Oct 17 2007

IT and sustainable construction – 3

I spoke at yesterday’s  EMCBE Expo 2007 Construction Conference in Rockingham, Northamptonshire, on the theme of Sustainability: the IT contribution (see previous post).

Due to time constraints (more about that in a moment), I couldn’t use all the material I intended. I had brought with me a press cutting from Sunday’s Observer newspaper of this article: “Britain’s trillion-page mountain stacks up”, but it ended up staying in my briefcase. Useful quotes include:

  • Although an estimated 9 trillion pages a year are confined to computer screens, the number of printed pages stands at between 2.5 and 2.8 trillion worldwide and is predicted to grow over the next 10 years.
  • office workers throw away 45 per cent of everything they print within a day
  • British offices print up to 120 billion pieces of paper every year, the equivalent of a paper mountain more than 8,000 miles high.

I’ve stored these quotes (electronically, of course) for future use.

I also learned a valuable lesson yesterday: try not to be the last speaker – especially if others are poor at keeping to their time slots. Despite the valiant efforts of conference chairman Andrew Carpenter (Constructing Excellence), the final group of speakers all had to shave five minutes off their allotted 20 minutes. And when one of these failed to do so, I ended up having to cram a 20 minute presentation into 10.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/it-and-sustai-3/

Oct 12 2007

Email or extranet?

Despite the protestations of some Crackberry addicts who can’t leave their email alone, extranets are a far better way for people to collaborate on documents online. Rick Mosenkis of Trichys Workzone clearly shares the same view: read his The Email Alternative: Using An Extranet For Online Document Sharing. (I especially liked his point: “With an extranet, all project related documents are automatically captured within a folder dedicated to a project. … Not mixed in with the latest joke circulating around the office.”)

Related posts: More on email… , and Email compliance.

Technorati tags: email, crackberry, extranet, collaboration

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/email-or-extran/

Oct 10 2007

Extranet Evolution: two years old

The Extranet Evolution blog is now just over two years old.

Just over a year ago, I noted that June 2006 had been my first year’s peak month with 2,069 page-loads by 1,049 unique visitors (totals marginally exceeded in September 2006: 2,122 and 1,282 respectively).

Over the past year, traffic has risen further – every month saw the page download total top 2,000. Page downloads exceeded 3,000 in six separate months (peak month for page loads was January 2007, with 3,762; April was peak month for unique visitors with 2,071). The daily peak was 295 page loads, achieved on 13 December 2006.

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to visit, especially those who return regularly – my Statcounter.com stats tell me there’s over 600 of you every month!

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/extranet-evolut-2/

Oct 10 2007

Collaboration vendors on awards trail – 2

Just over a week since my post mentioning the second running of the Construction Computing Awards 2007, I have just received an email from the organisers saying that online voting for the shortlisted candidates is now under way.

Looking at the shortlists from a construction collaboration technology viewpoint, almost every NCCTP member is represented somewhere (the exceptions are Aconex and Cadweb) though some are listed in somewhat inappropriate software categories….

  • I would not say that ‘extranet’ technology would fall into the category of e-commerce, yet 4Projects and Sarcophagus (plus former NCCTP member CTSpace) feature there – alongside e-business trading platforms such as RedSkyIT’s and Causeway Tradex,
  • Asite Workspace pops up in the project planning software category (as does Autodesk Buzzsaw),
  • and Business Collaborator is in the Business IT Service Provider of the year shortlist (with BIW [my employer])

Document and content management software would appear to be a more obvious category, yet only BIW and Causeway feature (alongside six others: Union Square, Saybi, Archtype, Stortext, The Content Group and Tekton Group). Surprisingly, despite the widespread UK uptake of ‘extranets’, there is still no dedicated category.

(Sarcophagus’s Etenderer solution is shortlisted for Estimating and Valuation Product of the year, and 4Projects is also up for Product of the year and Company of the year.)

While I think the Construction Computing Show (running 21-22 November) has been a pretty good event – and will hopefully improve now that it’s being held at the Emirates Stadium instead of the Barbican – I still think the Awards lack some credibility (after last year, I have ignored them from BIW’s perspective). As I have said before (see here and in the comments here), I am not sure that online nominations and online voting are beyond manipulation (while it’s more work, I much prefer awards where each hopeful has to compile a persuasive entry, which is then evaluated by an independent panel of judges); and, given that awards dinners are devised to make a profit, there may be a temptation for organisers to juggle the categories to try and spread awards around and so sell more tables for the awards dinner (21 November – £1495 for a table for 10). Maybe, if and when the awards become more established, I will be less cynical….

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/collaboration-1/

Oct 09 2007

4Projects 2006 results

Keeping my records up-to-date, I checked on the financial results of UK construction collaboration technology vendor 4Projects for the year ending 31 March 2006 at Companies House. It seems I was a little over-optimistic about my April 2007 guess-timate for its performance….

Instead of reaching £2.7m turnover, it managed £2.291m, up 10% from its 2005 figure of £2.082m. Pre-tax profits were given as £124k, less than half the £266k achieved in 2005.

