BE Magazine - Volume 5, Issue 1 - (Page 48) THE LAST WORD New Focus for BE Conference 2008: BEst Practices for Sustaining Infrastructure Greg Bentley Bentley CEO A s I write this, we’re at work throughout Bentley preparing an exciting new motif for this year’s BE Conference. During two-and-a-half days together in Baltimore, Md., on May 28–30, our user organizations’ decision makers and senior practitioners will network around best practices presented by Bentley software users. For the first time, many sessions will be organized within “solutions communities” aligned with your work on behalf of particular categories of infrastructure assets, such as campuses, roads, bridges, rail and transit, communications networks, factories, oil and gas, power generation, water and wastewater facilities, among others. What will be missing at BE Conference 2008, with respect to the longer BE Conferences of recent years, is hands-on Bentley Institute training. While there will be some Bentley Institute lecture-format courses in Baltimore, we are embracing a new approach and commitment to more broadly propagate the Bentley Institute learning advances that will achieve more efficient leveraging of increasingly scarce infrastructure professional resources. Our undertaking for 2008 is to bring Bentley Institute learning to you— through OnDemand eLearning and through regional training events that combine the courses of greatest interest in a particular region—rather than requiring that learners travel across the world for a comprehensive program of Bentley Institute curricula, as in prior BE Conferences. A very salutary additional benefit of the new approach for all of us will be a significant reduction in the environmental costs of training activities. I was frankly surprised at a sobering finding from Bentley’s recently conducted audit to determine our own corporate carbon footprint. More than a third of our overall energy use was expended in business travel, not including commuting! I suspect the same is true for many of your organizations, and that you will also increasingly want to limit your air travel to occasions (such as BE Conference 2008) in which in-person global interaction is truly necessary and worthwhile. So to help reduce your travel, a greater proportion and variety of Bentley Institute hands-on courses will be conducted in each region by our 2,500 plus in-place colleagues. In addition, we all should be taking ever more advantage of Bentley Institute’s “Anytime, Anyplace Learning,” most economically available through Bentley LEARN subscriptions. By way of organic innovation In my keynote at BE Conference 2007, I mentioned that in these times of resource shortages, we are increasingly impressed by your “organic innovations” that enhance project workflows and that arise continually at all levels of project work (as opposed to ostensibly valuable innovations that software vendors may impose by fiat). These best practices that arise organically tend not to be published or otherwise publicized, so it can be problematic for users working on other similar projects to learn about them, despite their merit. Fortunately, the decision makers and senior practitioners who attend the BE Conferences are generous enough to share these best practices, to the benefit of many others. The theme of BE Conference 2008 is “BEst Practices for Sustaining Infrastructure,” reflecting Bentley’s mission in providing software for the lifecycle of the world’s infrastructure, including sustaining its environment—and helping to alleviate the infrastructure professional resource bottleneck by empowering working smarter and by promoting infrastructure career opportunities. To prevail over these latest challenges, we all need to make the most of the best practices that arise from organic innovations. We now more clearly understand the limits of natural resources. Sustaining and improving the quality of human life depends upon preserving limited resources for our descendants and on reducing the unhealthy impacts of human activity on our environment. Better infrastructure must play the major role in sustaining these resources and reducing these harmful impacts. Additionally, we must be able to rely on infrastructure to mitigate the effects of severe events, both natural and man-made. As you know, compounding these challenges, infrastructure professionals are already working at what feels like full capacity. At Bentley, we are mindful of our unique capability, and thus our responsibility, to help attract students to the infrastructure professions—and at BE Conference 2008 you can take advantage of our BE Careers Network to help connect graduates with your organizations’ recruiting needs. But most immediately, it should be a priority for all of us to share with others our organically innovative best practices for accomplishing more with less. Thanks in advance for making BE Conference 2008 a breakthrough empowerment opportunity to increase our collective capacity for sustaining infrastructure. I look forward to seeing you in Baltimore at the end of May! 48 BE MAGAZINE | Volume 5, Issue 1 http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Training/OnDemand+eLearning.htm http://www.be.org/en-US/Be%20Conference/ http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Training/Learn.htm http://stream.bentley.com/mediasite/viewer/?peid=06c86f88-c583-44f3-9e31-bc6b15ecc4eb http://www.be.org/en-US/Be%20Careers/ http://www.be.org/en-US/Be%20Careers/
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