Construction Computing Awards 2010 voting begins

Voting for the 2010 Construction Computing Awards has opened, with 20 of the 24 categories to be decided by online votes, and four to be decided by a panel of judges – something of a departure from previous years’ practice.

Of course, you’ve got to be in it to win it, and there are some notable absentees this year. There is no sign of Asite, BIW Technologies or Sword-CTSpace, for example, in the document and content management category. This is still the closest to a category for construction collaboration or ‘extranet’ technologies, I think, but the organisers have never taken up my suggestion (first mooted in 2006) of a category expressly for collaboration systems – despite the wide industry use of the term, and despite most of the platforms offering much more than just document management.

But the other collaboration-related vendors make up for these providers’ absence (sometimes – to me – in some strange categories, but that’s long been the case):

• 4Projects has been nominated in five categories (Document and Content Management Software Product of the Year, Product of the Year, Company of the Year, Mobile Technology Product of the Year and Best Use of Social Media – a new category – see my pwcom blog post on this)
• UNIT4 – formerly Business Collaborator– and Aconex are each nominated four times in the same categories (Document and Content Management, e-Commerce Product of the Year, Product of the Year and Company of the Year). Woobius also appears four times (One to Watch: Company, One to Watch: Product, Document and Content Management Product of the Year, and Best Use of Social Media)
• MPS is nominated three times (in Project Planning Product of the Year, IT project of the year: and Best Use of IT in Construction (Public Sector))
• Union Square Software has two mentions (in Document and Content Management, and Product of the Year)
• Autodesk Buzzsaw appears once (in Project Planning Product – another bit of a strange one, I think!) as does Causeway Technologies‘ ECM (in Document and Content Management), though Autodesk and Causeway also feature strongly in other categories – reflecting the wider breadth of their respective product portfolios

Apart from the aforementioned firms, the remaining contenders in the Document and Content Management category are firmly in the document management field: RedSky IT‘s Summit, and Watson and Sole‘s INTELI-SCAN.

Update (17 September 2010): A special mention also for IBE Partnership whose CICLOPS system was shown at Be2camp 2008 (which I helped run). A collaborative working tool focussed on lean construction and based on the Last Planner approach, it has two nominations, in the Project Planning and Company to Watch categories.