Management Back Asswards

It has been said that "education is wasted on the young." In other words when we have the chance to learn and explore the world, we aren't old enough to understand what a great opportunity it really is. Only after we are older do we realize all the things we could of done and learned if we had only known...

Duh.

I think a corollary of this saying should be "management is wasted on the old." If you look around at any organization you will notice that most the upper management not only is "old" but it looks and thinks remarkably similar. While they all may not be “old white guys” they all seem to think like them.

I find it funny how you can walk into any company or organization in the world and ask the newest employee (after he/she has been there a few weeks) what is wrong with the it and he/she can tell you. But in 20 years time this same employee who is now in management can't.

This is because in general we only promote people who think like ourselves. By the time this young guy is promoted into upper management he is thinking just like the guys who promoted him. I think this is the main reason that the AEC/Highway industry hasn't been able to keep up with the technology. Sure everyone uses CADD today and very few current designer even know what a lead holder is (was). It is also the reason that very few of our senior management and engineers could actually use the tools they buy to design anything.

Because of this we are still printing paper plans and working in two dimensions instead of building from interactive models in three dimensions. I've been working in the Civil CADD area for over 20 odd years and we (with just a few isolated exceptions) are not doing anything with Civil CADD software that we couldn't do 20 years ago. It is such a waste. Just think were we might be today. If only. Am I the only one that feels this way?

Ubuntu and things

I have a few minutes so I thought I would test out my new firefox addon called ScribeFire.

I'm using Scribefire running on Firefox 1.5.0.12 running under Ubuntu Linux 6.06lts on an old HP pavilion 7867 computer. You know what?It runs flawlessly. It is faster, more stable and up to date than my main windows xp computer. If you haven't given Linux a spin yet I highly recommend that you download the latest Ubuntu release and give it a try. You will be glad you did. Especially if you need an addtional PC around the house or office to read email and surf the web.

About the only thing I can't do under Ubuntu that I can do under XP is run MicroStaiton or Autocad under it. My question is why not? Especially MicroStation which use to run under a varity of "unix flavors". I would even be happy with a slim down version (aka powerdraft) that would run under linux so that I could run it on slimmed down hardware like Palm's new ultra portable. Be a great cheap way to get MicroStation out into the field at a very competitive price... Anyone listening? I hope so...

CADD in 2057

For the past several weeks the editor in chief of the Inovate Daily Newletter http://www.innovateforum.com/daily has been running a series of on again off again articles on the future of CAD in the next 50 years. Since this is the kind of topic I enjoy thinking about I decided to blog about it a bit.

While I don't have the slightest idea what the future holds or where CADD will be in 2057 (for that matter I probably won't be around to care). I think it might be informative to look at where I thought CAD would be today. As the saying goes "those that don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it".

Back in 1987 when I started using, learning, supporting and talking about CAD I thought it would be much different in 20 years than it turned out to be. Other than the improvement in computer technology CAD hasn't changed very much at least in the Highway/AEC business. I have often said we are doing nothing today that we couldn't do 20 years ago... and that is really sad.

20 years ago I thought that by the year 2000 (at the latest) CAD would allow civil engineers to practice what I call "Real Time Engineering". That with the expected advances in technology, hardware and software design highway and bridge projects would be designed, built and managed concurrently. Although we have the technology, what I didn't count on or understand was the nature of the beast.

The Civil Engineering world changes slowly. It is not enough to have the ability to do things you have to have the will and drive to not only use CAD but to apply it. While we have had the CAD and computer technology for over 20 years we have never been able to change the way the Highway/Bridge/AEC community thinks and works. So even with all the wonderful tools we have at our disposal we still basically design and build highways just as we always have.

So I hope that in 50 years my "dream" of real time civil engineering comes true but if history is any indication the CAD systems of 2057 will still be stuck at the turn of the century.

2007 HEEP Area V

Just back from the HEEP Area V meeting in Budapest Hungary. Where I and my fellow "heepers" had a great time not only visiting, but discussing things with our counterparts from the the TEM Countries. I'll post a bit more later and post up a few more pictures.

I'm back

It’s been a while since I posted anything to “R Cubed” so since there doesn’t seem to be anything on TV (although it took great discipline not to watch John Wayne in The Green Berets) and I left the book I’m reading out in the car I might as well post something.  So to paraphrase my son’s famous quote “what to write? What to write?”  You see that is one problem with a blogs you have to write something now and again (as soon as those talking computers come on line look out).  

So what to write?  During the day I can think of all kinds of “heady topics” but when I get a chance to jot them down I have trouble remembering them.  Couple of things, I read a lot.  Because of all the different magazines, I read during the week I have gotten pretty good at noticing IT trends and tools before they really get popular.   A case in point is wikis and blogs – they seem to have become all the rage lately.  I was giving presentations on using them over a year ago.  Funny thing is that even though I was out in front of the curve and now that wikis are hot my organization doesn’t know they exist… so much for the prophet business.

I have talked about wikis before.  In particular a specific kind of wiki called a Tiddly Wiki.  I recently gave a short presentation at the 2006 HEEP International Conference held this past September in Williamsburg Virginia.  If you would like to take a look at it (remember power points lose a bit without my unique translation) you can download it and other HEEP presentations at

http://iheep.vdot.virginia.gov/iheep2006presentations.htm

you can find it under Thursday presentations and the title is

“Tiddly Wiki and Things – another internet technology that you never heard of but might find useful.”  

I gave two other presentations that day but I think I’ll save them for another posting.

Upgrade advice

Today it seemed like all the cadd newsletters and blogs (most of them anyway) were talking about the latest release of AutoCAD (with the catchy name of AutoCAD 2007) that is due to be released in late March.   While the pundits can’t wait, and are touting all the new 3D features I’ll lay money that the average user is thinking – “Oh shit, not another upgrade.”

Having just gone through a major upgrade at work (from MicroStation J to MicroStation V8) in 2005 I can relate.  For both users and the support staffs new versions suck.  Not that the features aren’t cool, they rarely seems worth the pain.  When you think that the average user at most uses 10-20 percent of a program’s features you have to wonder how bad we really need new ones.  I know the vendors say that the users demand them but to tell you the truth I’ve never met an average user who has ever been asked about what they need – Have you?

Unfortunately the biggest problem with a new version is all the grunt work you have to do to get them installed and running.  Not only are there general problems inherent in any new release, but it is rare that all the other programs you depend on will work with the new release out of the box -- this is where the problems really begin.  It seems to me that users tend to skip at least every other cadd release these days.  You think the vendors might take the hint…

If I could offer any advice to the cadd vendors of the about upgrades it would be this.  Stop worrying about features and make sure that when they release a new version that it solves our problems rather than creating new ones…