CAD Society Announces the Winner of the 2006 Leadership Award

Deke Smith to be recognized at COFES2006 and presented with CAD Society 2006 Leadership Award

DENVER, CO, April 10, 2006 - The CAD Society, a not-for-profit CAD industry association, today announced the winner of the 2006 CAD Society Leadership Award.

The recipient of this year's award is Dana K. �Deke� Smith. The award will be presented at a ceremony on April 22 at COFES2006: The Congress on the Future of Engineering Software, being held in Scottsdale, Arizona, April 20-23, 2006.

Mr. 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 Modeling (BIM) Standard.

Deke Smith is an architect by education, training and temperament. Throughout his career, he has applied an architects problem-solving skillsand tolerance for ambiguity and conflicting requirementsto solving a broad range of technical and business-process challenges in the building design and construction industry.

Over a period of 22 years, he served in various positions at the U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC), including Deputy Director of the Navy Y2K Ashore program, Director of Engineering Technology Resources, and director of the Engineering Support Systems Division, with responsibility for the advancement of CAD and GIS related programs in the Navy, including the $550M Facilities CAD2 program. 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 U.S. Department of Defense, which is part of DoDs Global Information Grid initiative. Raised in a military family, Deke has also worked as a surveyor, construction field engineer, and as a cost, value, and life cycle engineer. He is a registered architect in the state of Virginia.

Deke helped establish and continues to chair the Facilities Information Council (FIC) of the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS), has served as the United States representative to the International Standards Organization (ISO) for construction-related CAD, and was involved in the formation of the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI). He helped conceive and foster the concept of Installation Life-cycle 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 U.S. National CAD Standard, a joint publication of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Construction Specifications Institute (CSI) and NIBS. In the early 1990s, he was a co-author of the first and second editions of the AIAs CAD Layer Guidelines and chaired the industry-wide task group that produced Uniformat II, an ASTM standard th at provides a common framework linking building programs, specifications, and cost estimates.

�Deke is a man of uncompromising vision and a remarkable consensus builder,� notes Michael Tardif, former director of the AIAs 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, Deke was named one of the Federal 100 by Federal Computer Week, an award that recognizes �the 100 leaders who made a difference in federal information technology during the calendar year.� The CAD Society is pleased to honor him for his current leadership of NIBS efforts to develop a spatially related IAI Industry Foundation Class (IFC)-based Building Information Model (BIM) and a National Building Information Model (BIM) Standard.

The CAD Society Award for Leadership is awarded to an individual in the CAD industry whose outstanding technical and/or 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 communication among those who make their living within the CAD industry including AEC, mechanical, manufacturing and GIS.

About The CAD Society

The CAD Society is a not-for-profit industry association with the goal of fostering community and encouraging open communication among those who make their living within the CAD industry including AEC, mechanical, manufacturing, and GIS. The CAD Society is dedicated to creating an informative community and improving the tools its members employ in order to get their jobs done. This is achieved by providing an open forum of communication, which helps to illuminate the practices of industry vendors. It has been a leader in creating interoperability guidelines that encourage software vendors to develop applications that can openly share data.

www.cadsociety.org

About COFES

The sixth annual Congress on the Future of Engineering Software, presented by HP, will take place at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort, Scottsdale, Ariz., April 20-23, 2006. COFES, a mainstay of the engineering software industry, provides an intensive conference atmosphere where private and public discussions are held. Attendees are executives, end users, CAD and PLM vendors, analysts, and press who work together to determine, define, and clarify the business issues of engineering technologies. COFES is an invitation-only event. To find out more information and to request an invitation, please visit www.cofes.com.

  Get a free CADinfo news feed here...