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Strategic Positioning of IT in Construction: An Industry Leaders' Perspective' Report

The 'Strategic Positioning of IT in Construction: An Industry Leaders' Perspective' report has been published and is available through Construct IT. This report presents the analysis of a survey that was undertaken to assess the awareness and understanding of senior executives and IT directors of the UK's top contractors and consultants on three core areas:

• The strategic benefits of IT;
• The realisation of IT benefits through skills, business process and IT strategies;
• The investment decision drivers, new technologies, organisation e-readiness and financial returns.

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Spring 2008 Members' Meeting

The Construct IT CIOB CPD accredited Spring 2008 Members' Meeting was held on the 21th and 22nd May, Hilton Hotel, Warwick. The 1st day of the meeting was a facilitated workshop focused on Construction ICT Revolution! The theme for the 2nd day wasCarbon Footprint Challenge: ICT, Technology and Innovation in the Built Environment. Summary and Presentations from the event are available online ... more >

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Academic Members' Meeting 2008

Construct IT held an Academic Members' Meeting prior to the Spring 2008 Members' Meeting in Warwick, bringing together leading academics in the field of construction ICT to create a greater collective understanding of current research along with focusing on the future for construction ICT research, while exploring the opportunities for collaborative research in the UK. Presentations are available online .... more >

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Construct IT sponsors 'Best ICT Paper' at BuHu 8th International Postgraduate Research Conference

Construct IT are supporting the BuHu 8th International Postgraduate Research Conference, June 26th-27th 2008, Czech Technical University of Prague (CVUT), Czech Republic,
in contributing £100 for the postgraduate research conference prize of 'best ICT paper' .... more >

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Doctoral Research Workshop

Construct IT in conjunction with ARCOM hosted a Doctoral Research Workshop on the 14th March 2008 at the University of Salford Think Lab. Summary together with the presentations are available online .... more >

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SME Assisted Business Centre

Construct IT recently secured funding for a Business Development Portal for Construction SMEs.The aim of this project to take the first substantial step to wards establishing a seamless Construction SME assist portal with the view to lay the foundation for its cumulative development into a definitive point of reference for all Construction SMEs within the region, nationally and potentially at the international level. The project will commence with developing the hardware and software infrastructure for:

• SME Communication Information and Knowledge sharing
• SME Assist Apparatus
• SME Business Opportunity system

The project will also pave the way for the enhancement of the system to incorporate a full cooperative job management system which can be used by a number of SMEs to independently act under a Virtual Enterprise environment in order to bid for large projects and manage them to the point of delivery.

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CPD Training Course Development Workshops

Construct IT for Business (CIT) organised a workshop on the 4th October 07 to address the IT skills gap in the industry and take the issues to develop a CPD course that addresses the industry's requirements. Following the first workshop, a second workshop was organised on the 15th November 2007 with the aim of focusing on the prioritised areas (identified during the first workshop) in order to define the training requirements/needs, followed by formulating them into a set of CPD/training programme frameworks along with establishing the appropriate deliver mechanisms.Two CPD courses focused on both the Strategic/Fundementals of ICT across Construction and for Collaborative Working are currently being developed following the workshops through a CPD development industry steering committee .... more >

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Construct IT Judging

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Interoperability in the Construction Industry SmartMarket Report

The results of research conducted by McGraw-Hill Construction Analytics during late-Spring 2007, which was sponsored by nine industry associations including AIA, ICC, AGC, CURT, COAA, CMAA, CSI, SMPS, and buildingSMART Alliance, are reviewed in the Interoperability in the Construction Industry SmartMarket Report.

The goal of the study was to assess the interoperability of software applications and platforms serving the building community based on responses from a representative sample of 295 architects, engineers, contractors and owners. The study aimed to:

• Identify the types of software used most often by build team members.
• Evaluate usage of building information model software; and
• Quantify the costs and issues associated with the ability of construction project software to effectively share data or "interoperate" among applications.
• Determine usage of automated code compliance checking.
  

