| Technology
Toppers
I have finished reading
the ENR cover story, “Ten Electronic Technologies That
Changed Construction,” and wanted to send my congratulations
to the multiple authors for accurately capturing the state
of technology in our industry today (ENR 6/21 p. 24).
It is always a difficult task to
capture all the details of any subject, let alone such a personal
subject like technology. What one person cannot live without,
another could care less about. Being that CAD may be critical
to one group in our industry, another group may think that
using Internet tools is a higher priority. Given the diverse
and complex nature of our industry, writing about technology
and its usage in an industry context is a formidable task
to say the least. This cover story does the best job that
I have read in a while of providing a synopsis, taking the
temperature if you will, of our industry’s true use of
technology. I will begin to use it as a baseline.
Hopefully continued coverage like
this will provide the continued growth of our industry’s
less mature technologies like Web-based Project Management,
Interactive, Holographic Environments and Multi-Enterprise
Workflow solutions to warrant their own sections in the future.
CM Works
Scotland’s auditor
general may feel that construction management is not an appropriate
strategy for public projects but public owners in the U.S.
have had a very different experience (ENR 7/19 p. 16).
The U.S. General Services Administration,
the Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Postal Service and innumerable
state and local agencies are among the public owners who have
benefited from relying on professional construction management.
Schools, transit systems, airports, water and wastewater systems,
and other projects are all being completed more quickly, safely,
and smoothly thanks to CM.
GSA, possibly the world’s largest manager of construction
projects, strongly encourages its own personnel to pursue
CM accreditation and recognizes this designation as a positive
factor in evaluating project bidders.
The fact is, public agencies that
may build infrequently have great difficulty in maintaining
adequate construction expertise in their permanent professional
staffs. In such a setting, professional CM can make a major
contribution to saving taxpayer money and achieving the best
possible project outcomes.
The United States may be leading
the rest of the world in applying CM right now, but its value
surely will be recognized worldwide as it continues to perform
and achieve for public owners everywhere.
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