail is somewhat undervalued (in the little experience I’ve had). Storage on BIW can be compared to posting a video or link on the FB… Meeting management is highly developed in both!

I’m training some people in half an hour; I think I’ll attempt a little analogy with the FB, provided they now what it is.”

Of course, the phenomenal international take-up of Facebook has been heavily driven by under-30s, so provided her training group is relatively young the analogy will probably work.

Others seem to regard Facebook as a time-consuming irritation that should be banned from the workplace. UK trade paper Contract Journal recently discussed the pros and cons of such social networking, and CJ’s Foreman blog has just ‘outed’ contractor Skanska for changing its policy regarding employee use of Facebook.

BTW: this is the second time in the past month that I have had people talk to me about Web 2.0 as a relevant concept for the AEC industry – just a fortnight ago, Martin Brown talked up the possibilities for virtual meetings with project stakeholders.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/facebook-and-bi/

Oct 18 2007

Synchro secures funding

Following on from my Bricsnet post about fundraising, I see that former Asite CEO Tom Dengenis is in the news again, as CEO of Synchro Ltd, which has just raised £1.2m in a fundraising round led by Catapult Venture Managers.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/synchro-secures/

Oct 18 2007

Bricsnet raises $13m

US AEC and property solutions vendor Bricsnet has announced that “existing investors have approved implementation of a $13 million capital investment plan” (reports AECcafe.com).

According to its news release, Bricsnet intends “to use the funds to enhance product development and services, and to extend its leadership in the growing market for retail, corporate and public sector real estate management systems.”

The investors are long-term Bricsnet shareholders: “four European groups and individuals: Torimbia SL, Stonefund NV, Paladin SA, and TBC SA.”

Déjà vu

This announcement sounded very familiar. No wonder. It comes almost exactly two years after Bricsnet announced a $10m fund-raising round (see here; original release no longer features on Bricsnet’s website), again by a consortium of existing shareholders. The rationale for that fundraising was strikingly similar; it would: “use the funds to enhance product development and services and extend its leadership in the rapidly growing market for corporate real estate management systems”.

The 19 October 2005 announcement followed another fundraising round earlier that year in which it raised $4m – so it would seem Bricsnet has burned its way through $14m in the two years since then.

Briscnet raised $18.4m in an IPO in 1999, but struggled during the bad old days of the dot.com boom and bust in 2001 (read about it here …), losing millions of Euros (… and here …), and raising €10m around the time it acquired Constructeo (and here).

Related posts: BricsNet, Bricsys and Vondle (22 February 2007); Busy at Bricsnet (24 October 2005)

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/bricsnet-raises/

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