Behind-the-Scenes Spotlight

I’d had a variety of roles over a 25+ year career, all focused on how to make the best use of technology to support the business objectives of an organization. I’ve worked as chief information officer and management consultant in the construction industry for the past 13 years, helping the senior executives of companies both large and small figure out how to best use their technology investment. I’d describe myself as a practical technologist, meaning that I don’t just love technology for technology's sake.

Q: Describe agcXML as if you were speaking to a non-computer person.

When you send an email to someone, you don’t worry about which email system they use, you just send it. You can send attachments too and you know that even if you are using Outlook and they are using Yahoo or Gmail, they will still be able to read the email and get the attachments. This works because behind the scenes, email systems support and understand a standard for sending email. It’s called SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol). Although it supports more functionality, the agcXML interoperability standard can be thought of as the SMTP equivalent for sending construction-related information between construction software systems.

I’ve seen the value of standards used in other industries to send information between different software systems. They exist in manufacturing, finance, travel and education (to name a few) and support interoperability between the different software systems used in those industries. Ever since I began working in the construction industry I’ve been looking for something similar. I’ve seen so many companies struggling with the challenges of exchanging data both internally within their four walls as well as externally with other project specific participants that the value of a standard was clear. I see my role as a management consultant in the industry to be the contractor advocate with software vendors. With my technology background and experience of other standards becoming involved,developing a data interoperability standard for the construction industry was a clear way to be an advocate for Burger Consulting Group’s customers and for the industry as a whole.

Christian Burger and I have been working with AGC for over four years to help them re-energize the agcXML project which had stalled back in 2009. I was able to bring my experience in other industries with data interoperability standards to help develop a path forward for agcXML.

Q: How do you see agcXML transforming the industry?

I’ll give you my top three opportunities for the industry:

1. For owners and contractors: reduced overall construction cost - There have been various studies that show as much as 50 percent of labor cost is spent on non-value activities such as re-keying data, converting data from one format to another, correcting data, checking to see whether one or more people have received certain information, etc. The agcXML interoperability standard significantly reduces the amount of non-value labor effort (and associated cost), reducing the overall construction cost.
2. For contractors: become more competitive – In addition to the labor cost savings that agcXML can provide, it can also greatly reduce the processing time for individual activities as data is being exchanged in close to real time, rather than the delay that can be caused by traditional data exchange methods. This means that contractors can either pass some of the labor cost savings to owners, or they can reallocate the time saved on more value-added activities, such as value engineering.
3. For software vendors: better customer-focused functionality – By having a data interoperability standard, software vendors can focus more effort on supporting customer functionality needs rather than time spent on building integration tools and procedures in to their products. The standard will allow existing and new software vendors to build additional functionality in to their products and potentially increase their target market by being able to build more affordable products for some of the smaller contractors.

The agcXML interoperability standard defines a series of business processes that can be adopted as a whole or individually. The advantage of this approach is that benefits of adoption can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Initial adoption can be achieved by getting either a large number of software vendors to support one or more agcXML interoperability processes (e.g. RFIs and change orders) in their products, or a smaller group of vendors supporting agcXML over a large number of projects. Adoption will take a combination of owners and contractors demanding the use of agcXML on projects and more software vendors joining the initial group that is supporting it. We have several software vendors already supporting it and now we as an industry need to collectively demand that all of the software vendors that we use support the standard.

Q: Describe your role in the RFI data exchange demo at convention.

In my role as the chief architect for the agcXML initiative, my job was to work with all of the software vendors participating in the demo to make sure that they had what they needed to implement agcXML in their products. Outside of the demo I oversee the general direction of the development of agcXML. I help provide context to construction industry processes to the developer of agcXML to help them with the design. I also work with software vendors to promote the use of agcXML and to solicit their feedback in the development of the standard so that we can ensure that it facilitates adoption. My role is a combination of agcXML evangelist and steward to the initiative.

Q: How do you feel the audience reacted to the data exchange demonstration?

As an observer of the event I was laughing to myself a bit. The audience was impressed by the demo, seeing data flow between disparate systems without reentry was impressive to them, but it also happened so smoothly that it probably seemed fairly uneventful. We had four software vendors exchanging information as smoothly as if they had always been doing it. I think because it looked so easy the true momentous impact of what was accomplished by using the standard was not fully appreciated. It was an industry-changing event, but I think is retrospect, perhaps we made it look too easy!

Q: Were there questions raised by audience members that hadn’t been addressed by the agcXML team? If so, what were they and will they be addressed in the future?

I facilitated a panel discussion with the software vendors after the demonstration asking questions provided by the audience. The questions were focused more on getting additional clarification on aspects of agcXML than the identification of something that we hadn’t already thought of. Obviously one of the biggest questions is when will it be available and having two of the software vendors indicate they will have support for it in their product this year is fantastic news for the industry.

As a point of note, we are going to make all of the questions and the answers available via the agcXML .org website site soon

Q: What do you see as the biggest obstacle for this initiative?

When talking to software vendors about how to get them to support agcXML, for those that are reluctant to build support for it in their products, one of the most common responses is that their customers aren’t asking for it. That may be because their customers were not aware of agcXML or what it did in order to be able to ask for it. So educating the industry on what agcXML is and why it is important is I think the biggest obstacle at the moment. Once we have enough of the industry educated, they will know what to ask for from their software vendors and create that industry demand.

The first software products with support for agcXML built in are likely to appear in the second or third quarter of this year. Currently we are getting ready to conduct a public review of the initial business processes supported by the agcXML interoperability standard. What this means is that we will be soliciting feedback from as many industry software vendors as possible on agcXML. This is their opportunity to submit any questions about how to implement it in their product or request amendments to make it easier to implement. If you want to be able to use agcXML on your projects you need to make sure that you ask your software vendor(s) to participate in the public review and then demand that they support agcXML in their product as soon as possible.