LaiserinLetterLetters
An occasional sampling of reader electron-mail, or "keep those waves and particles pouring in, folks!"

Bill Davis, president of Cyntergy Technology, makers of the innovative ThumbprintCPM software for collaborative program management, responding to IssueTwentyTwo's Top-Level Takeaway on "Anonymous Taxonomies," writes:
> Just had to add to your take-away taxonomies :
There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count and those who can't.

> Speaking of folks who can count, the diversity and capability of next-gen project or program management software tools—such as the aforementioned ThumbprintCPM and the recently released Proliance from Meridian Project Systems—are stirring renewed interest in this formerly "mature" product category.

> Lots of folks wrote in to share their reactions to The Great BIM Debate. I'll concatenate the bulk of these comments into threads on the "BIM Page". Meanwhile, here's an especially insightful response from Ken Stowe, business development manager at Autodesk:
> We at the Autodesk offices in Waltham had your debate going with pizza accompaniment in the conference room. It was fun. Not everyone stayed for the whole thing. My personal thoughts—you are doing very important work, creating an opening for every professional in our industry. When models convey project scope to the team, and rich digital information gets to the builder, dramatic improvements in performance result, and the stage is set for leaner life-cyle management. It is a very grass roots type of movement, because it takes a wide lens to see the comprehensive benefits. The next questions are: How will long will the delivery processes take to evolve to frame BIM-based legal framework? What fractional part of the model is sufficient for most of the gains with minimal risk? Will design-build companies enjoy an advantage for one or several years?

> Thanks for those kind and vendor-neutral words, Ken. Because you are well-known as a long-time proponent of intelligently integrated AEC processes, your praise means a lot. Your questions are spot on as well. Sharing partial product models is a big issue the industry needs to address, and I'll be monitoring those developments closely. Definition of legal frameworks and processes that enable rather than obstruct model-based, collaborative design is another big issue to be tackled, but one that I think must be set in the larger context of process modeling in general. Advances in BIM are solving a major subset of the product modeling problem (describing what we build), but will not be sufficient until the process modeling problem (describing how we build) has also been addressed.
JL