Construction Collaboration Technologies

An Extranet Evolution

Paul Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134244263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Since the late 1990s, web-based collaboration technologies ('project extranets') have become increasingly widely used within the UK construction industry and are now routinely deployed on the design and construction of thousands of projects.

The first book dedicated to the topic, this comprehensive guide will help current and future construction professionals understand, implement and use such systems more effectively. Cutting through the hype and jargon, it offers expert advice and guidance from an industry insider on choosing a software provider, key software features, hosting, legal issues, connectivity, achieving user buy-in and assessing the benefits.

Chapter 1: Defining collaboration

This chapter:

• briefly describes the development of Internet-based collaborative applications specific to the UK architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry;
• refines an AEC-specific definition of ‘construction collaboration technologies’;
• outlines the subjects covered in the remainder of the book, helping readers to quickly find the topics that interest them.

In the early years of the twenty-first century it is increasingly difficult to imagine working without the internet.¹ Yet only a decade earlier, the World Wide Web (WWW) was still in its infancy and ‘spam’ was a proprietary meat-based product celebrated by the Monty Python television comedy team. Today, almost every sizeable organisation has its own website. And email, with its ability to support attachments from numerous other software programs, has become almost ubiquitous for day-to-day written communication; indeed, it has also become a victim of its own success – spawning a steady flow of newspaper articles about viruses, security lapses and ‘email overload’.

Since the late 1990s, the explosive growth of the internet coupled with the development of better telecommunications links has also provided a platform for many new types of information technology (IT).² Most notably for the purposes of this book, there has been a surge in demand for applications that allow groups of people to collaborate with each other. For the highly information-dependent and cost-conscious AEC industry, where projects are routinely delivered by relatively short-lived, multi-disciplinary, multi-company, multi-location groups of people, the opportunity to use IT to send and receive large volumes of project data over longer distances more quickly and cheaply was too good to miss.³ Around the world, software businesses recognised the opportunity and began to develop applications to capitalise on the growing AEC demand for more efficient team communication.

This book focuses on a particular group of applications sometimes described as, among other things, ‘extranets’. This chapter discusses the terminology and attempts to develop a more appropriate alternative description. It proposes a term used by the leading UK vendors themselves – ‘construction collaboration technologies’ – and relates its definition to the overall development of collaborative working practices within the AEC industry.

This book is also focused primarily on the AEC industry in the United Kingdom. While there have been similar developments in other parts of the world, most notably in the USA but also in mainland Europe, Australasia, Canada, Israel and South Africa (to name a few), the fragmented nature of the international AEC industry, the relative immaturity of most of the software businesses involved, and their initial focus on developing products and services to serve their domestic markets, have so far largely precluded any of the vendors from marketing their products and services globally.⁴ This will change, of course, as the technology becomes more widely accepted, as vendors mature, consolidate and expand, etc.; UK experience will also be influential in the adoption of the technology in other national markets, particularly those whose AEC project delivery methods follow UK models (the same also applies in reverse, of course: for example, one Australian-based vendor has opened a UK office).

This concentration on the United Kingdom will also, it is hoped, reflect the experiences and interests of the many thousands of UK construction professionals who want to understand more about the technology available to them and how to adopt and use it most effectively. To help meet this thirst for knowledge, industry writers and academics have produced a steady stream of magazine articles, reports, product surveys, briefings, ‘how to’ guides and case studies over the past four or five years, but no single publication has attempted to draw all this information together. This book seeks to fill that gap.

Moving on from this chapter's generic definition of the technology, Chapter 2 resolves why collaboration and its supporting technologies have become important now. By the end of 2004, well over 100,000 UK industry professionals had used one or more of the leading systems, and this user community was expected to continue growing for some years. Subsequent chapters are therefore intended to help readers understand, and make informed decisions about, the technology and the relative merits of the various vendors and their services. The benefits (and costs) of using the technology are illustrated by case studies, while pragmatic considerations such as the legal implications, connectivity requirements and training needs are also covered. The book concludes by looking at how collaborative technology might develop in the future.

