If you have visited this blog recently, you my have noticed a lack of updates. Due to pressure of other work, I was struggling to write regular posts. And a growing voluntary commitment to the …
Former UK BIM Task Group head Mark Bew, also co-founder of the PCSG consultancy business acquired by Bentley Systems in 2020, has stepped down as CEO of Bentley’s Cohesive group. The opening day of Bentley …
At an in-person London event, UK-based collaboration technology Revizto gave insights on efficiently implementing technologies. Today, Extranet Evolution is at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London, attending a briefing to learn more about Revizto, …
Thanks to mobile apps such as Buildiro, Skrap and now TeekIt, London streets are increasingly busy with deliveries of equipment and materials to construction sites, large and small. In late 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, …
UK Government is aiming to make open, standardised data drive an improved local plans system. Legislation will ensure data is delivered in consistent formats, and make some data publicly available and reusable. In June, I …
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The BBC reports Global wi-fi plan gets $22m boost, describing investment in a three-month-old Spanish – Fon – start-up aiming to build a network of broadband users to share connections wirelessly when away from home.
The article talks of ‘Foneros’, ‘Linuses’, ‘Bills’ and ‘Aliens’ in explaining the founder’s vision: "a truly broadband wireless internet everywhere". It stresses that the network requires active involvement by the leading internet service providers, as most ISPs currently ban the communal sharing of wireless internet connections. However, that does not mean to say that it doesn’t happen – whether intentionally or by accident or oversight; like some of my friends, I discovered that I could access a neighbour’s wi-fi network, and many corporate wi-fi networks extend outside the footprint of the company building. I will be watching the Fon initiative with interest.
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2006/02/fon/
"A load of old SoSaaS" is how Phil Wainewright describes SAP’s latest offering in the CRM sphere. The fundamental flaw is that SAP does not fully embrace the on-demand model at all; instead it sees the on-demand model as a way to get people to try out SAP’s application at a small-scale and then migrate to a larger – and more expensive – locally-hosted system:
"If [SAP] really wanted to deliver all of the customization capabilities that customers actually want, it would build them into the configuration options of its on-demand offering. But doing that would undermine its bread-and-butter on-premises offering."
Phil’s follow-up posting ("Big guns firing blanks at on-demand CRM") is just as dismissive. He portrays the giants of enterprise software responding to on-demand solutions by adopting a strategy of ‘running around squawking a lot with their eyes and ears covered up’. Good stuff, Phil!
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2006/02/sap_a_load_of_o/
As a postscript to Wednesday’s post, I got a mailshot today from CMP regarding The Building Performance show, this year to be run alongside M&E- The Building Services Event at London’s Olympia on 10-11 October. Despite the involvement of Firecrest’s Mike Sherrard, there is no mention at all of the PropIT show – it seems last year’s may well have been the last.
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2006/02/do_exhibitions__1/
The ‘blogosphere’ has been blasting salesforce.com, which suffered another service outage earlier this week (read, for example, Salesforce.com Customers Grouse About Outages, Salesforce.com Crashes Again and Almost the last word on salesforce.com’s outage).
There has been much talk about service level agreements (SLAs) – which salesforce.com doesnt’ offer while several of its competitors (eg: Netsuite, Salesnet and Rightnow) do. Critics of the ASP approach (adopted, of course, by most of the main construction collaboration technology – or ‘extranet’ – providers) argue that an SLA has limited value (can a one-month refund adequately compensate for the loss of business a loss of service can cause?), but at least the existence of an SLA can be a reassuring demonstration of the ASP’s good intentions.
Less laudible have been salesforce.com’s communications with its user base and industry watchers about the outages, argues Philip Wainewright in Reputation, trust and Salesforce outages.
