Research Nation: A Visit to Finland, Part 1 Premises/FM Trends: Tririga and Peregrine Products: Up to Date with ArchiCAD 8 LaiserinLetterLetters™ Laiserin's Lemma™—Don't Try This at Home Today's Top-Level Take-Away: Behind the Curve CISCO CEO John Chambers, commenting in a recent InformationWeek interview about a nine-year study of technology-based productivity, observed that "businesses got more productivity out of systems in years four through six than in one through three, and even more in years seven through nine than in the middle years." We think this disproves the "instant gratification" theory of return on technology investment and proves that if you let your competition get ahead too far ahead of you on the technology curve, you can never catch up. JL Research Nation: A Visit to Finland, Part 1 Pinned for hundreds of years under the successive thumbs of Sweden, Imperial Russia, and Soviet Russia, Finland came late to the globalization party. However, as any competitor of Nokia mobile phones can tell you, the Finns have learned fast—with nationwide deployment of disciplined and focused methodologies for competitive advantage in both domestic and export markets. Simultaneously one of the most wired and wireless countries in the world, Finland is rapidly surging to the forefront of global innovation in building information modeling and simulation technologies through strategic alliances, partnerships, and carefully managed R&D—much of it led, sponsored, or directed through Tekes, the National Technology Agency, operating under the slogan, "Technology creates future well-being." More... Premises/FM Trends: TRIRIGA and Peregrine Once upon a time, there was managerial cost accounting, which was more boring than dust until some clever folks transformed it into the oh-so glamorous and au courant enterprise resource planning (ERP). IT asset management provider Peregrine Systems attempted to work a similar transformation on facility management (FM) by glamorizing it as infrastructure resource planning (IRP). However, the recent deal transferring Peregrine's FacilityCenter product line to intelligent building modeling vendor TRIRIGA, Inc. signaled the death of the IRP trend and a rejuvenation of the design-procure-operate building lifecycle as the strategic position of choice for the future of FM software. More... Products: Up to Date with ArchiCAD 8 It's no secret that ArchiCAD has long served as a sort of competitive benchmark for many of its AEC building modeling competitors. The latest version, announced at the recent UIA Congress in Berlin to coincide with vendor Graphisoft's twentieth anniversary, adds significant new functionality, geometry, and speed, along with notable enhancements in ease of use, ease of detailing, and ease of document production and coordination. Expected to ship in the fourth quarter of 2002, ArchiCAD 8 promises to be an upgrade worth waiting for. More... LaiserinLetterLetters™ An occasional sampling of reader electron-mail, or "keep those waves and particles pouring in, folks!" More... Laiserin's Lemma™—Don't Try This at Home In a recent commercial on US TV for a high-tech service business, a senior manager finishes mulling over a proposal and enthusiastically announces "Let's do it!"—only to be dismayed when his two consultants sheepishly reply, "We don't, um, actually do what we propose, we just propose it." This estrangement of analysis from implementation can be the downfall of any techno-centric or techno-enabled project, which is why we here at The LaiserinLetter always try to do the things we propose. Sometimes the results can be, shall we say, "interesting." More...