End of the AIM Fellowship work

The funded period of AIM Fellowship research has now drawn to a close, but the outputs of the work developed through the Fellowship have led directly onto a range of new data collection and analysis projects. The full details of the outputs of the Fellowship will be uploaded onto this site over the next month. To learn more about the ongoing work visit: http://www.reading.ac.uk/designinnovation

Design Innovation Research

Following a busy summer of conferences - the European Group for Organization Studies in Gotenburg; Engineering Project Organization Conference 2011 in Denver and the Academy of Management in San Antonio - I have been reading around the issues of coordination and finalising a couple of articles ahead of the new term.

BIM Buzz

There is a buzz of activity on BIM at the moment; with the recent launch of the government's BIM strategy influencing presentations at the BuildingSMART meeting this week; and a host of other activities.

Government Strategy - Construction and BIM

The UK government has recently published its Construction Strategy, and even more recently its BIM workplan, which is published through the Built Environment KTN (https://ktn.innovateuk.org/). Hence this promises to be an interesting summer. I am involved in the ICE BIM event, which will be on the 18th October, see http://www.ice-bim.com/  We also have a whole host of ongoing research projects within the Design Innovation Research Centre at the University of Reading, with international visitors such as Assist Prof Ashwin Mahalingam (IIT Madras, India) and Prof Chimay Anumba (Penn State, USA) coming to visit us over the next few months.

BIM to FM - where management practices in projects and operations meet

There is interest in the links between Building (or Infrastructure) Information Modelling (BIM) in project delivery and the client's management of the completed buildings and infrastructure. We have started to explore this in a research context, and the preliminary findings of recent work is now online as an ICE briefing sheet.

Visual practices, organizing and management

I've been in Segovia at the great workshop that Paolo Quattrone and others organized, which brought together a range of scholars interested in the role of pictures and performances in accountability and organizing. It was interesting to discover a range of other traditions of thought that address similar questions around visual practices, organizing and management.
For me, in sessions and over lunch, the question of tradition and innovation arose - not least because the setting for the conference was a converted Dominican church, founded by Dominico himself (and my hotel in Segovia had a view of a Roman acqueduct). While I have been interested for some time in how management practices create stability and change, sitting in a chapter house that has a vaulted ceiling and the initials of Isabel and Ferdinand on the roof sets a longer context, one that is not often considered in business and organization studies.

AIM Visiting International Fellows at the University of Reading

We are looking forward to welcoming Deborah Dougherty and Paul Leonardi to the University of Reading in the next couple of weeks. The related workshops are open to any UK management scholars, and to join us please email designinnovation@reading.ac.uk

Lifecycle data management and the future for architects

Over the last couple of days, there has been an event discussing the future for architects at the Royal Institution of British Architects (RIBA), and lifecycle data management at the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). The two events were both compelling, but could not have been more different. The latter, organized by Bentley, was titled BS1192, and had a range of industy leaders, from across a wide range of disciplines and parts of the industry, talking about the changing nature of delivery to meet government agendas. Sustainability was high on this agenda. The former, organised by Building Futures, focused more on the architect's role, answering three questions - who will design our built environment in 2025? what roles will those trained in architecture be doing in 2025? and how might practice change in 2025?

It is clear that to create a sustainable built environment, we need to radically change the processes through which buildings and infrastructure are designed and re-designed. Sustainability is not achievable if design and operation are disconnected. Yet, too often designers start with 'a blank sheet of paper' and end up giving too little information about their design back to end-users, owners and facility managers. In our research, we are addressing the new connections between design and use that are made possible by digital systems, with an ICE briefing sheet on value to clients through data handover, and concerns about how we learn from buildings in use, and re-design in the context of existing infrastructure, which are discussed in a recent piece on Sustainable Design in the Digital Economy, page 10 in Reading Research Review.

AIM Visiting International Fellows

The University of Reading is hosting three visits from Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) Visiting International Fellows. Early career researchers are welcome to apply to join related capacity building workshops by emailing designinnovation@reading.ac.uk. Prof Andrew Hargadon (University of California, Davis) will be at the University on 10 February 2011, Prof Deborah Dougherty (Rutgers) on 14 March 2011, and Assist Prof Paul Leonardi (NorthWestern) on 21 March 2011. Full details are at http://www.aimresearch.org/aim-events/forthcoming-events/

BIM in New York

An interesting ENR story of BIM use in New York.

The Future of Construction Management Research

I find that I am online talking about construction management research as one of the Future Footprints taking at last year's Constructions Matter conference in Copenhagen Business School.

This is not a polished, or scripted presentation, or a particularly flattering video, but if you want to know my first reaction to a set of questions about construction research, then see below.
Future Footprints 10 from REKOMMANDERET on Vimeo.

The questions about construction management research that were put to me are: What questions to abandon? What paradox to focus on? What's next? (I had a longer answer to the last question, but the editor keeps an extended version of the answer to the second question and cuts this off)

Engineering Management in the Digital Economy

Details of the presentations at the event, run at the Institution of Civil Engineers, and co-sponsored by AIM Research, are now available.