There are still those who wonder if salesforce.com’s travails will impact on the whole SaaS sector (eg: Are Salesforce’s outages sullying the reputation of the SaaS model?). It was perhaps only logical, therefore that some of salesforce.com’s competitors showed some solidarity. For instance, here Rightnow’s CEO Greg Gianforte talks up the advantages of on-demand solutions:
"I am confident that on-demand can deliver more reliability than traditional on-premise can deliver. When an IT organization buys hardware from one vendor, database from a second vendor, firewall from a third vendor, and applications for the fourth vendor, making on-premise reliable is difficult at best. It is easy for an on-demand vendor who has done it thousands of times to deliver high reliability.”
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2006/02/another_salesfo/
It seems some newspaper and magazine publishers are getting annoyed at internet search engines and news aggregators for "unfairly exploiting their content", according to this Financial Times article – which I found thanks to Newsgator. In this instance, therefore, far from exploiting the FT‘s content, Newsgator has enabled me to view an FT article (and some adverts) that I would otherwise have missed. At this level, it seems quite a good symbiotic relationship to me.
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2006/02/search_engines_/
Last year I mused on the value of exhibitions as a B2B promotional vehicle for IT vendors. This followed a poor experience at the PropIT show at London’s Olympia, but my faith was partly restored by a more positive experience at the Construction Computing Show (see 9 November post) – an event which I understand will again take place in November 2006 (exact dates to be confirmed).
Across the Atlantic it seems some organisers are also wondering about the future of IT shows. At PR, Marketing and the Business of CAD, Rachael Dalton-Taggart discusses Reed’s decision to sell up its CAD exhibition business. I agree with her two-pronged analysis of why shows began to suffer: (a) “acceptance of the internet as a tool to understand, research and even buy products”, and (b) “the ongoing avarice of event owners” who kept prices high even after the tech bubble popped in 2001.
If trade shows are not the answer, then let’s support relevant conferences – what Rachael describes as “events where people question what the vendors are doing”:
“Vendors that are scared of honest, albeit blunt, questions, need to face up to the fact that there are perhaps areas in their technology that need more attention. No one is perfect. No software is perfect. But the only way it can get close to perfect is through questioning and discussion.”
With this in mind, think about attending some of these forthcoming events:
- Online Collaboration and Project Management Technologies Exposed, at Harvard University (see previous post), 8-9 March 2006
- The UK IT Construction Forum annual conference, 24 May 2006. Few details have been published anywhere as far as I know (it’s normally run by Emap’s events team), but it’s usually a good chance to meet some of the main UK collaboration vendors. (By the way, will the (tired) ITCF website by adopting the new look of the Constructing Excellence website – launched this week?)
- The second NCCTP annual conference – no date set as yet, but likely to be in October 2006. Last year’s was (OK, I am biassed!) excellent.
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2006/02/do_exhibitions_/
Lachmi Khemlani’s latest AEC Bytes newsletter discusses a recent US show, Technology for Construction, which included various conference sessions. Project collaboration came up as a topic (albeit renamed by the participants as "ePM, standing for electronic project management" – another abbreviation to add to the list!), and it seems US experiences are generally very positive.
The US’s General Services Administration (GSA) regards ePM as critical for large organizations needing to reduce the amount of paperwork and increase the efficiency of the multiple projects:
"Its Public Buildings Service is currently responsible for 188 major projects that add to up to $10.7 billion! Of these, it is using ePM on 27 pilot projects, including the $450 M Department of Transportation Headquarters and the $105 M WWII Memorial, both of which are located in Washington DC. No one technological solution was found to be adequate, and the GSA is currently using solutions from 7 different vendors, including Buzzsaw, Constructware, Prolog, and Tririga.
"Having a centralized repository for drawings, documents, RFIs, and submittals not [only] has the benefit of enhanced collaboration but other advantages as well: up-to-date and real-time information, faster and better communication, increased accountability of each team member, elimination of duplicate data entry, reduction in mailing and printing costs, and avoidance of disputes and claims because of the project archive.
