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2012 Predictions for CAD Managers

Identifying important technology trends now will help you prepare for the year ahead.

The New Year is upon us, and we're all back to work with renewed focus. I've always used this time to consider the demands of the coming year's workload, and make a plan to meet those demands.

As a CAD/technology manager, I've found that preparing for the work ahead requires me to make some predictions about what might happen in the computer industry. I'll share some of these predictions in this issue of the CAD Manager's Newsletter, in hopes that you can use them as a starting point for building your own 2012 plan. Here goes.

Trends to Watch For

Identifying technology trends requires predicting the future — an activity I'm admittedly not perfect at! Regardless, I've taken my best (educated) guess, and I believe the following trends will have a big impact on 2012:

• BIM (building information modeling) demystification
• The cult of cloud hype
• Great hardware values
• Increasing CAD software upgrade momentum
• The fusion of IT and CAD departments.

So how did I arrive at this list, you might ask? I used the following sources:

•  Interviews conducted with software industry personnel
• Experience with my clients
• Conversations with IT and CAD managers around the country
• Conversations with hundreds of users at Autodesk University 2011
• Good old gut feelings.

Next, let's dig into the predictions one by one.

BIM Comes Down to Earth

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you've heard lots of hype about BIM over the last couple of years — even if you're not an architect. The hype has been so omnipresent that BIM is now a household word (well, in CAD households anyway), yet many senior management teams still have no clue about the real-world benefits of BIM.

This will be the year that companies start to demand that BIM tools perform in a manner that makes financial sense. Simply saying, "let's do this project on BIM" or "we really need to have a BIM strategy" isn't going to work anymore. BIM will now have to pay its own way or be subject to the same cost scrutiny that any other software tool would. This is great news for CAD managers, because when BIM becomes a tool rather than a magical future technology, we'll be free to manage it without the hype and artificially inflated expectations of the past few years.

So let the marketing speak and BIM hype cease, and let the actual implementation of cost-effective BIM begin — finally!

Cloud Mystification Ramps Up

CAD software company marketing departments always need something to trumpet as "the next big thing." Since BIM will no longer fill that role, the cloud will take BIM's place.

Expect to hear lots of senior management and user interest in "CAD on the cloud," even though nobody exactly knows what that means. (It's just like BIM was a few years ago!) As a CAD manager, you'll need to be out in front of these new cloud CAD tools and be able to explain them. And know that if you can't explain how the cloud might benefit your company, everyone will start to form their own ideas and go off on all sorts of tangents about what cloud CAD really means. (Again, this is just like recent BIM history.)

The good news is, cloud-based utilities and tools should reach the market at a faster pace and become more fully integrated into our CAD environments. I expect that many of these utilities will be offered as free add-ins, giving CAD managers a great way to investigate cloud technologies without spending a fortune to do so.

So get ready for the wave of cloud hype: learn all you can about it so you can surf the wave, rather than drown in it.

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