Owners, developers, designers and builders need to squeeze every last drop of value from IT revolution

A recent visit to a regional medical center was an eloquent reminder of how much information technologies have transformed many aspects of our lives. Maternity ward nurses and doctors carrying Blackberry-like palm devices, scanned bar codes, downloaded and shared information directly from monitoring devices and to each other's electronic accounts. In the corner, a tired but elated husband answered e-mails on his laptop, enjoying the hospital's free wireless Internet service. A Palm Pilot buzzed with voice and text messages. Relatives half a world away had seen almost in real time JPG photos of the newborn, captured with the phone and e-mailed from the hallway outside the O/R. For the next few days, the personal and work lives of the new parents continued practically uninterrupted. E-mails, memos, spreadsheets, Internet banking and other daily tasks were performed on site without regard for time or place, or, indeed, the solemnity of the moment. The post-partum room as ersatz virtual office keenly illustrates the depth and breadth of the IT revolution. Yet outside our 6th floor window, where a new hospital parking garage is being erected, the change is less apparent. Looking down at the job site, yellow hard hats can be seen in groups hovering over construction documents, spread out in glorious 20# bond. A foreman walks out of the trailer with another set of rolled up drawings, which he now shares with his subs. Despite recent exponential growth in computer, network, and wireless capabilities, and regardless of more powerful software applications, our industry continues to rely on technology first perfected by the ancient Egyptians. Paper is still the leading medium to capture and exchange information among construction project participants. It is not for lack of imagination or intellectual myopia. Some of the sharpest minds work in the architecture, engineering and construction fields. All struggle under tight margins, unforgiving deadlines and countless other pressures. Any opportunity to decrease the cost burden or risks is adapted quickly. And, in fact, information technologies do exist for all phases of the building life cycle. Computer-aided design, project management, electronic estimating tools, operations & maintenance software are all in use today. Meridian Prolog, Autodesk AutoCAD, OnCenter On-Line TakeOff are some of the more common tools in use today. But the foreman at the job site six floors below my vantage point finds it easier, more convenient and effective to communicate detailed construction information with his team using cellulose and toner, not bits & bytes. Why? The happy development of software systems and the IT infrastructure to support them has also brought with it a fragmentation that, instead of streamlining processes, actually interrupts the flow of data from one project participant to the next. The architect designs in AutoCAD, and produces a DWG file, which the subcontractor cannot read. The file is converted to PDF, but in the process x-references are lost, or scaling is altered somewhat. Even the slightest omission or alteration can have serious consequences once the steel beam is up. Other industries, notably automobile and aircraft manufacturers, have integrated design and manufacturing much better, using electronic standards for many types of documents. Not having achieved this same level of integration, the construction industry settles on the only true interoperable medium: paper. The construction foreman needs no special software, or conversion, electric plug or battery, password or user name. As long as he can find his reading glasses, he and the team can hover over the latest revision and exchange information. This costly inefficiency is precisely the condition addressed by electronic construction document management. It strives to rationalize the flow of information at the document level. It does not replace design software, or word processing, scheduling, accounting, estimating or costing packages. Document management does concern itself with getting the right document to the right person at the right time in the best format for that project participant's need. Should it be the PDF version, for viewing on-site on a tablet PC? Or a TIFF file, for printing a hard-copy at the trailer? Should the drawing be in its original AutoCAD DWG format, so the design team can collaborate remotely? Construction document management technology to overcome these interoperability problems is not as widespread as we might expect, but its benefits are being recognized more and more widely. The New York State Education Department, whose annual construction budget is in the billions of dollars, began using it for its K-12 projects in 2007 after a six-year study. As owners, developers, designers, builders, we all have a stake in squeezing every last drop of value from the IT revolution with the potential to make our industry as efficient as aircraft manufacturing ... and, as it turns out, obstetrics! Victor Gomez is director of sales & marketing at Dataflow, Inc., Albany, N.Y.