Introduction
Competing for the future is about succeeding by making a difference to customers by creating unimagined but soon to essential products and services (Hamel and Prahalad, 1994), this is related to the strategies and planning of the corporate future in related to the product changes, and the customers thinking with connections to their needs.
The world does change! Who would want the job of trying to come up with a perfect new product in static world? Things have a way of reaching a state of equilibrium over time. Problems get solved or disappear; needs eventually are felled. If the world stayed the same, or changed only sluggishly, it would be pretty tough to find new-product needs that haven’t already been met. You’ve got to catch new needs and product opportunities on the rise (Buggie, 1981).
In the built environment, changes is always there, the change of the needs, thinking, conditions, material, production methods, legislations, and technological aspects related to it. In this paper, we will discuss the above Hamel & Parhalad’s statement with regard to the technological changes and its impact on the built environment industry and its client organizations.
Innovation
Innovation can be defined as the realization of inventions to a practical working application. Innovation in any industry, and the construction industry in particular, lies at the core of deriving technical changes to stimulate productivity growth. Innovation finds its origin in creativity, but its realization in a logical interpretation and development of the substance of creativity, or as popular song puts it – you can’t have one without the other! (Bradbury, 1989).
In his book
Creativity and Innovation, John Hefele offers this formula to define
creativity: A + B C where A is a known element, B is a known element, and
the arrow represents the insight to link them together in an innovative way,
yielding C, a new compound. C then may become an element of another new
compound. And so invention, and the technology on which invention is based,
proliferates (Buggie, 1981).
Invention gives credibility to an idea, or can subsequently give rise to ideas that are expressions of the functionality and application of the invention, where it may be made and claimed as such, without actually demonstrating their practicality; i.e.’ invention can take the form of postulating what needs to be done to implement an idea (Bradbury, 1989).
Technological change by its nature precipitates many problems affecting the techno-commercial aspects of a project, but the consequences of ‘change’ also greatly affects individuals, among whom the innovator and his colleagues are no exception. It is not surprising therefore that the innovator and inventor in particular often encounter to change which is inherent in us all to a varying degree. These changes are the expression of the dynamic nature of the innovative process involving as it does, a multiplicity of interactions which inevitably pass through the field of activity of numerous participants in the project, the majority of which impact upon the innovator or inventor to surprising degree (Bradbury, 1989).
Competing for the future
In order to compete for the future, you should think before the other, some time in different directions, to get the staff that is able to invent and innovate, in parallel with the needs to be satisfied. This needs also changes to done in the organization structure. Woodward (1965) examined manufacturing companies in order to study the relationship of technical complexity with aspects of organization structure. She categorized firms on a ten-point technology scale, ranging from unit, through batch and mass, to process production, and found an apparent linear relationship between this technology scale and organization characteristics, such as the length of the chain of command, the span of control of the chief executive, the percentage of total turnover going to the payment of wages and salaries, the ratio of managers to total personnel and the ratio of direct and indirect labors. Additionally she identified a U-shaped relationship between technology and certain aspects of the social structure of the organization, such as the arrangement of the work force into small primary groups and the tendency towards flexible, participative and informal management structures.
As awareness increases of skills and adaptiveness as a factor in gaining competitive advantage, the strategic scope and influences of the training function may well increase markedly. Training and similar ‘cost centers’ (business development, etc.) may provide some of the momentum for change in organizations where the line management is either weak or conservative, or where there is a growing body of opinion that the hierarchically oriented approach is not proving either proactive or responsive enough (Campbell and Warner, 1990).
An individual company may contribute to the advance of a technology but because of the number of companies involved in most technologies the action of any one of them is unlikely to have more than marginal effect upon the rate of progress. A company’s concern is to incorporate the technology in a specific application to serve an identified consumer need. This is a conscious act of investment in what may become an expensive development project; this decision has to be taken in relation to the company’s business and market strategies. Furthermore, it may be only one of a number of technologies embodied in the end product, which must be considered as a total system (Twiss, 1990).
Built Environment & Changes
Everybody is a customer of the built environment products, with different needs and expectations, this makes the innovations in the construction is less and the support for the researches of development of the industry is low. Whilst other industries, particularly the manufacturing industries, are exploiting the latest technologies as they are developed and investing heavily in aiding research and development for these technologies, the construction industry can be seen as a cautious and slow to react to change.
When James Hargreaves invented his spinning jenny in 1764 he was at the start of the process of change which we know as the Industrial Revolution. Of course, at the time, he was unaware of technology, which changed how people work, and ultimately affected the very structure of society itself.
