Going to the toilet puts UK economy down the toilet

Watercooler conversations undermine UK plc
Crosswords and Sudoko waste UK businesses £2bn a year

These are just made-up headline, of course, but I expect if you commissioned a survey into the time individuals spend not working, but chatting with their mates, reading personal emails, etc, etc, you would soon come up with some tasty headlines [...]

Web 2.0, construction and climate change

So it’s Blog Action Day and the topic is climate change. I signed up for the 10:10 campaign a while ago and following the campaign’s presentation at last week’s Be2camp@WorkingBuildings unconference, Be2camp is now also a 10:10 organisation.
This set Martin Brown wondering what we, as Web 2.0 enthusiasts in the architecture, engineering, construction and facilities [...]

Time to replace command-and-control

Through B L Ochman’s  blog, I learned about a new report on social media adoption by website usability pioneer Jakob Nielsen which says major corporations often take three to five years to incorporate collaboration tools into their intranets – but once they do, and once they change their command and control corporate culture, positive change [...]

Trends lend support to need for AEC Web 2.0 adoption

An excellent article in American journal Architectural Record, Future of the A/E/C Industry: 10 Trends, reports the remarks of US architect Raymond Kogan to a recent convention in San Francisco. Kogan outlines ten trends that he thinks will affect the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, and while only the first one is headed ‘demographics’ [...]

Launching two new Constructing Excellence networks

One of the UK construction industry organisations I value most is Constructing Excellence, as it seeks to maintain the ideals highlighted in Sir Michael Latham’s seminal 1994 report Constructing the Team and by Sir John Egan in 1998’s Rethinking Construction and 2002’s Accelerating Change. In the mid-1990s, I worked for Tarmac Professional Services (now part [...]

Teambuild 2009 – needs social media

I went to the London launch of Teambuild 2009 last night, and met lots of young professionals (architects, project managers, QSs, structural engineers, lawyers, etc) busy networking to form teams to participate in this year’s competition (find out more from the Teambuild website).

It was an excellent event (good venue: 11th floor of law firm Mayer [...]

Social product development in AEC?

Yesterday I attended the AECNetwork’s networking meeting at the Building Centre in London (where I helped to broadcast the event via Ustream to people unable to get to the event themselves, and contributed to the event’s Twitter-stream).
For me, the gathering was notable as it was the first time I had actually met some people with [...]

Should AEC businesses use Facebook?

Until the recent explosion of interest in Twitter, much of the popular interest in social media as a communication tool was focused on social networking sites such as Facebook (I was going to talk about other providers such as Bebo and MySpace too, but Facebook appears to be becoming increasingly dominant).
200+ million users
Facebook recently passed [...]

Could Generation Z be more web-savvy than Generation Y?

Twitter really hit the headlines today, being the lead story on the front-page of today’s Guardian newspaper, with news that UK primary school children will study social media such as Twitter and Wikipedia as part of a new curriculum that includes more modern media and web-based skills as well as a greater focus on environmental [...]

Live from HOK – guest post

This is a guest post by John Gilmore (right), one of the HOK corporate communications team behind the Life at HOK blog that I wrote about recently. I asked John if he would like to explain more about how the site (and other HOK Web 2.0 activities) is managed and policed and what business benefits [...]