1.1 What is collaboration?

At the start of the twenty-first century, new internet-based collaboration – or c-commerce – technologies were widely viewed as a major growth sector by IT analysts such as the Butler, IDC, Forrester and Gartner groups and by business process re-engineering gurus such as Michael Hammer (2001) and James Champy (2002).

They recognised that for many corporations, their greatest asset is their ‘knowledge capital’ (‘the value generating asset of a business that includes know-how, ideas, databases and goodwill’ – Davis 2003), and the key challenge is to maximise this asset's value while effectively controlling the management of this information. Most knowledge workers tend to work with others to complete tasks, collaborating internally with fellow employees, and/or externally with customers, suppliers, etc. Collaboration takes place at multiple levels, from small peer groups with immediate colleagues to multi-disciplinary project teams, from company-wide activities with members drawn from different grades of the organisation's hierarchy to those that extend beyond the enterprise to become inter-enterprise collaboration. In short, collaboration takes many forms and is required in just about every business process.

To collaborate, says the Oxford English Dictionary, is to ‘work jointly (with) esp. at literary or artistic production’ (and, perhaps particularly appropriate to the often-adversarial atmosphere of traditional construction projects, it adds: ‘to co-operate with the enemy’). This is to look at the term as it applies culturally, but it has in recent years – as we shall see – also gained a technology dimension.

If one looks at the cultural use of the term, some management writers have focused on the creative element. Schrage (1990), for example, defines collaboration as: ‘the process of shared creation: two or more individuals with complementary skills interacting to create a shared understanding that none had previously possessed or could have come to on their own’.

As this definition suggests, successful collaboration is a process of value creation that cannot be achieved through traditional, often hierarchical structures. However the vital communication takes place – whether face-to-face or virtual – it tends to require the giving and receiving of feedback in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect between all the interested participants, each specialist in their own fields. This feedback will often result in reassessment of an initial idea, and as the collaborators develop a shared sense of what they are trying to achieve, the outputs can be greater than the sum of all individuals’ expertise and knowledge inputs.

In an AEC context, Kalay (1999) defines collaboration as: ‘the agreement among specialists to share their abilities in a particular process, to achieve the larger objectives of the project as a whole, as defined by a client, a community, or society at large’.

It is perhaps worth emphasising, too, that true collaboration requires participants to set aside any self-interest or belief that, by their professional background, training, role or project responsibility, they are somehow superior to other members of the team. In the construction context, this was underlined by the UK Strategic Forum for Construction in its Integration Toolkit (2003):

By accepting that there is nothing individuals can do which cannot be done better by a team, collaboration automatically becomes the highest value which can only be reached by truly listening to other people and adding their valuable contribution.

(Integrated project team (IPT) workbook, section 5.5)

For the purposes of this book, we can absorb these points into a definition of collaboration:

A creative process undertaken by two or more interested individuals, sharing their collective skills, expertise, understanding and knowledge (information) in an atmosphere of openness, honesty, trust and mutual respect, to jointly deliver the best solution that meets their common goal.

Of course, this may be somewhat utopian. There will be many instances when what purports to be team collaboration is, in fact, simply a group of individuals going through the motions. They may communicate. They may consult. But the outcome may not actually be the best solution. It may, for example, be the result favoured by a domineering individual. It may be a quick compromise, impacting on quality, but agreed to save time and/or money rather than wholly satisfy the objective. Or its development may have overlooked the interests and inputs of key participants omitted from the ‘collaboration’ process. We return to this theme when we discuss non-collaborative use of technology later in this chapter.

