Jan 25 2007

ProjectDox rejects SaaS approach

I wrote briefly about US-based Informative Graphics‘ ProjectDox in July 2006. Today, thanks to Randall Newton’s AECnews.com (Informative Graphics Spins Off ProjectDox), I learn that IGC has created a subsidiary, Avolve Software, to manage ProjectDox opportunities, leaving the parent company to focus on its file visualisation products (eg: its Brava! viewer, etc).

Looking at the website, it appears ProjectDox has two primary uses: first, it can be used as a web-based project collaboration system; second, it helps local government organisations to manage planninig approval processes. It is not an on-demand or software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. Instead, ProjectDox is positioned very deliberately as a locally-hosted product – “No subscription fees” trumpets the website; “No expensive subscription fees or monthly storage fees, and no per-user fees,” it continues.

This seems almost counter-intuitive, given the forecasts for growth in the SaaS solutions market, but it may well appeal to conservative contractors who are more comfortable managing everything themselves (others may still prefer to outsource at least this aspect of IT management so that they can concentrate on their core business: building things). No doubt SaaS competitors to ProjectDox will be brushing up their arguments in favour of SaaS: 24/7 system availability, no hardware/software to update and manage, better use of existing IT resources, greater flexibility and scaleability, support costs included, economies of skill, data back-up, business continuity, etc.

The cost factor is debatable too. OK, no “expensive subscription fees” (instead, pay a substantial upfront license payment, plus the associated hardware and IT support costs), “no monthly storage fees” (instead, monitor your own storage capacity and buy additional hardware as required); “no per-user fees” (some SaaS vendors charge a flat-rate per project regardless of the number of users).

Last year, the ProjectDox pilot solution was likely to cost around $10,000, I believe. Then there are hardware requirements (according to a review and a datasheet I found on the web) which include a 2.0Ghz Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server platform, a Microsoft SQL 2000 server, 1GB RAM and 100GB hard disk space; and don’t forget the cost of of an adequate internet ‘pipe’ to cater for all that file-sharing, back-up systems, database and system administration, support calls, etc. There was free telephone, fax, web and FTP support for the first 90 days, after which telephone and fax support required purchase of a maintenance plan (no costs given, and don’t forget the long-distance charges to call the support number). The review was positive but warned: “you’ll have to work with the vendor to make sure the price won’t empty your wallet.”

Now, let’s have another look at those subscription fees….

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/projectdox_reje/

Jan 25 2007

Tom Dengenis resurfaces

Former Bidcom UK and Asite CEO Tom Dengenis is still actively interested in construction IT. He is now a “a senior manager at BearingPoint, a global management and technology consulting firm”, and has just written an article (Building Information Model: the Solution for Optimizing the Construction Delivery Process) on the US-based Riverguide for Construction Software website.

Incidentally, I was first alerted to the Riverguide site a couple of weeks ago by Austin Merritt and, while focused on the US, it has lots of interesting news and articles on different aspects of the software market – I’ve added it to my AEC IT sites listing. Austin also suggested I have a look at Don Fornes’ Late Majority blog, one of several ENR.com blogs – one of Don’s posts is an interesting round-table discussion on Software-as-a-service in Construction involving four US vendors.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/tom_dengenis_re/

Jan 24 2007

Workspace confusion

One consequence of BT’s launch of BT Workspace (previous post) could be the potential for some confusion in the UK construction marketplace with other products and services called Workspace.

Union Square, for example, has long had an intranet product (with extranet capabilities) called Workspace, and Asite has been talking about launching its second product with the same name for some months now (see Asite’s “major new developments”) And CTSpace apparently got its name from conflating “Collaboration Technology WorkSpace”.

(In addition, you have other, non-AEC software systems called Workspace from IBM, Sybase, Propero, EasyReach, FindLaw and Smilehouse, among others. As if these weren’t enough, there is also a UK property company called Workspace Group PLC.)

