Jun 22 2009

Putting the social into AEC development

I have been following posts on a blog hosted by PTC, a vendor of product development technology solutions to ‘discrete manufacturers’. Its product lifecycle management (PLM) applications are widely used in the industrial, high-tech, aerospace and defence, automotive, consumer and medical device sectors. OK, not my usual industry interests, but useful nonetheless as the blog posts are about how multi-disciplinary teams can use technology – and web 2.0 technologies in particular – to share and develop their product ideas.

And earlier this month, I got a news release from PTC about how its Windchill ProductPoint could be integrated with Microsoft’s SharePoint system to extend the SharePoint capabilities to work with complex CAD and structured product data, while also enabling social computing. PTC’s Rob Gremley says:

“Social product development is the next step in the evolution of how people work together. The idea that social product development was ever considered to be a new and revolutionary model will seem inconceivable to the next generation of engineers who have grown up with social networking as a normal vehicle for information sharing. Organizations that are able to harness the power of social computing in their product development strategy will quickly outpace their competitors with greater operational efficiency and ultimately better products.”

An AEC opportunity?

It is widely held, I think, that the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector lags behind technological developments in other industries, including manufacturing. PTC is already showing the way it believes manufacturing businesses can achieve a competitive advantage, so I wonder how long it will be before AEC firms begin to embrace social media as part of their technology stack to improve their operational efficiency and deliver better buildings and other assets?

Some have begun to adopt the tools and techniques (I have mentioned Fielden Clegg Bradley’s adoption of Wikis, and have blogged on pwcom2.0 about HOK’s use of blogs, Facebook and Twitter – see post and follow-up guest post), but for many AEC firms, social media is either shunned or only grudgingly tolerated – and even then perhaps simply for PR, marketing or recruitment purposes. Few have embraced Web 2.0 whole-heartedly and – perhaps apart from AEC integrations with SharePoint, the Kalexo platform I reviewed earlier this year, and Asite’s new community portal – we remain some way from incorporating social computing into everyday professional interaction in the AEC sector.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2009/06/putting-the-social-into-aec-development/

Jun 22 2009

More on BIM and IPD

Catching up with some reading over the weekend, I found this Constructech article: Integrated Project Delivery. Focused on the US market, it is a readable overview of the role that building information modelling (BIM) will play in supporting IPD, but also includes observations from users/vendors of pre-BIM information management systems (eg: Newforma, e-Builder) that facilitate project document workflows.

Relevant previous posts:

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2009/06/more-on-bim-and-ipd/

Jun 20 2009

Asite upgrades and updates

In contrast with the somewhat depressing tone of my last post (Gloomy times for SaaS collaboration vendors), it’s good to see UK SaaS collaboration vendor Asite being upbeat. The company has just upgraded its platform with its Summer 09 release, which also involves a major upgrade to the Asite website (incorporating a significant amount of social media capability). And Asite has also issued a trading update based on (unaudited) figures for the year to 31 December 2008 that show the company’s revenues continuing to grow, despite suffering a hit in the second half of the year.

Interactive community

The new website now features an ‘Interactive Community area‘ with blogs, discussion forums,
a wiki and Twitter feeds. I really have to congratulate Asite on this move. It is something that I wanted to deliver while I was BIW Technologies but development priorities there were more focused on expanding the capabilities of the core system (I did, however, manage to establish a BIW blog, set up an RSS news feed and start a BIW Twitter feed).

As I write on a Saturday afternoon, the Asite community is a little light on content, but as most UK users return to work on Monday morning, hopefully the site will soon begin to feature good levels of interaction between community members. Asite CEO Tony Ryan has written the first blog entry welcoming users to the new site (a development he said was coming “shortly” a year ago – see post), while marketing manager Karl Williams has started seeding the discussion forum with some content.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the Asite Community develops and to see what impact (if any) this has on its relationships with its user community and other stakeholders.

Trading update

The Asite trading update shows gross revenues for 2008 up 14% to £1.89m from £1.658m in 2007 (see Asite finally returns to growth), with pre-tax losses more than halved, down to £0.233m from £0.518m. Based on the half-year figures announced last September (see Asite continues ascent) – covering a period before the global financial crisis really began to cripple the AEC market – I had anticipated that Asite might have broken even, but the healthy growth seen in the first six months (29%) clearly could not be sustained over the remainder of the year.

My gloomy forecasts in the previous post therefore appear to be justified. Over time, I expect the other UK vendors to report similarly difficult times.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2009/06/asite-upgrades-and-updates/

Jun 05 2009

Gloomy times for SaaS collaboration vendors

Today I have been hearing about redundancies among staff at one of the UK’s leading construction collaboration vendors. This news comes as no surprise. The writing has been on the wall for all the collaboration vendors since the credit crunch hit last year. Widespread project postponements and cancellations have led to corresponding reductions across the many firms of consultants, contractors and subcontractors reliant upon a steady throughput of new project opportunities, and businesses like 4Projects, Asite, Aconex and my former employer BIW will not survive unscathed. Only last month, discussing StoreData, I wondered if its sliding turnover indicated the impact the recession was having on collaboration vendors – even those targeting supposedly more buoyant segments of the construction market. And in the wider AEC computing market, Autodesk has so far announced over 1000 lay-offs worldwide this year (ignoring the alarming reports that it was no longer investing in its Constructware collaboration product – see Constructware conundrum continues). It will be some months before we will be able to glean from their annual reports and accounts exactly what the impact of the recession has been on the main collaboration vendors, but the steady upward curve of the sector’s turnover will certainly be interrupted. Hopefully some of the people affected by any redundancy programmes will quickly find new opportunities – but I suspect some will be lost to the construction/property industry altogether.

(I know from my own experience that the general AEC market downturn has prompted belt-tightening across many areas of business expenditure. With less funds being devoted to marketing, PR and industry liaison, the attraction of being BIW’s in-house corporate communications professional was dwindling. However, I was also being asked to provide strategic advice to other AEC firms on collaboration technologies and on social media for construction PR and marketing, so I worked with BIW to negotiate a mutually-beneficial exit from the company and re-establish my previous consultancy business, pwcom2.0 – see A new blog, a new direction.)

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2009/06/gloomy-times-for-saas-collaboration-vendors/

Jun 04 2009

E-business penetration of AEC industry

Having completed a PhD in the 1990s and got lots of support from people in completing questionnaires and doing interviews, etc, I vowed that I would return the favour when approached by other researchers. Ever since, I have supported numerous academics in their endeavours, and the latest is Star (Yongjie) Chen, a PhD research student supervised by my friends Kirti Ruikar and Pat Carrillo in the Civil and Building Engineering Department of Loughborough University (Kirti was co-editor of the book e-Business in Construction, to which I contributed a chapter last year – see post).

Star is looking at e-business, and wants to establish the level of penetration of e-business in the UK construction industry, and to investigate trends within the industry in implementing e-business strategies. If you want to participate in this research project, the questionnaire is available here. This confidential survey will apparently take about 8-10 minutes to complete, and you can request a summary of the results.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2009/06/e-business-penetration-of-aec-industry/

Jun 01 2009

e-tendering still a minority pursuit

Three-quarters of firms still post or email tenders to their clients, despite the fact that e-tendering can reduce their costs and streamline the overall tendering process, reports Construction News, citing a report released last week by BCIS, the building cost information service of the RICS.

BCISetendercoverThe BCIS survey (PDF available here) – reflecting responses from 369 RICS members – showed the percentage of tender documents sent solely in electronic format has almost doubled since 2006, increasing from 8% two years ago to 15% (ie: about one-in-seven). However, the percentage of electronic documents being delivered by physical means, eg: on a disk, increased from 2% to 46% while the percentage sent by email decreased from 64 per cent to 46 per cent.

These results suggest that, since the RICS first issued guidance on e-tendering in October 2005 (see my post RICS e-tendering guidance note: a review), there has been been a reduction of only about a third in in the use of email for e-tendering – despite the RICS’s warnings of the risks involved. Yet, the main area of growth appears to be the sending of electronic documents on physical media – ie: by post or courier.

The RICS launched its own e-tendering system in October 2007 (see my post) but according to reports in Building magazine earlier this year take-up was not extensive (see my January 2009 post RICSe-tendering.com hardly used – not ‘baffling’ and the 14 February follow-up).

BCIS executive director Joe Martin believes the main barrier to adopting a web-based system relate to the presumed costs (though his main focus clearly relates to the RICS e-tendering service). It is also clear from the results that marketing efforts to persuade clients of the benefits of e-tendering need to be upgraded: client demand for e-tendering remains almost unchanged since 2006.

For me, a stand-alone e-tendering system – while a step in the right direction towards electronic information-sharing and re-use – remains a flawed concept, particularly where project teams are already using web-based construction collaboration platforms (aka ‘extranets’) to manage and document just about every other aspect of a scheme’s development. The BCIS report’s final paragraphs appear to suggest that such seamless sharing of information flows is both best practice and desirable:

“BCIS is convinced that Web based e-tendering minimises the administrative overheads associated with tendering, streamlines document handling, speeds up tender processes, eases the demands on managerial resources, provides added security and makes it easier to comply with best practice recommendations. …

“Better structured digital tender data supports improved analyses and facilitates the flow of information from contractors and subcontractors, through surveyors’ systems, into clients’ systems. Over time, BCIS believes industry firms will become increasing aware of the true value of such data.”

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2009/06/e-tendering-still-a-minority-pursuit/

May 29 2009

Google Wave

The web is abuzz with excitement this morning about Google Wave (see this great summary at Mashable), Google’s new real-time communication platform “coming later this year”. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management into one in-browser communication client.

Already, people have started wondering about the potential of this new technology to revolutionise project collaboration in construction – and as I’ve started reading up about it, I’ve begun to wonder if the construction collaboration technology vendors might start developing OpenSocial gadgets or robots to create interfaces between their systems and Google Wave.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2009/05/google-wave/

May 26 2009

TEAM building and BIM

I have spent a few hours recently talking to groups and individuals about building information modelling (BIM). My perspective is one fashioned by experience in working in construction collaboration software – a field that is still almost completely 2D – but I find that some of the issues relating to adoption of BIM are simply an extension of the issues faced in adopting any kind of collaborative approach. This usually boils down to an assertion that successful collaboration only 20% technology, the other 80% is all about people and process.

This, I think, applies equally to BIM. And others echo my thoughts. I have just been reading Mike Whaley’s article, There is no ‘I’ in IPD – the latest Viewpoint article in Lachmi Khemlani’s excellent AECbytes newsletter – and he makes a similar point in respect of the need to build teams, to get people out of their old-style silo approaches and embrace an integrated, collaborative approach. He seeks to encourage:

  • Trust (commitment that we were all working together)
  • Enthusiasm (that this was an exciting group of people to work with, and that it was a good project)
  • Appreciation (of the various skills that everyone brought to the project)
  • Mutual respect (often based upon previous project experiences)

The workshop process he advocates sounds very similar to the approaches employed on numerous UK projects undertaken on a “partnering” basis since the 1994 Latham Report. He also favours the co-location of teams. This is something that has yet to be widely employed in the UK (but was used successfully on the Heathrow Airport T5 project). Mike then discusses the potential of BIM technology to enable integrated working, and is clear that the existing BIM solutions are still in need of development:

“In an ideal world, the full integration would eliminate the need for the ‘remodeling’ from one phase or team member of the project to the next. But the development of one all-encompassing ‘mega-model’ that will work for all the disciplines is probably somewhere out there in the future.”

Like other commentators (see my posts US structural engineers warming to BIM, and 2D to 3D: still a work in progress), Mike has also found marked differences in the speed at which different disciplines, subcontractors and suppliers have embraced BIM:

“… many of our subcontractors and suppliers are more advanced at modeling than our design partners. … for aspects such as ductwork, etc., the manufacturing industry has been doing modeling for years to coordinate with fabrication equipment. This has allowed these industries to be ready to “jump” on the BIM bandwagon faster and, quite honestly, has also given these sub-contractors financial advantages in this tight market by allowing them to pre-fabricate, thereby reducing waste and improving schedule/delivery. On the other hand, many of our design partners are opening the “box of BIM” only now.

“… we have a few design partners that have really embraced BIM technology and, as we look for strategic alliances on projects, this is becoming an important characteristic to us in our team selection process. As IPD becomes the preferred project delivery method, there may very well be some design firms that will unfortunately be left behind because of their lack of ability to provide strong BIM modeling.”

This final point hints at the challenge many design firms now face regarding BIM: should they invest now (ie: during a recession) or wait until the industry/technology/demand develops still further? (see my posts BIM boom? and Information modelling for greener buildings).

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2009/05/team-building-and-bim/

May 26 2009

Constructware conundrum continues

The recent flurry of claims and rebuttals about the future of Constructware (see Constructware’s future questioned) has not convinced everybody that Autodesk remains committed to developing its Software-as-a-Service construction collaboration application Constructware.

The atmosphere of uncertainty is also not helped by last week’s news (and here) that Autodesk is to lay off a further 430 people, on top of the 750 redundancies announced earlier this year. No details were given about where the axe was going to fall, but nervous Constructware custumers might need some further Autodesk reassurance that the application their projects rely upon is not going to be allowed to wither on the vine.

The software industry is littered with products whose continued development amounts to little more than patch releases and the completion of long-planned updates. As existing competitors add new functionality or expand existing features, and as new alternative products are launched targeting the same market sector, Constructware customers will want to know that their application remains at the forefront of technology. Managing projects using what are perceived as ‘old’ applications is not going to give a contractor or project manager a competitive edge. And clients will be reluctant to entrust management of their business-critical asset to a toolset that might soon be overtaken by more functional alternatives.

The uncertainty has also allowed SaaS sceptics to point out the supposed folly of online systems. For example, while acknowledging the efforts of Autodesk’s Jay Bhatt to assure customers that Autodesk is “investing in the development of Constructware and moving the product forward”, WorldCAD Access’s Ralph Grabowski opines:

“Again we see the danger in entrusting data to the cloud — in this case, limited to a few days of worry. The only solution we can trust, however, consists of perpetual licenses for software running on our own servers — aided by backups to an external site.”

Sadly, I am not yet convinced that the Constructware conundrum has been “limited to a few days of worry”. Despite the Q1 loss announced last week, Autodesk’s announcement of job cuts seemed to boost the company’s share price. If that’s what it takes to keep shareholders happy, then perhaps Autodesk might offload or trim products that don’t sit comfortably with its core strengths in on-premise licensed software.

(Update: 15:30 BST, 26 May 2009: I have just read Engineering News Record‘s short account [registration/fee required] of the “shiver that went through the contractor world”. One customer appears placated by Autodesk’s written assurance, but another is waiting for proof of Autodesk’s commitment, including incorporation of building information modelling. “This would be an interesting dialogue to have about six months from now,” says David Goldin, senior vice president and CIO at Maryland-based Clark Construction Group LLC.)

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2009/05/constructware-conundrum-continues/

May 16 2009

Constructware’s future questioned

I’ve seen a ConstrucTech Newsflash and a couple of blog posts (eg: EADoc, Jeff Yoders (BIMboy) – since updated) suggesting that Autodesk may no longer be developing its Constructware Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) construction collaboration product.

Writers seized on a statement by Tim Douglas, Autodesk’s industry segment manager for construction:

“Autodesk, like other companies, has been evaluating its product portfolio and has had to make some difficult decisions. And one of those decisions is to reduce the resources for Constructware.”

According to the ConstrucTech piece, Autodesk is committed to supporting the product for current customers and will maintain and support customers who need to complete current projects. However, Douglas said, the company did not plan to do any new feature or capability development for the product going forward. In a comment posted on Jeff’s blog, another Autodesk executive Rick Rundall tries to clarify the situation:

“… ‘ends development’ is a mis-characterization of how we are handling our Constructware product.  … It is not true we are ending development of this product. In fact, we just released a new version of Constructware this week that includes enhancements including such as new aggregate custom reports, the ability to rename additional modules, and new routing recall options. … we are dedicated to [our customers’] success, and will work hard to make sure that our plans for this product are consistent with that.”

What’s happened since 2006?

Autodesk announced it was spending $46 million to acquire one of the pioneers of on-demand collaboration, Constructware, in February 2006 (see post), and at the time it appeared Autodesk intended to take some of the more sophisticated features of Constructware and add them to its existing SaaS offering, Buzzsaw. However, over the past three years there has been little sign of any convergence between the two solutions and the two brands continue to be marketed as separate but complementary collaborative project management offerings: Buzzsaw is positioned as a document and information management service, while Constructware was described more as a process and budget control system. From contacts in the US, I understand that neither product has made any significant inroads into the other’s markets: Constructware remains popular with general contractors and with government and education clients while Buzzsaw’s document management capabilities are popular with house-builders and retail clients. And Constructware is mainly focused on the US market, while Buzzsaw has significant presence in European markets (among others), partly due to the marketing efficiencies of selling the service to existing users of Autodesk’s widely used AutoCAD products. Constructware founder Scott Unger apparently left Autodesk last autumn, and the business’s other personnel will also have been pruned following Autodesk’s announcement of 750 job cuts earlier this year (see post).

Competitor reaction

North American competitors, almost inevitably, have looked to take advantage suggesting now is the time for Constructware customers to consider migrating to other solutions. Jon Antevy of e-builder says, for example: “It leaves all of those existing clients to basically run out their projects and then make a decision — either migrate to other Autodesk products or look elsewhere.” CMiC‘s Bassem Hamdy tells ConstrucTech of a firm in the middle of a Constructware implementation that contacted CMiC asking about its project management and costing solutions. And EADOC’s Eric Law (busy posting comments on blogs, including Ralph Grabowski’s WorldCAD Access and this blog – “It looks like Constructware in the US will be following Asite as a casualty of the economy and poor acquisition execution”) invited facility owners and engineering firms interested in replacing Constructware to contact them, while heaping scorn on Autodesk’s product strategy:

“Autodesk despises the web and collaboration and prefers proprietary software sold on a per seat license. Autodesk has always focused on design and never paid much attention to the Construction side of AEC. Combine this with Constructware targeting Contractors, Owners and Designers with a rigid product that offered very little flexibility and you have a recipe for failure.”

“Despises” may be a little over-the-top, particularly as Autodesk has continued to invest in developing a number of on-demand design-related services and products, particularly in its Autodesk Labs. But I do share Eric’s view that it is difficult for firms which have historically relied upon selling proprietary software on an up-front per-seat license basis to accommodate and/or make the transition to selling software on a service subscription basis.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2009/05/constructwares-future-questioned/

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