The design of a building is not like producing a motorcar, which can be carried out under factory conditions with considerable opportunities for automation. The operation involved in getting most buildings built are highly fragmented with a large number of people coming together in order to design a unique product. Over the past twenty years various parts of the computerization and we are now at the point where the impact of new technology is beginning to have a discernable effect on organizational structure (Day, 1991).
Technology and innovations presents radical changes to the construction industry and the whole built environment aspects. In the past 2 years BT and other large companies, have vacated more than 7 million ft2 of office space. With 40% of companies fixed assets being tied up in building, companies are utilizing many of the new communications and computer technologies to reduce their space requirements. When top UK firms like BT, Bp and IBM state that they intend to reduce office space by 25% in the next few years, it has grave repercussions for the industry. It spells out less building in total and all new buildings and refits designed and constructed to house the new technology (Russell, 1996). And this may introduce what called workstation, where you can do a lot of things, controlling, monitoring, and managing from the same place.
Workstation
The electronic workstation is the central building block of the high technology office, it is where all technological advances must be available at the fingertips of all staff members: clerical, administrative and professional.
The workstation setting should include a consideration of individual controls for the environment, for example, task lighting. Similar considerations should apply to furniture, especially chairs which accommodate individual dimensions and preference. Components should be capable of being readily modified with little or not need for tools. People must be informed of the possibilities of adjustment. Furnishing made to be modified tend to be kept in a fixed configuration unless an effort is made to inform people about these capabilities. Furthermore, workstation design must reflect a range of human needs:
1- Anthropometrics: body dimensions, physical capabilities such as sitting and standing height, reach lengths. The best design reflects economy of effort, minimizing fatigue.
2- Sensory: visual, auditory and thermal comfort needs.
3- Social: interpersonal relationships among colleagues and others.
4- Privacy: the ability to regulate and control social interactions and avoid interruptions.
5- Territory: an area with boundaries under control.
6- Status: workstation design is commensurate with organizational role (Atkin, 1988).
Digital Buildings
I studied architecture in the conventional way, using the drawing board, pencil and slide-rule to produce the designs and construction details. Now, the visitor to the average design office cannot fail to notice the inroads that computers have made into an environment once dominated by the drawing board, pencil and slide-rule. In many large firms there are few drawing boards left with each employee having access to their own computer screen, which flickers with a current drawing, report or spreadsheet. Those firms, which have invested heavily in the technology, can afford to employ less staff, they tend to have less hierarchical systems of office organization and more flexibility when it comes to dealing with fluctuations in workload (Day, 1997).
This is not the only feature of the digital buildings, Banks now doing most of their works digitally, the paperless office is common, were you feed the computer and get the output. In the same time, the use of the computers and information systems to control the building systems, and manage their operation and maintenance, is common specially in the large size projects, connecting the all the buildings of the city with fire station, to alarm in the case of fire, and to show where is the fire in order to ensure a quicker rescue.
From the house, you can make your shopping, study and communicate with your teacher and supervisor, do your work, and enjoy your time. This is because the technology and its application in the built environment. BT has 7000 employees working from home (hot disking) among 120,000 of its total employees, and the concept of working from home is emerging only with the Internet revolution and communication technology.
Computer Aided Design &
Construction
The use of computers in the design firms is now fact, which they cannot work efficiently without it, in order to compete in the construction market. Architectural design, working drawings, specifications, quantities, documentations, all done now by computers, transferred through computers, viewed and monitored, updated, all by the use of computers, and finally stored in the computers, with less storage areas, and ease of teaching it.
The construction work is the same, viewing the drawings, printing, scheduling activities, controlling the project work, controlling the management of the project and payments according to schedule, using the project management software.
In the buildings maintenance and operation, computers used to control buildings facilities and services, alarming, monitoring, keeping the information available to be used when ever needed, in the same time, the application of Life Cycle Costing in the construction industry become easy after the introduction of computer applications which help in prediction and estimating.
What technology can do?
For the construction industry, technology can do many things, from the design, documentations, construction management, overall management; communication, etc. but can technology help in making construction faster and cheaper?
The try to use different resources the human is still insufficient, robots has been used in the manufacturing successfully, but in buildings, the nature of the construction project and how unique is every single project makes it difficult to use robots in construction sites, while it can be used when systematic productions are needed like in the building material industry, this bring us back to the use of robots only in manufacturing.