The turnover figure places it some distance behind BIW Technologies [my employer] which turned over £4.66m in the year up to 30 September 2006, and behind both the former BuildOnline (£2.793m; see CTSpace post) and Business Collaborator (£2.35m – post).

Of course, if 4Projects did indeed achieve a turnover of around £3.4m up to March 2007 (as then chairman Paul Callaghan claimed back in April) or even the £3.2m claimed in August, this amounts to significant growth: around 48% or 40%, depending on which figure you believe (both prior to 4Projects’ MBO in July, of course). But I guess we will have to wait until the March 2007 figures are lodged with Companies House to find out what the audited figures were.

Update (10 October 2007): In response to a comment from Frank Carron at Aconex, I should clarify that the graphic refers to turnover accounted for in the UK (the CTSpace figures are based on reports for BuildOnline (UK) Ltd – prior to the Citadon merger, BuildOnline (Holdings) had total international revenues of £4.2m – see May post). Aconex’s global revenues are, as previously stated, c. £4.875m, but to date only itself and, more recently, Asite have started to give a geographical breakdown of revenues (my CTSpace figures were gleaned from newspaper reports). If and when more of the vendors adopt a similar practice, I will present both global and UK-based figures.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/4projects-2006/

Oct 08 2007

Beat the post strike – collaborate online

One benefit of using a construction collaboration platform to manage a project is, of course, the reduced reliance on conventional paper-based communications. The UK’s Royal Mail is currently enduring its second 48-hour strike, so anything sent by post is going to be hugely delayed. Email and other electronic forms of communication have already taken a lot of correspondence away from the paper-based world, and strikes like this will only accelerate the trend.

Some technology vendors are also trying to take advantage of the situation: for instance, I received an email on Friday from Submit-a-Plan, proclaiming: Beat The Postal Strikes – Make Your Next Building Control Application Online. (Submit-a-Plan was specified and developed in conjunction with LABC services, is run by Resolution Data Management Ltd and is funded by UK local authorities.)

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/beat-the-post-s/

Oct 04 2007

IT and sustainable construction – 2

While I was writing yesterday’s post, an email discussion about the Draft Strategy had begun among Constructing Excellence ‘s Collaborative Working Champions (of which I am one of the latest tranche). I volunteered to start work on a paper to form part of a collective response to the consultation document (we have until 30 November to respond), and fellow blogger Martin Brown of Fairsnape dropped me a line with some of his initial ideas (and linked to my post from the Lancashire Construction Best Practice Club blog).

While my initial focus for the Expo event is deliberately quite pragmatic and short-term, I do intend to do a little future-gazing – and Martin supplied a wealth of ideas, including these nuggets:

  • “the emergence and evolution of Web 2.0, and the planned Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 and the impact that will have on the built environment… virtual meetings with all stake-holders to a project, including academic and other experts, pushing the concept of early involvement.”
  • “Accessing information today. … people in the industry need the information they want delivered; knowing that it is out there is not enough. Yet 99% of the industry do not know how to get it, so don’t.”
  • “Carbon calculators… a big issue. … Contractors and clients need a construction process calculator (If you want to collaborate on developing one then great !) This will become vital – we do not have a benchmark level for the carbons we use on site to construct the building – so how can we know we are improving? Clients are increasingly asking for this information in bids. Just what is the carbon footprint of a construction site?”
  • “FM – the move to virtual offices. Futurologists are in agreement that with a decade or so the corporate office will be mostly virtual, with a reduction in the fixed or real assets. What then the FM sector that is overly concerned with asset management? Will code become the new fm asset? Indeed will code become the new bricks and mortar?”

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/it-and-sustai-2/

Oct 03 2007

IT and sustainable construction

On 16 October, I am speaking at the EMCBE Expo 2007 Construction Conference at Rockingham in Northamptonshire, on the theme of Sustainability: the IT contribution.

This regional event includes a presentation regarding the UK government’s “Draft Strategy for Sustainable Construction”, and in prepararing my contribution, I had a look through the document to see what it said about the IT. Sadly, there is just one mention of ICT (a note listing the areas covered by BERR’s Technology Strategy Board), although the draft does at least refer to other industry initiatives which have made more explicit statements – for example, “Accelerating Change” and the 2012 Construction Commitments (see July 2006 post).

IT plays an increasingly important part in supporting construction project processes and its impact on sustainability cannot be ignored. The manufacture of IT hardware, for example, places high demands on natural resources; during use, this hardware also requires large amounts of power to support processing, cooling, etc; and disposal of hardware at the end of its (often far too short) useful life can be highly polluting. And when you take into account the significant overheads involved in keeping that hardware running, we are also talking about lots of people occupying offices which need to kept air-conditioned and well-lit, and to which people generally need to commute.

The IT industry is well aware of these issues; some online publications even devote entire sections to ‘Green IT’ (see ZDNet’s Green IT toolkit, for instance) and numerous vendors are recognising that their corporate social responsibilities must extend to mitigating the carbon footprints of their products and activities.

