Technically Speaking

Bumper-to-bumper traffic is incredibly frustrating when you have no idea as to the cause of it. That’s the way it goes in the Washington, DC metro area! And, while I know there is construction and repair to the transportation arteries in and around the DC metro area, seemingly, I must have the world’s worst short term memory, because every day I get frustrated in my effort to get home. Until the other day… Speaking recently in Kansas, President Obama said, “I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot”. Hearing the President talk about the US facing “a make or break moment for the middle class”: I recalled from high school history class that middle class growth was at its greatest starting in the 50’s and throughout the 70’s. So, I got on the “Google Machine” and started searching for any information that would satisfy my curiosity about middle class growth during that 30 year period and its contributors. One of the biggest contributors to job growth and the rise of the US middle class was Infrastructure expansion. Two years ago the President signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law giving $46 billion for transportation projects, including $27 billion for highway and bridge construction and repair and $11.5 billion for mass transit and rail projects. Wow, I thought, this ought to create jobs and alleviate the congestion that causes me so much aggravation; that was 2 years ago!! What happened?

On Thursday, November 17, Google and “[acronym]’s sponsor, DLT Solutions hosted a live technology seminar at the Sheraton Denver West Hotel in Lakewood, CO. The Tech Day highlighted DLT Solutions’ partnership with Google to provide innovative technologies that help government agencies with Enterprise solutions. Google product experts spoke to Federal Civilian and State and Local government employees about how these modern technology solutions allow them to meet the current challenges of their agency.

Way back in 2003, an eternity in tech years, Network Appliance purchased Spinnaker Networks an appliance maker that utilized SpinFS. Since the acquisition NetApp , as it is now called, has developed two different operating system offerings a.k.a. their “special sauce.” The original ONTAP “flavor” (ONTAP 8 7-mode) and the ONTAP 8 Cluster-mode, a reincarnate of technology acquired from Spinnaker and previously known as ONTAP GX.

If you missed the recent Autodesk See the Suite Advantage Virtual Event, don’t worry! Autodesk has made all of the content available on-demand so you can browse the presentations, white papers, and more when your schedule permits. I even found a few interesting presentations that could really interest our public sector audience: • Accelerate Transportation Project Delivery with AutoCAD Civil 3D • Better Planning with AutoCAD Map 3D • The Power of Map 3D for Planning in the Electric Industry • Designing Substations with Digital Prototypes: Nashville Electric Service Moves Beyond 3D

By Pam Broviak, City Engineer/Assistant Director of Public Works at City of Geneva, Illinois. When my past employer, the city of LaSalle, installed an automatic meter reading (AMR) system, I was excited about the technology and looked forward to improving the efficiency of our meter reading and water billing system. Some of the benefits included tracking and notifications to staff of customer leaks, immediate final reads, high/low water usage, and tampering alerts. Yet, as an engineer, I also planned on using the data for designing, monitoring, and operating our water system. My vision had been to link the data to a digital map created from our GIS where dots represented meters. Colors and other indicators would tell us of real-time reads, flows, pressures, and all that good stuff allowing a visualization of how our system was functioning using real-time actual data. Unfortunately, once I saw the software and asked about the ability to extract data from the database, not only did the vendors seem surprised anyone would even want this information, they made it clear their system was designed for billing only. If we wanted to do anything more with the data, we would have to hire our own programmer and create our own setup.

In a recent guest article, Bryan Cowles, an Applications Specialist at IMAGINiT Technologies, observed that while more and more government agencies are moving ahead and incorporating Building Information Modeling (BIM) into their workflows, “…some are yet to be convinced of the benefits that an intelligent model can provide.” In his article - Teardown or Retrofit: A BIM Evaluation Gives the Answer - Bryan goes on to provide an excellent example of the time and cost savings achieved by retrofitting two existing structures into one larger structure, as opposed to going the demolition route – thanks to a BIM-based feasibility study. A study which also won over a team of doubtful engineers who thought demolition was the best option.