Equipment World Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/93519
technology | by Wayne Grayson Common ground Will it fi nally be possible for all of your software to work together? F ive software companies have joined together to create the Construction Open Software Alliance, launched during the Associated General Contractors of America's IT Forum Conference in August. The companies that form the alliance are: SmartBidNet, Sub, Note Vault, Cloud Takeoff and On- line Plan. The lack of interoperability be- tween construction software pro- grams prompted the alliance, notes James Bernham of JB Knowledge Technologies. "Why isn't asynchronous collabo- ration built into all of the software Other manual process We don't transfer data In-house custom system CSV XML Other 52% 35% 18% 13% 12% 6% 4% contractors use?," he said, pointing out the easy experience of using cloud services like Google Docs, Gmail and Dropbox, which effort- lessly and instantly sync documents and data across devices for millions each day. "It should be." In a recent survey Bernham took of construction IT professionals, 40 percent of the respondents said the software they use didn't integrate or talk with one another. Because of that, 52 percent of the survey respondents said they use Micro- soft Excel spreadsheets to transfer data and 35 percent use some other manual process (see chart). "This has to change. We have to How do construction IT departments transfer data? Excel sheets have structured data," Bernham says. The alliance wants to create a seamless way to share data be- tween the software applications contractors depend on most. "We believe that a one-stop-suite is not always the best choice and that it can be much more effi cient for the end user to operate multiple applications when they integrate seamlessly," the alliance website mission statement reads. "This can be achieved by an open applica- tions standard built and accepted by industry application developers, which streamlines the transfer of cross-application data." This is not a new effort. Back in 2007, AGC released the agcXML standard "as the fi rst effort to stan- dardize and encourage the effi cient exchange of data between solutions in the industry," as agxml.org says. However, the vast majority of industry technology providers have not adopted the agcXML standard and its development has stalled, not even making it to version 1.0. The alliance wants to change that, Bernham says. "Right now, (contractors are) doing what we call point-to-point integration," Christian Burger of Source: James Bernham, JB Knowledge Technologies EquipmentWorld.com | October 2012 45