National Platform part 2

I might add that we are making inroads towards addressing the other two as well:

• Mass Adoption and Application of Off-Site Manufacturing, Automation & Mechanisation Processes and Systems
• Well Trained, Well Qualified Workforce able to use the Latest, Best Practice Technologies

The tools that enable virtual design and link the model to the systems down the supply chain within the suppliers and manufacturer base - will be key to integrating off-site manufacturing and just-in-time materials supply into the industry.

And, of course, I hope that one positive output from Build London Live is bound to be an overall increase in awareness of tools and best practices for BIM - and that this will be at least a small contribution to the overall qualification of the workforce.

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BLL - National Platform for the Built Environment

Jeff Wix has sent me a mail noting the following--

48 hours of Action Oriented Progress
In the 'ICT and Automation (ICTA) Scoping Study Report' published by Constructing Excellence for the National Platform for the Built Environment, five key research topics have been identified for the 'ICT and Automation' priority area to achieve the industry's long-term vision of itself. Three of these key topics are being directly addressed in Build London Live.

They are:

• Collaborative Prototyping to Define and Deliver Client Requirements
• Efficient, Seamless Sharing of Information Across the Built Environment Stakeholders
• Ability to Interact with Real-Time Information Regardless of Physical Location or Timezone

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Link Entry

This is little more than a redirect (!) - but Build London Live is progressing apace. If you are interested but have not gotten involved then please do so by registering online..

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Build London Live - Site Context and Design Brief

All of the preliminary info about the site on Greenwich Peninsula is now available online including a Google Maps interface, a Google Earth interface using the newly available Google Earth browser plugin, and an excellent video that shows the site context in some detail.

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Build London Live - Update

We now have a number of sponsors on board and two teams officially formed. We are just receiving details of a third team forming which is comprised entirely of US-based architects. That means so far we have a Finnish consortium versus American Architects versus a pan-Northern-European group which are taking up the design live gauntlet!

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Build London Live - Updates

The BIMStorm Build London Live event has its first sponsor and has formed its first official team.

Synchro has donated a fancy new Alienware laptop to the prize fund - guaranteed to make a BIM Designer somewhere very happy at the end of the event...

Work on the site and the detailed design brief are progressing rapidly and full details will become available on the site over the next two weeks.

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Build London Live

Asite is working with AEC3, CADVisual, and ONUMA to organise a London BIMStorm event June 24-25 to coincide with the 2nd London BuildingSmart International conference at the RIBA.

The website for BUILD LONDON LIVE was launched last week. You can register online (participation is free and includes free access to the collaborative systems) and there is a mini-blog for the event on the website as well.

Please get involved either as a designer/participant or as an observer!

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Chartered Institute of Building Innovation and Research Panel

I attended a meeting of the CIOB Innovation and Research Panel today at the CIOB headquarters in Ascot. On the way there I got to drive past Ascot Racecourse - the reconstruction of which was delivered in 2006 using Asite as the collaborative platform - so is not only a beautiful structure but one I take some small personal pride in.

The panel is the body within the CIOB charged with focusing research and development activity across the building industry and advising the UK and European government funding policies and strategies for construction. There is a cross section of contractor, consultant, and academic representation in the group and Asite has been asked to bring the perspective of collaborative working and of technology to the fray.

The meeting held my interest well despite being close to 5 hours long (which is saying something and is testament to the engagement levels of those in the room!). There was of course the enticement of getting an advance peek at the award winners for this years CIOB Innovation and Research Awards (which I shall not divulge!).. The Awards dinner is tonight (as I type these words) and so the info shall become public knowledge shortly in any case.

Of course in my recently acquired status as the father of an infant daughter I was required back at home rather than in evening attire at an awards dinner. Trade-offs must be made!

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NCCTP

I was unable to attend today's quarterly NCCTP Steering Committee meeting, which was a facilitated session run by Constructing Excellence with the goal of determining the "way forward" for the organisation and how we as a segment of the construction industry can best position ourselves to maximise our contribution to moving the industry forward. I did however get my input into the mix ahead of the meeting and I look forward to finding out what conclusions were reached.
I can see from Paul Wilkinson's twitter feed that the technical standard has survived (in what form we shall see) and that a new marketing effort has been agreed. We shall find out more in due course...

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Loughborough University

I had the pleasure last Thursday of delivering a lecture to about 60 students in two Masters Programmes in the Department of Civil and Building Engineering at Loughborough University in the Midlands. They were about 10 MSc Construction Management students and the rest third year students in the MEng Civil Engineering programme.

I spoke to them about the Egan Agenda and how it has and has not changed the industry over the last 10 years - and how collaborative working and collaboration technologies have helped to enable partnering in the construction industry. I do these kinds of lectures fairly often - as the "construction technology" company launched by Sir John to help push the Rethinking Construction agenda Asite gets these requests on a regular basis - and inevitably I end up spending a large part of my talk (two hours in this case!) speaking about contract forms and all the different ways in which companies in the industry contract with each other. I do enjoy seeing some of the keener students twig when they look at these contract forms and the relationships through the supply chain from the raw perspective of a "selling off of risk" - and start to think about the subbie to subbie to subbie (ad nauseum) relationships in that way rather than in the more touchy-feely ways which are the public face of construction contract forms.