1.2 Defining collaboration technology

The IT world is awash with technology buzz-words and abbreviations which have been associated with collaboration (enterprise content management, business intelligence, knowledge management, enterprise application integration and business process management are just a few). The term ‘collaboration technology’ is often used to describe various combinations of software and/or hardware employed to help people collaborate. These include enterprise portals and intranet applications, generic workspace or project team applications, web and video conferencing and online meeting applications, peer-to-peer file-sharing, and real-time instant messaging (IM), to name but a few.⁵

Unfortunately, as one might expect, no standard definition is shared by IT analysts or, more particularly, the various vendors of such collaboration tools. For example, the Butler Group (2003) talks about a ‘technology stack’ including individual, workgroup, enterprise and inter-enterprise collaboration, while the vendors often tend to define the term in a way that suits their product or market – sometimes to the confusion of their customers. For example, some vendors may stress that collaboration requires real-time or concurrent interaction (synchronous), while others will suggest that collaboration is undertaken through a series of interactions with time delays between them (asynchronous).

The difference is fairly straightforward. Synchronous collaboration takes place when participants review and discuss issues in real time. In construction projects, for example, this can take the form of face-to-face conversations, formal and informal site meetings, design reviews, workshops, etc.; if participants cannot be in the same place at the same time, telephone calls, online meetings via webcams and video conferences are all forms of synchronous collaboration. Asynchronous collaboration might involve a design being produced by one person and forwarded to another for review, comment or approval, perhaps by email or fax. After a period of time reflecting on the design (and perhaps some synchronous collaboration – a chat – with colleagues in the office), the recipient may then respond to the originator and suggest improvements resulting, eventually, in a further iteration of that design. On most construction projects, therefore, communications will take place using both forms of collaboration at different times depending on the circumstances – though, with the requirement to think, review and make comments, etc., the onus will tend to be on asynchronous collaboration. But whether synchronous or asynchronous, the key ingredient is the involvement of two or more human beings.

In this respect, arguably, the term ‘collaboration technology’ may be something of a misnomer. First, if we regard collaboration essentially as a creative process or capability reflecting the roles and responsibilities of the participants concerned, then it is clear that it is people that collaborate, not technologies or systems; as the Butler Group (2003) succinctly put it: ‘Collaboration is an activity – not a piece of technology’. Using so-called collaboration technology does not necessarily mean one is ‘collaborating’ (as already suggested, there is more to collaboration than just communicating with fellow project participants). It is, in short, an enabler, a platform that allows collaboration to take place when people are prepared and equipped to do so. Second, albeit a more minor point, ‘technology’ implies that a single solution is employed. In reality, the technology is actually a combination of several interacting technologies: a computer, a modem, an internet connection, a web-browser and one or more additional software applications.

Individual collaborators need a point of access or contact where they can participate in a process, sharing their collective information with other members of their team. In the above definition of ‘collaboration’, the words ‘process’ and ‘information’ were deliberately emphasised to stress that collaboration involves an interface – a shared environment where processes and information can be efficiently and effectively integrated.

This book's initial definition of collaboration can now be expanded to develop a definition for collaboration technology:

A combination of technologies that together create a single shared interface between two or more interested individuals (people), enabling them to participate in a creative process in which they share their collective skills, expertise, understanding and knowledge (information) in an atmosphere of openness, honesty, trust and mutual respect, and thereby jointly deliver the best solution that meets their common goal.

Today's technology market includes numerous different applications that provide a shared virtual workspace that people can use for collaboration, whether the needs are internal or external, enterprise-wide or team-focused, synchronous or asynchronous, etc.⁶ The focus of this book, however, is on data-centric applications employed in the AEC market.

1.3 Defining construction collaboration technologies

While ‘collaboration’ has been a technology buzzword for some years, it has also become an increasingly widely used word within the UK AEC industry since at least the mid-1990s. As we will see in Chapter 2, the term became particularly popular following the 1994 Latham Re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Defining collaboration
• Chapter 2: The convergence of culture and technology
• Chapter 3: The construction collaboration providers
• Chapter 4: Hosting construction collaboration technologies
• Chapter 5: Features and functionality of construction collaboration technology
• Chapter 6: Connecting to a construction collaboration service
• Chapter 7: Legal issues relating to construction collaboration technology1
• Chapter 8: Human aspects of collaboration technology
• Chapter 9: Benefits of using construction collaboration technologies
• Chapter 10: Where next for construction collaboration technologies?
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography