Ecppm 2004 wednesday morning notes¶

See the overview page for the links to the rest of my notes. First part is the opening speeches, followed by two keynotes. Attila Dikbas, conference chair

The gave an introduction on the university, which is quite old actually. The istanbul technical university (ITU) started as the royal school of naval engineering in 1773.

Raimar Scherer, Technical university Dresden

Raimar is the president of the EAPPM, the organisation behind the ecppm conferences. E{a|c}ppm is 10 years old now, so he dug out Matti Hannus's islands of automation picture as the goal of ECPPM. Integration of tools, data exchange, object oriented models, etc. were the topics of the first conference in 1994 in Dresden.

Since 2000, Lisboa, e-business and e-work has been the title of the conference, as it is a good indication of what goes on in the conferences. The current conference deals with ontologies, semantic web, context-sensitivity, ambient intelligence (=> agents, grid, P2P).

Erol Bilecik, Turkish information technology services association

Ah, Turkey is one of the countries that wants to be a knowledge economy (like the Netherlands and Australia, as I just heard from Robin Drogenmueller; let's wait for what comes out of it in practice as saying "we want a knowledge economy" and "cutting government investments in the knowledge economy" are apparently equivalent to politicians...)

Emre Aykar, vice president of Turkish contractors association

Important: he mentioned that results of our research should be available in a form that is economically affordable to the large number of small companies in order to see wide-spread addoption. Amen to that from me!

Fikret Üçcan, advisor to the prime ministery

IT transforms our lives. One of the richest people in the world owns a software company. IT changes our work, our education, our recreation. IT also, according to Fikret, allows great growth in the standard of living. IT has so much influence... At a yearly improvement in effectiveness of 5%, which is attainable in many countries, the standard of living doubles every 14 years. (To me, that sounds a tad on the optimistic side, though).

The construction industry should embrace the internet and e-business.

Keynote by John Nolan (EU commission)

Again: Europe is to become the biggest, most dynamic and competetive knowledge economy in the world. The goal isn't being achieved at the moment, so the changes have to be more radical. One of the things is that the "e-space" has to be available for "all", for instance not only to the big construction companies, but also to the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).

We should not underestimate the effect of ICT on the growth of the economy (as I doubted a bit above :-). John says that ICT provides 50% of the productivity growth in Europe.

He wants to put the users in the centre, for instance looking at different ways of interacting with ICT. Look beyond the keyboard at in/output via other channels.

Pfff, he had a whole list of things he mentioned for possible research themes. Nice ones: "conversing companies", "empowering individuals in the knowledge economy", "new forms of value creation paradigms, based on new collaborative structures accross and within organisations". (Conversing companies: read the cluetrain manifesto).

Keynote Peter Brandon (Salford university) - Making innovation happen through vectors, visions and values

A lot of hardware is converging. A mobile phone is also a camara, email device, mp3 player, etc. Similarly with software.

Malcolm Gladwell's book The tipping point talks about a tipping point when something suddenly becomes BIG. Like the internet. It must be something contagious in a period where small causes can have big effects.

What will tip the balance for the construction industry? (Yes, this "tipping" is something that he expects quite soon).

• convergence
• culture
• connectivity
• common standards
• creativity
• content
• collaborative working

One of these will tip the balance.

On another note, when a new technology gets adopted you quickly see an enormeous hype curve. After that, it drops like mad, then after a time rises again a bit to the level of its true worth. Peter thinks that vectors, visions and values are needed to close the time-gap between the hype and the period where the technology is valued for its true value.

Vectors: predominantly deterministic. Which means that they concentrate on one small aspect and suggest a new direction or solution there. But a process improvement needs to be something integrated. Vectors solve current problems on a 0-5 year timescale.

Vision: the faster you go, the stronger your headlight needs to be. Where are we going? This extrapolates on current developments and aims at a 5-15 year timescale.

Values: if we really want to change something, we should ask ourselves what we really want. This will be mostly value-oriented. Who gets power over who? Who knows what? Who (or what) decides what?