I have yet to encounter a Masters programme student in a construction-related field who has heard of "partnering" or "collaborative" forms of contracts, so clearly there is much work to be done on pushing those into the mainstream. Turns out that the lecture was very timely as I got to the office the next day to the weekly edition of Building magazine in which the cover article was "THE PROPHET WE LOST - Who cares about Rethinking Construction now?" - about where the Egan Agenda has got to over the 10 years since the Rethinking Construction report was delivered to government. See a precis from the editor of Building here.

Of course it would not be a group of 60 university students on a Thursday morning if we didn't have one or two nodding off! I was of course in university once and so have sympathy with the poor souls stuck listening to me...

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Paper Space... Model Space... Earth Space

Avatech released an earth connector for Autocad back in January which allowed a model to be exported into the Google Earth file format (KMZ) and placed in "earth-space" using GIS coordinate data held in the model. Now they have done the same for Revit - which is Autodesk's main BIM solution in the mechanical and electrical space.

Revit also has support for the BuildingSmart IFC standard, as was confirmed to me when I put the question to Paul Stefan of Autodesk after he gave an end-of-day presentation about Revit BIM to the IT Construction Forum annual conference back in May. I know Paul from 2000 when we were colleagues at Citadon. He confirmed that Revit had "been on-board with standards since the beginning".

technorati tags:BIM, REVIT, GoogleEarth, Avatech

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Constructing Excellence - Building & Estates Forum

I spent the day yesterday at a Constructing Excellence (in the Built Environment) event held in Madejski Stadium in Reading - home to the newly promoted to the Premiership - Reading Royals.

The day was focused on collaborative working and supply chain integration and, like most CE events I have attended, was well-organised to include the right mix of presentation and interactive discussion sessions so that people were engaged more or less throughout - rather than the death by powerpoint show style which you find at far too many industry events. There was also a good mix of clients, contractors, architects, and specialists suppliers in the group. I thought the conversations were open and constructive even when people disagreed - focusing on practical experience and finding solutions as opposed to theory (in most cases). I think this reflects the ever-increasing appreciation within the industry of the importance of collaborative supply chains, a growing realisation that the impact of this way of working on our businesses must be understood before diving in and that strategic technology choices must be made in order to enable collaboration and to remain competitive.

There were a couple of other software developers at the event from the NCCTP (with which Asite is involved via the project management part of our business). There was George Stevenson from BIW and Duncan Mactear and Richard Vertigan from 4Projects, so there was a smattering of representation from solutions vendors in the room both to learn from what the user community is saying today and to provide some real-world perspective on collaboration implementations to those who are new to the game or looking to move to the next level.

All in all an interesting day. For those UK industry readers who are not aware of CE - I would encourage you to check it out and get involved at some level. As an organisation it is doing a fine job of pulling together a lot of previously disparate research initiatives / think tanks / industry advocacy groups into one coherent body that may just be capable of making a difference to the industry overall at a real level.

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Google Earth 4

Just saw the news about the newest version of Google Earth (version 4) being released in Beta. You can download the beta and have a play from the Google Blog.

"Google Earth now covers more than 20 percent of the landmass of the entire globe with high-resolution satellite imagery (soon Google Maps will too). When we say "high resolution," we mean the good stuff: you can see cars, houses, buildings in more than 200 countries and territories. Not every house is covered, only about two billion of them. That's our best estimate, anyway — that about 1/3 of the population of the Earth can now see their homes in high-resolution."

There is also a bit of commentary from a user's perspective on this blog.

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Web 2.0 and Construction Industry Analogy

Came across this article in Monday's Bangladesh Daily Star. It is an exposition about the concepts of the collaborative web which underpin what some people have started to call "Web 2.0" - and a call to arms to the Bangladeshi IT market to grab the opportunity presented by these developments for both economic gain and for potentially driving social change. I think these are admirable goals and I wish the author the best of luck. The article is written by the CTO of a Bangladeshi company called DataSoft Systems - named Ihtisham Kabir - who spent about 20 years as an engineer at Sun Microsystems in the US before moving to Bangladesh...

I came across the article because of an analogy Ihtisham used comparing the technical building blocks of Web 2.0 to the practice of prefab in construction and to the product we all know and love called ready-mix concrete.

"An analogy from the world of building construction perhaps clarifies the distinction. Web 1.0 was like building houses from cement, sand, crushed bricks and aluminium. You had to mix cement, bricks and sand together to make concrete, then use concrete to make the house. With newer Web 2.0 technologies you effectively have concrete, prefabricated walls, corrugated iron sheets, etc to build houses. So you can make more interesting and elaborate houses than before.

Many Web 2.0 building blocks are available as open-source software products. These products are, for the most part, free to use. Further, the source code (ie, the engineering blueprint) is usually available for developers to modify as needed. Since there is a huge variety of open source software (for example, SourceForge, a repository of open source software, has over 115000 projects), the programmer can mix and match the right tools and build a program very quickly (and cheaply.)

So, continuing our construction analogy, Web 2.0 programmers not only have ready-made concrete, but it is free ready-made concrete!"

This resonates with me quite simply because of the number of times that I have used analogies from the world of building projects to explain concepts in software engineering (and vice versa) -- building software for construction and explaining construction to software developers!

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