December 2022 President’s Message: Keeping Pace

The theme for this issue of IIBEC Interface is technology, and I’ve spent some time recently thinking about how much technology has altered the way we do business. When I started out in the late 1980s and early 1990s, our work didn’t rely on the internet, computers, or cellphones. The fax machine was the state of the art. Even at that time, the pace of business could seem extreme, but expectations were different. I remember feverishly trying to finalize a set of hand-drawn construction documents by a certain deadline. I had no choice but to finish on time because it would take two business days to deliver the drawings to the reproduction company where they would generate the blueline copies for the owner and various bidders. When my office acquired its own in-house blueline machine, that eliminated the hassle of working with the reproduction company, but I would now spend all day plotting the drawings and all night inhaling ammonia as I ran the original drawings through the blueline machine.

Read the rest of Chris Giffin’s “Presidents Message.”