Building With Innovation

摘要

If you are ever building a wall and want to know how many bricks you will need, Alan Cook is your man. He started life as a civil and structural engineer and might still have been one if, in the mid 1980s, he hadn't found himself working for Leeds City Council. For those with short memories, those were the days when Margaret Thatcher embarked on a mission to shake up local government. She decided council workforces should compete with the private sector for key tasks such as sweeping the streets or maintaining buildings through a process known as compulsory competitive tendering. Leeds City Council set up its own quasi-company called CMS Construction and Maintenance Services. It had to bid for council building contracts against private sector rivals. It was Cook's job to handle estimates, a task which traditionally involved well-chewed pencils and paper. But Cook had a state-of-the-art computer to help him with the task. It was an Apricot Zen 1, which boasted a 640k memory and stored anything beyond that on 5.25in floppy disks. "It was basically just a complicated calculator," he recalls, and "pretty rudimentary" by today's standards.