BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 3 - (Page 24)

BE CONFERENCE IN REVIEW Greg Bentley WATCH THE VIDEO NOW AT WWW.BE.ORG “ While “computer aiding” has enabled each desktop to perform the same work faster, the economic value of each unit of increasingly commoditized work must have gone down at least at the same rate, reﬂecting a more competitive world. Computer-aiding in merely speeding up “drawing production” was not WATCH THE parity with other business sectors sufﬁcient for VIDEO NOW AT WWW.BE.ORG that were realizing information technology beneﬁts faster. Indeed, a recent study by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation found that IT boosts sector productivity to a much greater degree when it is applied by organizations to enable innovations in their business practices. By analogy, the IT breakthroughs required for engineering services to regain its ground in economic productivity will entail comparable workﬂow and business model innovations—not so much within desktops, but rather those that span the distributed enterprises that our projects represent. And just in time, given the sudden resource squeeze, we do ﬁnally see an encouraging inﬂection in productivity, in the most recent years reported. I believe this does reﬂect some successful adoption of strategies, such as those we’ll highlight today, to leverage IT for project-level beneﬁts, rather than settling for diminishing returns in computer-aiding individual tasks. But considering the cumulative productivity gap that remains, and the perhaps related professional resource squeeze, in light of the importance of our ‘backlog,’ we must all resolve to catch up faster in applying technology’s potential. Increased Productivity Is Only Way To Meet Growing Workload I n his 2007 BE Conference keynote, Bentley CEO Greg Bentley emphasized that the backlog of infrastructure work is growing. On top of “ordinary” improvement and retroﬁt work in developed countries and basic infrastructure needs in developing regions, infrastructure professionals face pressing “extraordinary” sustainability challenges, including natural resource selfsufﬁciency and natural disaster resilience. Making these tasks all the more challenging is today’s shortage of ” engineering resources. Given the years of training required to become a productive infrastructure practitioner, there is no quick ﬁx for the comparatively low rate of new entrants joining engineering professions. The solution to these challenges is to dramatically increase economic productivity for architectural and engineering services, which according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (USBLS) has substantially lagged behind the economy at large since the mid-1990s. He added that data from the most recent years reported by USBLS indicate an inﬂection upward, which he believes reﬂects some successful adoption of IT-enabled workﬂow innovations such as those represented by the BE Award nominations and others presented in BE Conference best practices sessions. Further gains can best be achieved by prioritizing learning, extending collaboration, and fostering organic innovation. He then presented a virtual tour of BE Award nominations and other Bentley user projects that have beneﬁted from ﬁve key strategies for economic productivity: software interoperation, accelerated delivery of assets, higher-quality deliverables that are reusable, the delivery of assets with better performance and better ﬁt for purpose, and business model innovations. 24 BE MAGAZINE | Volume 4, Issue 3 http://stream.bentley.com/mediasite/viewer/?peid=06c86f88-c583-44f3-9e31-bc6b15ecc4eb

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 3

Contents Rising to the Challenge News BE Newsletter Highlights More ITS Sightings Racing Concrete Canoes Lights, Camera, Action! Making the Cut People’s Choice Awards 2007 Executive Keynotes Building Clear Vision of a Dream Concrete Results Reaching New Heights Building News From Bentley Golden KIWI Awards 2007 Civil A Coordination of National Highway Proportions Training Troops Beautifying Highways, One Sign at a Time Civil News From Bentley Geospatial Facility Facelift Planning for Uncertainty Geospatial News From Bentley MicroStation at the Heart of LiDAR Surveying Solutions Plant Making the Grade Data Deja Vu Data Clouds Provide Clear Visual of Underground Saving Precious-Metal Mining Time Plant News From Bentley Advertisers Index Special/Academic The Art of Visualization Training Is Key To Delivering State-of-the-Art Solutions Bridging the Information/Infrastructure Gap

BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 3

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