December 01, 2009
With the New Year quickly approaching, contractors are inquiring about which factors will drive technology initiatives forward within the industry in 2010. The answer to this question is, in a word, collaboration.

Diane Carlisle, director, professional resources, ARMA Intl., www.arma.org, Overland Park, Kan., says “Everybody is rushing toward a collaborative worksite because workers are dispersed across pretty wide geographic areas sometimes. It is helpful to be able to have that electronic place where you can work together and do designs and documents and that type of thing.”

True, BIM (building information modeling) has been garnering quite a bit of attention, as the process that is going to help enable all project stakeholders to collaborate more effectively, but some industry sources and contractors point to an age-old tool that might see a bit of revitalization in 2010—Microsoft SharePoint.
One recent example of a construction company using SharePoint is J.R. Filanc, www.filanc.com, Escondido, Calif., which is using document-imaging technology with SharePoint. All of its information goes into a Microsoft SharePoint repository and every department has its own SharePoint page. While this is just one example, more and more contractors are using this tool in new ways.

With the anticipated release of new versions of Microsoft products in the first half of 2010, SharePoint is sure to takeoff even more so than it has already. In the coming year, construction technology providers will be stepping up their use of Office-related products.

According to Microsoft, www.microsoft.com, Redmond, Wash., new advantages of the 2010 line of Office products include easier collaboration through the Web and phone, more capabilities to gain insight into business processes, and greater flexibility.

As one example, PowerPivot is a new BI (business intelligence) tool for Microsoft Excel and SharePoint that will allow construction companies to look at data in the Microsoft Office environment.

PowerPivot for Excel allows companies to process large amounts of information with analytical capabilities such as Data Analysis Expression. PowerPivot for SharePoint centralizes business intelligence and enterprise data within the SharePoint application, allowing contractors to collaborate on user-generated data models and analysis from Excel.

For the construction industry, this type of technology will allow companies to gather more information for business insight and make better decisions.

As we look to what will be among the biggest trends in the construction technology landscape in 2010, contractors and vendors alike point to increased collaboration.

BIM enables collaboration for all project stakeholders by sharing information through models and will inevitably see growth in the coming year. But with new advances in Microsoft tools and an increased focus on a collaborative environment, SharePoint will also likely experience some growth in the construction industry in the coming year.

To learn more about what will be some of the biggest factors driving technology initiatives forward within the construction industry in 2010, check out the January 2010 issue of Constructech.