Looking among the UK-based construction collaboration technology vendors, for instance, Cadweb has long made claims about how using its extranet product will reduce use of paper, transport and meeting travel (read about its latest “Carbon calculator”), BIW [my employer] has also published statistics about paper savings arising from using its platform, Union Square’s Will Yandell has written to construction publications on the same theme, and ePin says it “is a CarbonNeutral® company committed to reducing its carbon emissions and those of its clients”.

I am still researching the issue and developing my presentation for 16 October, and – if time permits – I propose to write a paper on the IT contribution to sustainable construction (anyone care to contribute?).

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/it-and-sustaina-2/

Oct 02 2007

Collaboration vendors on awards trail

Last Friday, I was honoured to present the ‘Integration and Collaborative Working’ award – sponsored by BIW [my employer] – at the Constructing Excellence London and South-east England awards dinner, held in central London. The winner, by the way, was the Dartford Team (including the Highways Agency, Costain, Jacobs and Mouchel Parkman) for the A2/A282 junction improvement project – a scheme I pass quite regularly from my home in south-east London.

There are further Constructing Excellence awards to be presented at an event on 11 October (National Awards – the Dartford Team are, I believe, up for a similar award at that event) and on 30 November (the G4C New Generation Awards – targeted at people still in their early career – deadline for entries just extended to 17 October).

In the meantime, we still have the second running of the Construction Computing Awards to look forward to (being awarded on 21 November – you can view a video of last’s winners, with big ‘plugs’ for 4projects and Union Square, among others). I was recently assured by organiser Recep Saffet that lessons have been learned from last year’s running of the Awards, but this year’s awards seem, if anything, to be even slower in coming. For instance, nominations for the awards apparently closed on 10 September, with the shortlisted candidates due to be announced on 17 or 25 September (depending on which website page you look at) – but (in early October) the website still carries no news about who’s in the running (BIW was runner-up in the Software Product of the Year category last year).

Well-run, industry awards are certainly a strong marketing opportunity. Organisers see a good opportunity to raise the profile of their publications or organisations and to reward their industry’s top performers. Hopeful entrants can be approached by the organisers to book tables at the awards dinners, and can take along existing and/or potential customers as guests in the interests of corporate hospitality – all looking forward to a celebration if they get an award. The winners can then trumpet their victories (I notice Aconex has just won a business award in Australia), and even shortlisting can be an achievement of sorts (Asite, for example, is a finalist at the British Computer Society IT industry Awards 2007 in the Best Use of Green Technology category – see press release – for its cBIM product, despite this still being at market testing stage).

Reminder: The deadline for Construction News Quality in Construction is also looming – 12 October.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/10/collaboration-v/

Sep 27 2007

Asite stops the rot

After three years of gradually dwindling turnover, UK-based construction collaboration technology vendor Asite looks like it has started to reverse the decline, mainly due to healthy revenues earned in the Middle East. Today’s Stock Exchange announcement of its interim results for the six months ended 30 June 2007 show gross revenues up 19% to £0.854m (from £0.719m for the same period in 2006), while its pre-tax loss was down 13% to £0.257m (£0.296m in 2006). A similar performance through to the end of 2007 would see Asite return to the levels of annual turnover it last achieved four years ago (2003: £1.697m).

For the first time, Asite has analysed its performance by geographic segment, divided into UK, UAE and Europe. The UK accounts for the lion’s share (83%) of the company’s revenues, with most of the rest arising in the fast-growing AEC market in the Middle East (15%) where it generated revenues of £124k (up from just £8k last year). Several of the other principal ‘extranet’ vendors are also targeting the Middle East – Aconex, for example, has been publishing a steady flow of news releases about wins in the region, and I know from a recent NCCTP meeting that both Cadweb and Sarcophagus (among others) have also been exploring opportunities there.

However, looking at Asite’s UK segment, revenues were up just 3% in the first half of 2006.

The financial review says “the sales pipeline remains healthy” and, after mentioning its Al Raha project win in Abu Dhabi, adds “The Group has £5.511m of contracted revenue stretching out to 2018”. This is down on the order book level (£5.811m) previously reported for the start of 2007.

Uptake of services

Use of Asite’s services continued to grow:

“In the first half of 2007, of users and organisations accessing the site rose from 24,716 and 3,457 to 29,202 and 3,818 respectively. The number of documents managed over the site has increased from 1,809,990 to 2,233,977 during the same period.”

That means 4486 new users, 361 user companies and 423,987 documents were added in the first six months.

As previously noted, Asite is still being outstripped in these respects by rival UK vendors such as BIW [my employer] and 4Projects. BIW, for instance, reports its numbers of users, etc, weekly on its website, and added 11,952 users and 1135 companies in the same period. Asite’s total user base is a third the size of BIW’s.

Related posts: UK vendor trends; Asite 2006 financials

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/09/asite-stops-the/

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