The Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) at Stanford University has become the leading North American academic center for the research and practice of AEC technological innovation. Each year it allows a small group of industry leaders to enroll for its summer institute. The alumni of the CIFE summer institute are a Who's Who in the industry. Last year's institute was sold out in advance. Today CIFE announced details of its 2006 Summer Institute, with the theme of “Integration by Design,” scheduled for June 19-23, 2006, on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, California.
As stated in CIFE's announcement, Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) “has now entered the mainstream of design/construction practice. It provides genuine value for organizations and owners. It is fun for practitioners and some of its successful practitioners have become heroes within their organizations.” (For another appraisal of Virtual Design and Construction, read the AIA Online essay, "Avoiding Mistakes, Saving Money: The Case for Virtual Design and Construction," by Michael Lingerfelt, AIA.)
CIFE teaches that VDC can be part of an incremental innovation process, which sustains existing work processes on projects and business models. CIFE also says that VDC can become a breakthrough innovation that dramatically improves project performance and opens significant new business opportunities—something we keep preaching here at AECnews.com. CIFE's program will enable participants to define and implement incremental and breakthrough strategies to add value to their organizations immediately and see their futures differently; we highly recommend it.
Seminars at this year's Summer Institute will focus on the opportunity and the challenge of implementing VDC to integrate disciplines and project phases, to improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of AEC project operations. “We find that this integration can come by accident from use of VDC, but that it comes best when integration is an objective of VDC implementation and management using VDC methods,” states the CIFE announcement. “Wide adoption of VDC in practice seems both compelling and difficult to achieve. This program addresses the major challenge to create strategies, objectives, plans, incentives and methods to grow the number of practitioners who understand the organization, the business practices and VDC methods.”
More information is available online at http://cife.stanford.edu/SP06/index.htm.
--RSN