"At the same time, there are also challenges involved in ePM implementation such as the reduced band-width at job sites, the question of who takes up the ownership and responsibility of the system, and reliability and security concerns. …
"The real key to reaping the benefits of ePM, according to Kristine Fallon Associates, is universal adoption of the system, elimination of the requirements to use paper documents, and the elimination of parallel systems."
I was pleased to read Lachmi’s concluding remarks about the whole area of technology:
"… looking at emerging technologies in construction as a whole, there seem to be three distinct movements—BIM, ePM, and smart chips. While it is terrific to see so much potential for technological improvements ahead, it is also troubling to see these technologies being developed in relative isolation rather than in conjunction with each other. What we really need are project management and collaboration tools that work with model-based design and construction processes, which in turn incorporate the smarts provided by RFID and other wireless technologies. The benefits this integration of technologies can bring to the AEC industry are mind-boggling and can hardly even be fully imagined."
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2006/01/technology_for_/
Peter Cochrane’s blog at Silicon.com often delivers some interesting insights. I liked his latest piece – Kids today – in which he describes how new generations of IT users have little or no understanding of older technologies (he gives an example of a wi-fi-savvy eight-year-old with no experience of connecting to a network).
I reckon we might, one day, be saying the same thing about software. Could we reach a point when Software as a Service (SaaS) or on-demand software becomes normal, and storing personal and corporate information in various secure online repositories is unremarkable?
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2006/01/peter_cochranes/
Reading my selected websites and blogs today, I noticed some close parallels. First, Silicon.com reports Email security firm resorts to dirty sales tricks, descibing how a salesman had emailed prospects creating doubt about a rival firm's financial security. Second, Ralph Grabowski – see CAD vs CAD, Par Deux – and Rachael Dalton-Taggart at PR, Marketing and the Business of CAD write about The attraction of Detraction, discussing the marketing tactics employed by some leading CAD vendors to draw attention away from their rival's events.
As you might expect in a relatively new market like the UK's construction collaboration technology market, competitors' salespeople have sometimes been only too happy to slag each other off in private emails to prospective customers, but it has occasionally erupted in public. In a busy 2004 autumn, I recall, first, awkward press coverage emanating from a competitor's negative and inaccurate briefing about BIW's claim for a R&D tax credit (a claim which later provided quite legitimate – see news release), then, second, 4Projects' finance director using the pages of Contract Journal to accuse BIW of having "received significant venture capital funding" (an inaccurate assertion that again led to a quickly-despatched letter to the editor, see October 2004 BIW news release).
In both the above circumstances, BIW had to respond. If it had not, readers of the original distortions might have believed they were true. BIW had to put its side of the story fast in order to protect its reputation.
Thankfully, I have had little experience of UK competitors trying to distract rivals from a BIW promotion – perhaps we are all a bit more gentleman-like or mature than the CAD vendors? Certainly, through the NCCTP, we are even capable of doing joint events – witness last year's combined stand at the Construction Computing Show and the shared event the following week: the NCCTP conference.
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2006/01/pr_marketing_an/
While some managers may be reluctant to let their staff work from home, the number of companies offering Home Computing Initiatives (HCI) schemes to employees has more than tripled in the past year (says a Silicon.com article). More than 1,250 organisations have implemented schemes, up from 380 at the same time last year, with increasing numbers of small and medium-sized businesses now beginning to participate.
I didn’t think 1,250 was particularly impressive – until I read that: "nearly half a million employees have acquired home computing equipment through HCI schemes so far". That’s pretty good going by anybody’s estimation.
A Royal Mail spokesman says the scheme has been tremendously successful in his organisation, "so much so that we believe there would be an outcry from our employees if we thought about stopping it."
The only reason I quote this remark is to say that we often hear similar things about adoption of construction collaboration technologies – usually something along the lines of "I would never want to go back to the old way of managing documents and drawings on a project". Contrary to the view sometimes expressed that people are happy working the way they are, it shows technologies can get an overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception from end-users.
Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2006/01/interest_in_hom/
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