I am pretty sure that the term ‘workspace’ on its own cannot be registered as a trademark as it a generic term. To distinguish between the various products and services, therefore, one will need to ensure that the company prefix (BT, Asite, etc) is always mentioned, and care may need to be taken lest customers believe they are buying a rebadged version of another company’s system.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia definition of ‘workspace’ has a specific section devoted to Software-as-a-service, where the term means: “an application that allows users to exchange and organize files over the Internet”. This was only added in October 2006 and currently (as of 15.45 GMT today) seems to be have been edited to be very specific to the BT offering – time for some of the other vendors to make it clear they too use the term, perhaps?

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/workspace_confu/

Jan 24 2007

BT Workspace

Almost unnoticed, UK telecoms provider BT has recently launched a web-based service, BT Workspace, aimed at helping people in small to medium-sized enterprises share information and collaborate with each other. It talks about getting rid of email clutter, and managing and controlling projects via extranet functionality, with intranet functionality also available for internal company dicussions and processes.

BT Workspace Lite is free for two people and offers 10MB storage and two Project workspaces. You can start with this and then upgrade to the main BT Workspace service which costs £7.50 (excluding VAT) per company user per month and offers 100MB space per user – pooled between all users, unlimited project workspaces and has extra storage available at £5 per month per 1GB.

Other bloggers have started to report on and review the service (for example, read Dennis Howlett’s two-part review here and here; see also David Terrar’s blog).

This is a major step forward for online web services, particularly as it is coming from a business more commonly regarded as a telecoms provider rather than a software developer (I’m thinking of Microsoft’s Office Live here, for instance). BT is one of the UK’s best-known and most trusted brands, has a large customer base – particularly in the broadband market – and a powerful marketing machine. This Software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, being so competitively priced, will doubtless appeal to many small businesses (sole traders, partnerships and other small project-oriented groupings), and could therefore prove a major turning point in the development of SaaS in the UK.

From a construction industry perspective, I don’t see this service threatening the main extranet or collaboration platform providers targetting the medium-large project market (there are just too many complexities about collaborating on CAD drawings, managing contract workflows, etc). But, particularly at the repair and maintenance and small building works end of the construction marketplace, this could be a very compelling offer indeed.

It also underlines that online collaboration is not just something dreamed up by geeky software specialists; with this move, BT could be raising awareness of on-demand solutions and and boosting their credibility. Many conservative construction people may well, therefore, be tempted to take their first steps towards using online collaboration tools as a result.

Update (30 January 2007): According to Isabel Wang, “BT Workspace is powered by a modified version of Microsoft Sharepoint…. BT co-branded it from SMBLive.” SMB:Live Corporation’s role is also clear from the Workspace terms and conditions, terms of use and privacy policy.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/bt_workspace_1/

Jan 24 2007

Change management seminar – 2

Yesterday, I travelled to Bristol to chair a Construction Productivity Network seminar on change management (see post).

We heard an interesting pair of presentations from Robin Wilkin (MPS) and Professor Ming Sun (University of West of England). Ming (who, incidentally, was one of the people who encouraged me to write my book) has been leading a research project evaluating the use and benefits of MPS’s web-based CCM (contract change management) solution focused on the NEC/ECC contract, so we heard some interesting feedback on the initial results of a questionnaire survey conducted in late 2006 (PDF version of document available here).

I read the document on the journey home. The findings are very positive in respect of the NEC/ECC contract and of the benefits of the CCM system. When analysed by discipline, clients and project/contract managers tended to be more positive than contractors, with the latter also tending to rank the top 10 benefits differently – reflecting, I suppose, that contractors will have different commercial pressures, responsibilibities and priorities to other team members. Further research is to be conducted into the use of the system to build upon this initial phase.

I also enjoyed the presentation given by Adrian Terry (until recently group staff development manager at Halcrow and, before that, a Respect for People project manager). He described a change management programme conducted in Halcrow, and included a short video of one of the group’s events. As a former Halcrow employee, I found this particularly interesting: it was like watching a home movie, as I tried to spot people who I used to work with.

At very short notice (we’re talking about 10.30am yesterday morning, just 2.5 hours before the event’s start!), Esther Ridsdale of CSPI Associates agreed to fill a gap caused by the late withdrawal of another speaker, and did a sterling job, drawing on experiences in change programmes for supply chains in Honda and Nissan, among others, and stressing the importance of letting individuals know “What’s in it for me?”

