The Future of Engineering Software

"Consulting group CounterEntropy Strategies LLC convened 64 engineering software industry leaders to articulate an agenda for the start of the new millennium. What problems remain to be solved, and what new ones will we face? Some of the answers were predictable; others were surprising.
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Sixty-four of the most influential thinkers from Intel, Microsoft, Ford, Autodesk, Bentley, Georgia Tech, Raytheon, the Federal government, and other organizations converged on the Empire Room of Chicago's Palmer House Hotel on the evening of November 7, 1999, and came back to spend the day together on November 8.

We employed a structured series of workshops, discussions, and votes to educe the sense of the assembly as to the most critical issues facing the engineering software community. The deliberations yielded 35 individual issues that fell into nine areas:

• User Interface. When it comes to engineering software human interfaces, the "shoe" still doesn't "fit." Software tools are simply too hard to learn, and too hard to use. This issue garnered 18% of the votes-more than any other.
• Web Implications. 16% voted for this topic, and agreed with the statement, "All engineering projects of any substance will be managed with the help of an extranet-or project- or product-web-within three years." Business-to-business e-commerce is fomenting a revolution throughout engineering, and software vendors are still not quite sure what to do about it.
• Interoperability. "It's not going away soon," said 15% of the votes. Both the technical side of file exchange and the intellectual property aspects are still at issue, and there is nobody willing to take responsibility on behalf of all users.
• Barriers to Implementation. Technology is not the major obstacle to improvement; fear of change is. 14% of the votes indicated that the dearth of full "art to part" and "trees to keys" implementations is due more to change resistance than to technological challenges.
• Knowledge Capture. Another 13% of the votes were used to express the sentiment that knowledge capture and management are already important, and will become much more so in the future.
• The Channel. Just over 8% of the votes were cast on software distribution matters. Here, the hot issue is "application service providers," groups that are employing the Internet to rent software, services, and storage. Strong feelings that this will radically change the software sales picture were in evidence in the discussions.
• A "Dream Machine." The PC and workstation are not the final form of engineering computer. 6% of the votes were in favor of defining the systems that will be used by engineering professionals in the coming years.
• Failure of "The Grand Unification Theory of CAD." Ambassadors used 5% of their votes to demonstrate agreement with the idea that there will probably never be a standard CAD format or a standard set of CAD commands.
• Better Tools. The group applied its final 5% to cite the general inadequacy of engineering software tools, and the unbounded opportunities for innovation presented by our field."