Distinctions among teleported programmed and cognitive robots are not always clear, any more than the identity of “robot” is clear. Even when we talk about construction robots in particular, definitions can be ambiguous. Simply, a construction robot is a robot that constructs, meaning builds, and yet such robots do a lot more, they exhibit flexibility in the roles they play and the equipment they use, and they perform tasks of a complexity that previously required human control (Whittaker, 1986).
In the manufacturing of Pre cast elements and building components, technology can help to make faster and more economical, and in the execution, the technology products like cranes, cuter, wiring machines, etc, will help in doing the tasks more accurately and quickly.
The innovation used in built environment could be more applicable in the building components & systems, design and construction management process.
Human & Technology
Factory workers and office staff alike were favorably disposed towards new technology in advance of its deployment and that exposure to it usually had the effect of reinforcing this favorable attitude. The main evidence supporting this impression was the queue of volunteers in almost every workplace anxious to be the first to be retrained on the new machines.
There were two main pre-deployment fears: a personal inability to cope, which almost always disappeared with experience; and secondly, the fear of losing one’s job. This too was weakened ex post but generally persisted. There was also a definite feeling of inevitability: that new technology represented ‘progress’; almost a manifestation of the heroic materialism of the Victorian age.
One post deployment attitude, which is worth noting, was a sense of frustration when new system failed to work. The psychological problems of frustration and helplessness when a system failure occurs are particularly prevalent when an entire group or section of the workforce is dependent on a central computer system. (Simpson, Love, and Walker, 1987).
The relationship between producers and users require more detailed attention if problems arising from a poor understanding of user needs in the development and use of new technologies are to be avoided. The relationship between producers and users of the built environment is of particular importance given the nature of the construction system, with its myriad of supply networks (Gann, 2000).
Managing change and innovation
In order to grow and keep your market share if not expanding it, a company should think of how to deal with the changes and innovation, and how to use them within the corporate future and development strategies.
Johnson and Scholes (1999) suggest that organizations need to be concerned with the extent of direct rivalry between themselves and competitors. What is it based on? Is it likely to increase of decrease in intensity? How can it be influenced? The most competitive conditions will be those in which entry is likely, substitutes threaten and buyers and suppliers exercise control.
Cole (1997) mentions Moss Kanter’s suggestions to avoid poor management of change which consist of the seven follow skills:
• Managers must learn to operate without the might of the hierarchy behind them.
• They must know how to compete in a way that enhances rather than undercuts co-operation.
• They must operate with the highest ethical standards.
• They have to acquire ‘a dose of humility’.
• They need to devolve a process focus (i.e. execution of plans may matter more than creating them in the first place).
• They must become multifaceted and ambidextrous (i.e. able to work across functions/units, to be flexible, to make connections with the skills of others).
• They must gain satisfaction from results and be willing to stake their own rewards on them.
Conclusion
The relationship between new technology and organizations is complex and it is difficult to predict which technologies will be taken up and used within a particular environment. One cannot say that just because a technology is available it will be used and will have a particular set of consequences. The decision to take up a new technology and use it within an organization relates to a company’s internal structure, its markets and its longer-term strategy. Once the decision has been taken to invest the outcome is also unpredictable. In some instance, as in banking, the effect over time can dramatic, resulting in change to whole nature of the business, in others, the effect can be neutral or can even be negative with the opportunities offered by the technology being neglected, or even undermined, in order to retain the status quo (Day, 1997).
Development depends on both experimentation and design in order to advance the project to the stage where both product and process model the essential parameters of their full-scale counterpart. The design contribution introduces the use of logical methods of ascertaining the performance characteristics of the prototype and determining by analysis, how to optimize the various parameters involved to meet an identified application. High in importance is the need to achieve a cost/effective product and process while still leaving room for creativity to introduce new ways of resolving the problems, which are encountered at this stage. Innovation as a result of experimentation is obviously still active in producing new ideas for effecting the translation of the laboratory sample into the pre-production prototype (Bradbury, 1989).
You can ignore changes, you can degrade it, but you cannot stop it. The best way is to know your needs and the demands, and to draw a strategy of how you are going to deal with the changes and innovations.
References:
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2- Bradbury J. A. A. (1989) Product Innovation: Idea to Exploitation, John Wiley & Sons.
3- Buggie Frederick D. (1981) New Product Development Strategies, American Management Association.
4- Campbell A. & Warner M. (1990) Management Roles and skills for New Technology, Technology and Management, Edited by: Ray Wild, Cassell Educational Limited.
5- Cole G A (1997) Strategic Management, 2nd Edition, Continuum.
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