By Brian Seitz on 3/28/2008 6:22 AM

Over the years various segments of work have become standardized and now follow to some level a predicable experience curve. Various white-collar work segments are now doing the same as indicated by the employment of CRM, BPM, and to some extent PLM. The question from last year's COFES on Innovation is can creativity and innovation become standardized and follow an typical experience curve (i.e., become creative on-demand)?

Read More »

By Joel Orr on 3/25/2008

On Dave Gurteen's knowledge management blog, a fascinating take on the "2.0" meme:I recently spent the whole of January in SE Asia; giving talks and running knowledge cafes in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok. As always I learnt as much as a I taught at these events.Most of us understand what Web 2.0 is all about as we move from a read-only web to a read-write or participatory web.And we are starting to come to grips with so called Enterprise 2.0 where the concept and technologies and social tools of Web 2.0 are moving from the open web into organizations.It is still early days and there are many issues to be grappled with as we try to balance the structure and stability of the old world with the more fluid and complex nature of the new.But the "2.0 meme" is starting to affect everything. In a talk in Kuala Lumpur I was asked how you implement Enterprise 2.0 and I was talking about some of the barriers when someone spoke up and said "We will never have Enterprise 2.0 until we have Managers 2.0!”...

Read More »

By Joel Orr on 3/21/2008

Amazing how even the most scientifically-minded become advocates of causes whose scientific basis still holds many open questions. There are systemic reasons for this, and they are not new, and I am very far from the first to point this out. I'm reading an anthology of editorials from Analog (formerly Astounding) Science Fiction magazine, written in the forties, fifties, and sixties, by John W. Campbell. He has much to say about the institutional need to quash alternatives--in medicine, very notably, but also in all sciences.The referenced article below points out that there is a lot of emotion behind climate issues today--but that the implications of the questionable conclusions hold regardless. This is from the American Society for Engineering Educators.Canadian editorial criticizes climate "hysterics."In a signed editorial for Canada's Daily Observer (3/20), columnist Lorrie Goldstein wrote that "[g]lobal warming is the gift...

Read More »

By Deke Smith on 3/18/2008

BIM Handbook, A Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers, Engineers and Contractors by Chuck Eastman, Paul Teicholtz, Rafael Sacks and Kathleen Liston recently published by Wiley with a forward by Jerry Laiserin is the first scholarly text of its kind for building information modeling. It covers the subject well and provides a lot of good insight as to what tools are available and what is possible today with the tools. It also takes a glimpse into the future of where this whole effort is headed. This is a fast moving target and it will also be fun to look back at this book in ten years as the baseline of what it looked like in 2008

By Deke Smith on 3/18/2008

buildingSMART alliance™ has published its second edition of the Journal of Building Information Modeling. The cover story about BIMStorm™ is by Kimon Onuma. There are other articles covering the latest concepts in this exploding industry. It will be available in PDF on the buildingSMART alliance web site (www.buildingsmartalliance.org) soon and will be in print in a couple of weeks.