CAD leadership winner announced

CAD Society announces the winner of the 2006 CAD Society Leadership Award

The CAD Society has announced that the winner of the 2006 CAD Society Leadership Award is Dana "Deke" Smith.

The award will be presented at a ceremony on 22nd April at Cofes 2006: The Congress on the Future of Engineering Software, being held in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, from 20th to 23rd April 2006.

Smith has demonstrated outstanding leadership in the spatial information and CAD industry from the very beginning of his career and will receive the award for his exemplary leadership of the effort for a national building information modelling (BIM) standard.

He is an architect by education, training and temperament.

Throughout his career, he has applied an architect's problem-solving skills and tolerance for ambiguity and conflicting requirements to solving a broad range of technical and business-process problems in the building design and construction industry.

Over 22 years, he served in various positions at the US Naval Facilities Engineering Command, including Deputy Director of the Navy Y2K Ashore programme, Director of Engineering Technology Resources, and Director of the Engineering Support Systems Division, with responsibility for the advancement of CAD and GIS related programmes in the navy, including the $550 million Facilities CAD2 programme.

He later served as Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Army Research Lab in Adelphi, Maryland, and currently serves as the Chief Architect for the installations and environmental portions of the Business Transformation Agency of the US Department of Defense, which is part of DoDs' Global Information Grid initiative.

Raised in a military family, Smith has also worked as a surveyor, construction field engineer and a cost, value and life cycle engineer.

He is a registered architect in the state of Virginia.

Smith helped establish and continues to chair the Facilities Information Council (FIC) of the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS), has served as the US representative to the International Standards Organisation for construction-related CAD, and was involved in the formation of the International Alliance for Interoperability.

He helped conceive and foster the concept of installation lifecycle management, which promotes sharing of information throughout the life of a single building facility, a campus or an entire real property portfolio.

As FIC chair, he spearheaded the development of the US National CAD Standard, a joint publication of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Construction Specifications Institute and NIBS.

In the early 1990s, he was a coauthor of the first and second editions of the AIA's CAD Layer Guidelines and chaired the industry-wide task group that produced Uniformat II, an ASTM standard that provides a common framework linking building programmes, specifications and cost estimates.

"Deke is a man of uncompromising vision and a remarkable consensus builder", said Michael Tardif, former Director of the AIA's Center for Technology and Practice Management.

"Whatever job title or volunteer leadership position he has held throughout his career, his job description has always been the same: to improve the process by which the built environment is created and managed".

"He is unfailingly calm and good-natured in the face of the most difficult technical, political or cultural challenges, maintaining a laser-like focus on the ultimate goal, and quietly persevering when many others would have given up in frustration".

In 1996, Smith was named one of the Federal 100 by Federal Computer Week, an award that recognises "the 100 leaders who made a difference in federal information technology during the calendar year".

The CAD Society is pleased to honour him for his current leadership of NIBS's efforts to develop a spatially related IAI Industry Foundation class-based BIM and a national BIM standard.

The CAD Society Award for Leadership is awarded to an individual in the CAD industry whose outstanding technical and business leadership over the past year has significantly contributed to the benefit of the CAD community.

The CAD Society is a not-for-profit industry association with the goal of fostering a community and encouraging open communications among those who make their living within the CAD industry including AEC, mechanical, manufacturing and GIS.

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