By Mark Ilich, Burcin Becerik and Bert Aultman
The following is an excerpt from the article “Online Collaboration: Why Aren’t We Using Our Tools?” from the Spring 2006 issue of Means, Methods and Trends. The full article, and the rest of the Spring 2006 issue, can be found at www.mmtmagazine.org. Copyright © 2005-2006 AEI/CI. All rights reserved. The excerpt is reprinted with permission.
Project collaboration is an industry buzzword that you may have read about in the Engineering News Record or seen marketed at one of the numerous Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) tradeshows in the past 5 to 6 years. Or perhaps your firm has made the leap of faith and has adopted one of these tools to keep your company ahead of the competition. Regardless of your company’s familiarity with project collaboration, there is a chance that you may not realize the extent to which these tools are underutilized in our industry. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on why adoption has been slower than would seem reasonable and what should be done for successful collaboration through technology.
Collaboration is defined as the agreement among specialists to focus their abilities in a particular process to achieve the longer objectives of the project as a whole, as defined by a client (Hobbs, 1996). Collaboration is needed to share visions among different stakeholders and to maximize team efforts on a particular job. Collaboration involves people working together by sharing (interacting, communicating, exchanging, coordinating, and approving) information and processes.
Managing construction projects using web-based techniques is gradually becoming a common practice as contractual, organizational, and informational integration is achieved. On typical large construction projects of geographically distributed teams, it is a daunting task to encourage collaboration between the hundreds of different individuals representing dozens of companies. The use of collaboration technologies represents a movement toward a virtual organization, where people are not tied to any particular workspace, thus allowing the flexibility to work from any physical location. Increased bandwidth capability, vastly expanded connectivity, and the integration of communications with computing technology together enable communication of richer and more complex information than was previously possible and contribute to a large variety of changes in organizational forms.
If effectively deployed, project collaboration dramatically increases the speed of communication, reduces the costs of communications, and provides productivity savings. The technology has the potential to offer a competitive corporate resource in this era of information management. It might become an integral part of corporate strategy of AEC businesses helping to reduce staff, connecting subsidiaries in different regions, facilitating new organizational structures, increasing the company’s bargaining power with customers and suppliers, and improving the internal and inter-organizational efficiency of the company.
In 1999, over 150 vendors were marketing project collaboration software and/or services to the AEC industry. During the past 7 years, we have seen rapid changes in the marketplace of vendors, and we are now left with a handful of competent companies who have gained from experience and learning our business. A current evaluation of these tools would prove that there is a good variety of vendors who are capable of addressing their customer’s needs. Such competition between vendors allows consumers to get the best product/service for the value.
Despite the proven advances in the technology itself, our industry has yet to fully embrace these tools. With each day, new teams are mobilized to begin projects with no coordinated plan to utilize project collaboration. While this fact is alarming to technology advocates, the struggle is to identify the obstacles that contribute to the underutilization of these tools. Sources for the slow adoption may include: inadequate implementation practices, lack of team-wide value proposition, potential impact on traditional work practices, risk and liability concerns, ownership and control of data, lack of education and training, and the culture of the industry (including both human and organizational factors).
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Construction Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers