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View from the Top - Part 2 |
Part 1
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COMPANY FILE
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Established in 1946 by Ove Arup,
Arup is a firm of consulting engineers working on projects
including automobiles, infrastructure, structural engineering,
communications consultancy, financial and socially led
engineering.
It has 72 offices in 32 countries,
and around 7,000 members of staff. Its turnover in 2001/02
was £403 million.
Arup is one of the world’s leading
firms of designers, having worked on projects such as
London’s Millennium Bridge. It also worked on the structural
design of the iconic Sydney Opera House in the 1960s
and the development of the route for the Channel Tunnel
Rail Link in the 1990s.
In 2000-2002, the firm undertook
a comprehensive review of its knowledge assets and as
a result developed the Arup Global Intranet Project
(AGIP).
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Q: WERE THERE ANY PROBLEMS GETTING THE
PORTAL TO INTERFACE WITH YOUR EXISTING DATABASES, SO IT COULD
DRAW OUT THE INFORMATION?
A: During the first six months of testing we almost mapped
the business – we realised that the portal was a good idea
but then had to look at how it would work in practice, the
nitty gritty of how the different systems would interact.
We integrated various legacy systems and, for each integration,
we have had to think about how it works. For example, we had
a comprehensive projects database, Ovabase, which captured
previous project experience. This was getting poor feedback
– it wasn’t bad but it was a hard system to get into.
We created a better interface but also we needed to integrate
a few things alongside it to give people a kind of ‘one stop
shop’ of information. If someone is preparing a bid, they
want to look at past projects in Ovabase, but they will also
want information from the financial system – did we make a
profit or loss in the past? – they might want some data from
the image base or some timesheet data.
We had to make those links happen, and for each database
the way we presented and retrieved data had to be thought
through.
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Conspectus 2004
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Copyright © 2004
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