Spring 2011 - AIM visiting international fellows

Three AIM Visiting International Fellows will be visiting the University of Reading in spring 2011. These are Prof Andrew Hargadon, Prof Deborah Dougherty and Assist. Prof Paul Leonardi. All three are well published in management journals, and the University will be hosting AIM capacity building workshops for UK early career researchers in relation to these visits. The call will be out on the AIM Research website early in January 2011.

Building Information Modeling and Management

Fundamental questions about management practices are raised by the activities involved in the production and use of long-term physical assets such as buildings and infrastructure. Diverse social groups are involved in the various stages of design, delivery, maintenance, use and re-purposing. How can knowledge be sustained across these different stages?

Information technologies are increasingly seen as part of the solution. The UK government has announced its intention to increase the use building information modelling and management over the next five years. New technologies provide the potential to integrate diverse streams of data about buildings and infrastructure, through a range of CAD, GIS and asset management software solutions. We will be discussing these opportunities, and the challenges, at the 'Engineering Management in the Digital Economy' at the end of this week.

IT and the Management of Projects

Our the last few days, both at the Stanford Center for Research on Global Projects  open house, and up in Stanford Sierra at the Engineering Project Organization Society's conference, there has been a lot of interesting discussion about the delivery of global projects. The conference brings together a small set of researchers with a focus on the organization of engineering projects. The contribution that Ray Levitt and I made to the new Oxford Handbook on Project Management, which explores IT and the management of projects was initiated at the conference two years ago. this book chapter explores the new forms of project management that are breaking the mold of traditional approaches.

Links with the USA

Travelling straight from the BISRIA event on Building Information Modelling on 2nd November, I will be attending the Engineering Project Organization Conference next week. This conference, co-organized by Profs Paul Chinowsky and Ray Levitt, brings together researchers interested in a range of management, leadership and organizational issues relating to engineering projects. It also provides an opportunity to catch up with members of the international advisory board for the Design Innovation Research Centre and to visit the R&D laboratories of one of our collaborators, Bentley Systems. I will be visiting both the Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects and the Center for Integrated Facilities Management at Stanford as part of the visit, and Prof Martin Fischer will be speaking at the event on Engineering Management in the Digital Economy at the Institution of Civil Engineers and visiting the Centre in Reading in December.

Management Practices and 'BIM'

The increasing use of integrated software solutions, such as Building Information Models (BIM), on large projects has significant implications for management practices in project-based design environments. It is the focus of industry and policy-making attention, with a number of events this autumn.

On 3rd December 2010, I am hosting an event on Engineering Management in the Digital Economy: Research and Practice at the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), which is co-sponsored by AIM and the ICE. This will bring together senior practitioners and leading academics to consider how the issues encountered in leading practice can help shape research agendas; and how the outcomes of research can help inform industry and policy in this area. While the full event is invitation only, the talks will be broadcast.
The increased interest in BIM is demonstrated by increased attendance at a recent event hosted by Autodesk. Other UK events this autumn include a CPIC workshop on 2nd November (see http://www.bsria.co.uk/training-and-events/details/building-information-model-2010/#content) and CIBSE training day on BIM in building services on 2nd December (see http://www.cibsetraining.co.uk/conferences/single/1975). I am engaged in research to inform the evolving debate, working with colleagues to examine the handover of digital data to construction clients in particular. 

Open Standards, International Collaborations and Data in Construction

An interesting week catching up with colleagues in Copenhagen Business School, and with what is going on in the industry. Developments in new technologies for coordination and integration are leading to new issues for management in project-based design environments.

The Building Smart conference here drew my attention to the role of government in promoting Digital Construction in Denmark. There is an international set of delegates here, and I was particularly interested to learn about initiatives such as http://bimserver.org/ that are developing software on an open standard basis. Over the week I also had some conversations with colleagues in the USA this week, catching up on initatives such as the BIM Execution Planning Guide and a recent McGraw Hill guide to green BIM.

Connections to Danish Infrastructure Projects?

I got a boat from Harwich to Esberg and am now visiting colleagues at the Copenhagen Business School, and then hoping to catch a bit of the Building Smart conference that is going on in and around Copenhagen this week. Over the next year I am looking to understand best practice on major building and infrastructure projects in Denmark, as part of my AIM Fellowship work involves comparing UK practices to those in the USA and/or Denmark. I would be interested in hearing about any existing comparisons, or infrastructure projects that are using innovative new digital approaches to coordination.

More from the Academy

The socio-materiality professional development workshop, run by Anne-Laure Fayard, Samer Faraj and Wanda Orlikowski stimulated thinking about the relationships between material, embodied, practices and social relationships and interactions. Theorizing sociomaterial practice is important, as phenomena observed in research are difficult to understand in terms of a social realm that is separate from / outside of the material world.


Questions that I brought to the PDW are:
• How to build socio-material constructivist (as opposed to social constructivist) explanations of organizational practices?
• How to use interviews as well as observation to study digitally-enabled work through the range of situated material practices?
• How our understanding of the role of management might be reframed in/through socio-material studies?