Download full report .... more >

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EU CoSpaces Integrated Project: Innovative Collaborative Work Environments for Design and Engineering

CoSpaces is a €14 million Integrated Project funded by the EC under the IST Programme of the FP6, which is aimed at developing organisational models and distributed technologies for collaborative workspaces for individuals and project teams within distributed virtual manufacturing enterprises enabling effective partnerships, innovation, improved productivity, and reduced design cycles. The results from CoSpaces will therefore enable effective partnerships, collaborate, be creative, improve productivity, reduce the length of design cycles and take a holistic approach to implementing product phases. This will be achieved through enhanced human communication, innovative visualisation, knowledge support and natural interaction and will transform the current working practices to be more competitive in the global market. CoSpaces proposes to validate these collaborative workspaces against three sectors: aerospace, automotive and construction. However, the impact of this research will go beyond these three sectors due to the generic nature of the technologies.

The first phase of the user requirements capture has recently been completed through a series of industrial scenarios such as aircraft maintenance, construction site support, distributed digital mock-up reviews, remote design of car parts, etc. In parallel, the general architecture of the CoSpaces platform has been defined around four components: resource management and real-time conferencing, group management, knowledge support and dynamic service management. The project team is currently in the process of setting up a distributed engineering infrastructure between the European project partners to validate the emerging CoSpaces technologies .... more >

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Manubuild: Moving Towards Open Building Manufacturing

Part-funded by the EU under Framework6, ManuBuild is a 4 year industry-led research project involving 24 partners across Europe. The project commenced in 2005 with €10 million funding and is targeting a radical breakthrough from the current 'craft and resource-based construction' to 'Open Building Manufacturing', combining ultra-efficient (ambient) manufacturing in factories and on sites with an open system for products and components offering diversity of supply in the market. The ManuBuild vision is of a future where customers will be able to purchase high quality, manufactured buildings having a high degree of design flexibility and at relatively low cost compared to today. For the first time, inspirational unconstrained building design will be combined with highly efficient industrialised production. This will be underpinned by enabling business processes, ICT systems, new materials and technologies and smart components, etc. The potential impacts of the project include significant reductions in the number of construction industry accidents, waste and the costs and time to construct buildings. This will allow Europe to improve its building stock, whilst also releasing resources that can be allocated to other income generating industrial sectors.

The work within ManuBuild started with capturing the disparate stakeholders requirements across Europe in respect of 'Open Building Manufacturing'. The stakeholders comprised the supply chain of the construction industry as well as the potential end users of manufactured dwellings. The result of stakeholders requirements were consolidated within 12 key points against which the main Research and Technological Developments RTD will be measured.
ManuBuild is a unique project in the sense that it is aiming to promote the construction industry through leading by example. Currently, the industrial partners are starting the demonstration phase of the main RTD results. These will be demonstrated using real Building projects (residential, office and educational buildings) in the UK, Spain, and Sweden .... more >

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International Workshop on Organisational e-Readiness and the Construction Industry

An International Workshop on Organisational e-Readiness and the Construction Industry was organised by the Research Institute of the Built and Human Environment (BuHu) at the University of Salford in conjunction with Construct IT from 28th-29th June 2007, Think Lab, University of Salford.

CIT participated in a two-day workshop of leading national and international researchers and practitioners to discuss the issues of organisational e-readiness. The workshop address several topics such as:

• Organisational IT/IS maturity and capability
• Barriers and enablers for IT/IS implementation and innovation
• Measuring and benchmarking IT and IS success
• Good practice cases and lessons learned
• Future directions and visioning technologies
• Future collaboration opportunities

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Uniting Construction Information

Construct IT For Business are actively engaged in the Uniting Construction Information initiative which is being embraced by the DTI to unite the various construction IT network/membership-based organisations under 'one voice' in order to work much more collaboratively, reduce industry and Government confusion, celebrate divercity while avoiding duplication and pursuing common goals .... more >

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SME Engagement

Construct IT is engaging with SMEs in the North West through the ERDF CONNECT NW project which aims to deliver new employment and assist small businesses in property, housing management, cleaning and facilities management four elements of asset skills. It focuses on creating and developing opportunities for community involvement in regional regeneration activities. The project works with four housing market renewal pathfinder areas: Central Salford, East/North Manchester, East Lancashire and Oldham/Rochdale .... more >