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/change_manageme_1/

Jan 22 2007

De Kieviet’s Gambit – more CTSpace ‘spin’

The latest spin on CTSpace comes in a one-page ‘Company focus’ feature in UK trade weekly Building (see PDF on CTSpace’s website). At first glance, the article, written by Mark Leftly, makes CTSpace seem a very credible venture, but I think there are some very debatable assertions.

  1. I was puzzled by the claim that the merger of BuildOnline and CTSpace created a company “with a turnover of £10.2m). This figure is repeated in the box under Gert-Jan De Kieviet’s photograph where it adds BO and Citadon “provide roughly a 50:50 split”. Only last month (see CTSpace: initial redundancies), CTSpace CEO Howard Koenig said the combined business had combined revenue for Year-End June 2006 of approximately £8 million. To grow from around £8m to over £10m in just six months takes some doing!
  2. “CTSpace now has a global workforce nearing 100, including a team of 35 in India”: the inference is that the business is now bigger. However, the figure actually reveals that a programme of redundancies has already cut deep, as the headcount is already down from the 130 it was when Koenig was quoted (c. 18 December).
  3. Citadon may have been founded in 2001, but its origins go further back. Indeed, as previously discussed (see CTSpace further dissected), CTSpace is now the latest manifestation of 11 previous (failed) brands.
  4. The article repeats Koenig’s boast that “Now combined, we are unrivalled in our ability to provide global collaboration expertise.” Given the global reach of at least two rivals – Autodesk (and its Buzzsaw/Constructware collaboration brands) and Aconex (among others) – CTSpace is certainly “rivalled”; and in terms of users, it is actually still some distance behind Autodesk globally, and lags behind other players in various individual markets (including the UK, where I believe BIW to be the market leader).
  5. There is a frank admission that for Citadon “99% of its business was in the US whereas 99% of BuildOnline’s was in Europe”. This may just be an extreme illustration, but such polarisation clarifies why CTSpace has had to maintain both partners’ sets of products: neither was good enough to satisfy both US and European markets.
  6. There is no mention of the word profit in the article; instead, it seems it’s all about turnover (“over the next two or three years, the firm aims to double in size, meaning turnover will top £20m”). Again Koenig has previously been reported as saying he is aiming for break-even by year-end 2007, but this will require a strong performance by De Kieviet’s North EMEA business (which includes the UK), particularly if it is turnaround the ailing BuildOnline UK business which lost nearly £1m on a turnover of £2.8m in the year to 31 March 2006 (see BuildOnline UK position worsened).
  7. And the final paragraph is just hype. Mark Leftly shouldn’t believe all he’s been told by CTSpace. First, it has yet to prove that it is “now a truly global business”; second, I don’t foresee rivals acknowledging “they have been left behind”. Moreover, looking at the previous track records of Citadon and BO, neither should inspire particular confidence in customers or investors (having merged nearly a dozen businesses so far, and burned their way through, between them, somewhere over £100m to date – see CTSpace raises $5.3m); the M&A strategy hasn’t, so far, translated itself into profits, and rival collaboration vendors might, with some justification, argue that a better strategy might be to build more gradually a single, solid, focused and ultimately profitable business.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/de_kieviets_gam/

Jan 19 2007

The email argument revisited

I keep returning to this topic (see previous post, for example). This time, my post has been prompted by three things: a Union Square press release, a conversation with Sarcophagus’s Jeremy Sainter, and a blog posting by Lars Plougmann linking to the thoughts of a Harvard professor.

Taking these in reverse order, Lars writes about the flipside of email and collaboration, drawing on a suggestion that asks: what would enterprise adoption look like if collaborative platforms had been invented before email? Harvard professor Andrew McAfee poses the question in his blog.

He distinguishes between private communication channels such as email, IM and texting (where “information … isn’t widely visible, consultable, or searchable” and often “no record exists of who sent what to whom”) and collaboration platforms (where contributions are visible and persistent). If current corporate collaboration and communication technologies were exclusively platforms (he mentions blogs and wikis, but let’s add extranets into this category too), McAfee argues, what would happen if a crop of new channel technologies – email, instant messaging, text messaging – became available? He suggests two main outcomes:

“First, users would adopt the new channel technologies for private communications, but not for much more than that. They’d quickly see that it’s less efficient to use channels, and less helpful to their colleagues….

