One of the biggest challenges for today’s architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry is that of how to share information effectively.
After all, building information modeling (BIM) puts a fair bit of emphasis on the importance of information—and for a project team to collaborate effectively, its members need to have up-to-date information all the time.
We’ve seen several tools cropping up that promise this global collaborative workflow, many of which have the ability to interoperate with competing software options. There are initiatives to create a single standard between these various companies, but it could be quite some time before we reach full interoperability.
So what’s the best way to solve this issue of interoperability today? It could well be what Ian Howell, CEO of Newforma, calls the hybrid solution.
What Does the AEC Industry Need?
Although this might seem like a monumental question, there are really three basic things that the AEC industry needs in terms of its workflow.
Part of the puzzle of interoperability is promoting individual productivity, which increasingly includes using mobile devices and the cloud on job sites.
“Empowering individual productivity is all around accessing information; most often on mobile devices, but through desktops as well,” explained Howell. “It’s about me doing my job as a member of the team.”
Team collaboration is about the dozens of companies working on a single project, which must somehow come together to collaborate. They may never have worked together and may not even use the same software, but they need to work together on this unique project that only gets built once.
“A construction project, even in its design phases, involves multiple companies,” said Howell. “I like to call it a situational team; ‘Because of this project, we are all now seated around the table and we’re going to be together for the next year, or two years, or whatever the time frame is, working together on this project.’”
“It’s only by being ‘on the same page’ that they can make timely and accurate decisions for their project,” Howell pointed out.
Company productivity is about optimizing company performance by allowing a company to retain and review its project information to identify any processes that were used on a particular project team that could be repeatable for other teams. It’s about creating best practices.
“How do we normalize our service across all of our different project architects and project engineers to make sure that every team gives the same standard of service to all of the different owners?” Howell queried. “What have we learned from this job that we can apply to the next job?”
Companies also need to be able to get this information back so they can have it on hand in the event of a litigation or claim.
The trouble with these needs is that it’s very easy in the AEC industry to find apps and tools that target one of these features, but it can be tricky to find one that can target all three.
“We’ve seen many Silicon Valley start-ups that do something wonderful to help the individual, but don’t necessarily manage the team collaboration or help make sure that the information’s available for the company to leverage on the next job as a best practice,” Howell pointed out as an example. He also mentioned that similar issues can be encountered with legacy systems and project hosting solutions.
So what’s the solution?
The Mission: Solve for All Three
So far, the method for improving individual productivity, team collaboration and company productivity has been to make use of the cloud.
“When we created Newforma Project Center, architects and engineers were focused on managing their projects in their own offices,” Howell explained. “We added Newforma Cloud Services because we’ve realized that there’s been a shift—the idea of sharing information and everyone having copies of the same file has moved to, ‘Where is a single place we can all share a file as a single source of truth?’”
“[People] are more willing to put things in the cloud now than they were two years ago or four years ago, or certainly six or eight years ago,” Howell explained.
However, the cloud can still be somewhat limiting when it comes to a full AEC workflow—and this is where Howell’s idea of a hybrid solution comes in.
The hybrid solution is a combination of cloud and legacy systems that enables teams to choose which documents are shared and to keep in-house databases as projects progress.
Rather than keeping everything in the cloud or everything in-office, companies need the ability to keep some things private and make others public. For example, a design team might have several different design iterations that it would keep internal until it had decided on a final version, then upload that version to the cloud for all other project team members to comment on and mark up.
“The idea is that certain schemes, certain design ideas and certain documents are being shared and collaborated on—and the best way to do that collaboration is to take advantage of something like Amazon Web Services,” explained Howell.
“We think having the hybrid solution is really powerful,” Howell said. “People can keep certain information in the company and have it out on the cloud for collaboration purposes, but once the collaboration is done, they’d be keeping a record back at the office.”
The Interim Solution for Interoperability?
Although there are initiatives in the AEC industry to move toward a single standard, it’s important to think about how to work with the tools we have now. Howell believes that the current solution needs to be a flexible one.
With multiple collaborators sitting around the table, either literally or figuratively, it's important to consider existing tools and how to make them work. (Image courtesy of HOK.)
“What I’ve realized after being on that mission for a long time is that it is not viable and not pragmatic and not happening quickly enough,” Howell continued. “We may get there ultimately one day, but certainly, right now it’s a matter of, ‘Okay, these 27 companies are around the table working on a project right now. How can we best help them?’ They’re not all going to choose the same authoring system.”
These companies will likely also have a collection of other tools that they’ll use—and often, these tools don’t lend themselves to a single exchange of information. One such tool, PlanGrid, recently became the first of what is likely to be a string of partnerships to promote interoperability.
Bridging the Gap for Interoperability
Newforma recently announced what it calls the Connector Initiative, which it hopes will help bridge the existing gap between data silos. The initiative aims to do this by imitating a collaborative BIM workflow and bringing third-party apps such as PlanGrid onto Newforma’s open Cloud Services.
The partnership has seen PlanGrid and Newforma exchanging application program interfaces (APIs)—and Newforma has hinted that this is just the first of many upcoming exchanges and new tools to help the AEC industry.
“Projects are being designed, projects are being built—and we can’t all wait for that futuristic ultimate goal of one standard that everyone agrees to use in terms of all the different software vendors,” Howell pointed out. “This is a way to go after that puzzle and add real value in the short term.”
For more information, check out the Newforma website.