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A Knowledge-Sharing Gap
A lack of interoperability is symptomatic of a larger issue: the inability to effectively share and disseminate knowledge. "Knowledge management is one of the really critical topics," says Nelson. "Everything is a project at an engineering firm. You have various offices in your own firm, plus clients, subcontractors, government offices. There's so much passing information back and forth -- and doing that in a secure environment. Everyone is still looking for the one tool for collaboration, but no one has found it."
Construction and engineering firms have invested in IT in recent years, and the trend looks likely to continue. A survey last year by Engineering News-Record of 400-plus executives found that 29% expected to increase their IT budgets in 2006, while 45% expected spending to stay the same. "Our highest priority is getting project information to our project people more effectively," says Greg Gould, the CTO at Burns & McDonnell Inc., in Kansas City, Mo., with revenue of roughly $600 million.
Burns & McDonnell is deploying a new employee portal to automatically generate business reports that interface with its Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. It's also rolling out Document Locator, a new document management system from ColumbiaSoft Corp. "More and more of our clients want us to be able to collaborate electronically," Gould says. While his company has tried several tools, none has worked to his satisfaction, he says.
One measure of inefficiency is how much paper the industry uses. A recent Harris Interactive survey indicates that large CAD files are reviewed 50% of the time both on paper and onscreen because they can't be exchanged electronically. "Documents are splattered all over the company," Nelson says. And he knows what he's talking about. He organizes the IT portion of the Design Finance Officers Group, a roundtable for industry CIOs to discuss concerns. "When the project ends, you have to archive the stuff," Nelson says. "Companies have different rules. I don't know anyone who has solved this problem. Everyone builds their own thing."
Another problem is the rapidly changing nature of workflow. Larger firms might have thousands of active projects spread among an ever-shifting array of locations. "The workload changes all the time," Nelson says. "Two offices talk to each other all the time, then they never talk again. Every company seems to have a different way of doing things. And lay the government on top of that. You need a communications network you can really manipulate." Companies frequently have to open satellite offices at construction sites with heavy bandwidth requirements quickly, only to move these resources to other projects before long.
"You get a notice they're going to open a project office in two weeks," says Kevin P. Pierce, director of technology at $80-million Woolpert, an engineering and design firm in Dayton, Ohio. "You need 30 days to get an Internet connection at least. Acquisitions are another challenge. We don't want any of their computers, but generally they come our way anyway. In two years, we've had four acquisitions."
Retrofitting Technology
The issues are similar at firms like Burns & McDonnell, where growth has been organic. The company employs more than 2,000 people in nine business units scattered among more than a dozen offices. "The units traditionally have lots of autonomy and different ways of doing things," says Gould. "My primary focus is on project execution. We're tying apps together to improve productivity and efficiency."
Many offices house different practices under the same roof, each with different IT systems. But as the business expands, Gould says he has to add more systems to capture customer information. Early this year, the company rolled out Interaction, a customer relationship management system from LexisNexis, replacing a homegrown program that Gould calls "user belligerent." Interaction, he says, gives the firm a handle on all parties with whom it does business.
Unfortunately, Gould has to turn to solutions designed for other industries because vendors have difficulty meeting this industry's demands. "Every project we do is different; every design is different in this industry, but business applications are made for people who make widgets," Gould says. Since AEC firms are project based, he adds, systems leave much to be desired. "The way we want to track and report -- those systems don't fit our needs."
Michael Ybarra is a contributing writer for SearchCIO-Midmarket.com. To comment on this story, email editor@ciodecisions.com.
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