“Second, many constituencies would hate the new technologies, and strenuously advocate that they be kept out.  In a company accustomed to platforms, introducing channels would be perceived as asking for trouble.  They’d be seen as tools that would let sensitive information leave the company and jump over Chinese walls, let sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior flourish below the radar, and let people waste as much time as they wanted to chatting with each other about irrelevant stuff.  What’s even worse, compliance officers and other managers would feel largely powerless to stop this bad behavior, because channel traffic is so hard to monitor.  They couldn’t read all employee emails, and sampling would be unlikely to catch all the problems quickly enough to head them off.”

This flipside test exposes some of the contradictions in using email, as I have argued in the past (see The email argument). At BIW, we have tried to discourage use of conventional email by project teams during delivery of construction projects, but individuals have become so accustomed to using desktop-based email as their primary communication tool that it is sometimes difficult to convince them to use any alternatives, such as the ‘team mail’ functions built into the on-demand BIW solution.

And it’s not just BIW. Right across the AEC industry, this insistance on using email has prompted IT businesses to deliver email management solutions either as part of wider solutions or as bolt-on extras. Union Square’s Workspace, for example, has apparently just been adopted by Stuarts Industrial Flooring because it:

“… has been designed to help construction firms improve management of email and prevent valuable business information disappearing. The software provides companies with a simple method of filing, archiving and retrieving all emails through a central software portal that can be accessed by any employee within the organisation.”

And Sarcophagus has been marketing its MsgSave software for around five years, and has seen interest grow – particularly in the US following the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

But this may change and such email accommodations might become unnecessary. As mentioned yesterday (under ‘Document Collaboration’ in my On-demand/SaaS “set to take off in 2007” post), if the construction industry follows wider IT trends “challenging the domination of desktop applications” then we might yet see working environments where collaboration ‘platforms’ become the norm and ‘channels’ are rejected for being insecure, difficult to manage, time-wasting and unauditable. However, this would still require a major change in individual attitudes and corporate cultures to take place (as I’ve said numerous times before, successful use of collaboration technologies is 80% about people and processes, only 20% technology).

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/the_email_argum/

Jan 19 2007

Asta acquired by Eleco

Another bit of M&A activity in the AEC IT sector: project management software business Asta Group (developer of construction software products such as TeamPlan and PowerProject) was acquired by Eleco (AIM-listed: ELCO) just before Christmas 2007 (reports ITShowcase).

Like RedSky IT (see post), Asta was another firm that has worked with BIW in the past, so I will be interested to see how this acquisition works out both commercially and for its staff.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/asta_acquired_b/

Jan 19 2007

Change management seminar

Next Tuesday (23 January 2007) in Bristol, I am chairing a seminar: “Change Management – Can you manage without it?” Organised by the Construction Productivity Network in association with the Constructing Excellence Bristol Club, the event will have presentations from:

  • Robin Wilkin of MPS
  • Professor Ming Sun, University of West of England
  • Brian Swain, Rubicon Associates
  • Adrian Terry, ex-Halcrow

For further information about the event, click here.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/change_manageme/

Jan 19 2007

Avanti – latest

As a recently appointed member of steering group of Constructing Excellence‘s Building and Estates Forum, I am now well-placed to keep up with developments regarding the Avanti programme (see previous post).

A recent meeting heard a presentation from CWC (CE’s training and consultancy arm). It appears a distinction is now being drawn between “the narrow Avanti SMP (Standard Method and Procedure) – which with luck may become an ISO standard for CAD data exchange – and a broader integrated collaborative approach to achieving project and business excellence, now branded CWC Advantage.”

Updated 22 January 2007: The latest BE e-newsletter mentions a CWC-Avanti launch at the House of Lords in London on 30 January 2007. No further information, so I’m not sure who can attend, etc.

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2007/01/avanti_latest/

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