Interoperability
Doing some research for a presentation, I read a report by McGraw-Hill Construction on interoperability of software applications in the building community, which found that interoperability costs add 3.1% to a typical project budget. Although this report has been widely commented on in industry sites and blogs already (it was published last October), it reiterated the value of online project collaboration solutions.
The president of McGraw-Hill Construction, Norbert W. Young, concluded that, "Interoperability, from a purely technology-based viewpoint, allows collaborating firms to share electronic data between software applications. The lack of seamless flow of information - or interoperability - is one of the primary factors holding the entire industry back from quantum leaps forward."
As anyone who has been even partly exposed to an IT integration project will know, workable system-to-system interoperability is a tall order. However, the market has already taken steps to circumnavigate this problem by using collaboration platforms. Because web-based project collaboration systems allow users to manage, view and exchange files, regardless of what program they have been created on, they by-pass the issue of interoperability. In the short term at least, this approach is far more productive than waiting for systems to start talking to each other - which is still some way off. In the mean time, innovation has enabled people-to-people collaboration before system-to-system compatibility is possible.
Labels: Technology
