Manufacturing a New Kind of Construction
What comes to mind when you think about modular design? Did you come up with an image of half a house on the back of a flatbed trailer, or one of a modern high rise? While most people these days still have memories of the double-wide’s on the highway, there are more and more projects appearing in unexpected places that are incorporating modular design, and in most cases you wouldn’t even know it when you see it. What makes something modular? Modular design by definition is the breaking down of...
Three Things You Should Know About Managed Services
The simplicity of the user experience that we have grown accustomed to with our smartphones and tablets is in stark contrast to the growing complexity of the cloud computing technology that makes it possible. Enterprise information technology has experienced a series of disruptions and an increasing rate of change over the last ten years that indicate we have entered into a whole new era of computing. Small wonder then that the IT shop in the typical architecture, engineering and construction...
Advancing BIM Toward “Level 3”: Compounding Benefits
Among the multitude of viewpoints regarding a “new level” of BIM aspirations, I would like to offer Bentley Systems’ perspective, as a leading software provider dedicated to “sustaining infrastructure,” on how and why the advantages at each BIM advancement can accumulate exponentially. For context, we conceptualize the many potential advances, in technology and workflow processes, as pushing out a frontier arrayed across two axes (Fig. 1). BIM strategies support better asset performance throu...
Is Green Infrastructure Diminishing Innovation?
Since the Environmental Protection Agency, and in turn state and local regulators, have gone all in on green infrastructure (GI) and low impact development (LID) concepts a seemingly regrettable consequence has emerged. Topics specific to the broader adoption and implementation of GI have monopolized our collective dialog on stormwater management of late. The predominantly positive press and barrage of GI heavy conference agendas seemingly suggest that if we apply GI far and wide then water q...
Improving Pipeline Information Sharing
On September 9, 2010, a section of natural gas pipeline in San Bruno, California, exploded leading to significant property damage and the death of 9 people. The cause of the explosion was ultimately traced to defective welds and a decision to increase the pipeline operating pressure. Legal action was taken against the operating company, and a number of its executives are facing criminal indictments. Of particular interest is the charge, under the U.S. Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act of 1968,...
Do We Still Need Geospatial Standards?
Since 1994, I have participated in, facilitated, and lead a variety of standards activities. I have helped develop standards in the OGC, OASIS, ISO, OMA, IETF, W3C – the list goes on. Given this commitment to the standards world, you might think that I have a strong bias toward the status-quo for standards development and use. Quite the opposite. Twenty years focused on interoperability and the standards that theoretically enable interoperability has caused me to constantly question the standar...
Harvesting Transparency with Location Intelligence
Today government agencies at all levels are challenged with severe resource limitation, yet they are required to foster the quality of service they offer to their respective communities. The global financial crisis made it even more difficult for state and local governments that can no longer afford to continue business as usual when it comes to serving and engaging their communities. Citizens today expect and demand more from their government. This means more collaboration and better services,...
How Micro-Location, Geofencing and Indoor Location Are Driving The Retail Revolution
Indoor Location has become the holy grail of location based-marketing, bringing consumers from their home to the closest shopping mall or retailer, greeting them with a message as they enter the mall or the store, helping them navigate indoors, send product information and special promotions as they get closer, and finally allow them to pay for the items right from their mobile. With the hype surrounding the launch of iBeacon in the Apple retail stores, proximity sensors, also called proximit...
Sensor Sensibility: Project Planning and Deployment Considerations
The wireless sensor network is fundamentally a distributed network of constrained devices. There are a host of considerations that must be taken into account when planning and implementing a wireless sensor network – considerations that are often overlooked in the lavish space in which traditional IT operates with nearly extravagant disk space, CPU and working memory. In contrast, the wireless sensor is a targeted device with limited memory, limited power, and limited processing capabilities, wh...
Wearable Computing and the Internet of Things
It is hard to go anywhere now and not see individuals or whole crowds of people staring at their “device”. I was walking past an outdoor café the other day and noticed that every single person on the patio was engaged in texting, searching and scanning. No one was talking. It is pretty obvious that wearable devices will very soon replace our “phones” which will become at most a router or local http server. Longer term they will no longer exist. While the exact format (and number) of wearable dev...
Stormwater Interview with Robert Page, P.E., Vice President, HNTB
Santa Barbara County North Branch Jail Expansion
February Issue 2026
