Built on Collaboration

We received a comment earlier this week asking our thoughts on the merits of Google Docs. As the author said, Google Docs is a free tool that can perform some of the functions of a construction collaboration system. It provides easy indexing, searching, automatic versioning and live editing whereby multiple users can edit documents at the same time, with a built in chat function for users to converse while editing.

I'm sure many software providers live in dread that Google will launch a free tool that is potentially a substitute for their product. However, although Google Docs is a good generic tool for the simple sharing of docs, it is not really a competitor to construction collaboration tools.

Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Construction and engineering projects demand a system that is customized to the needs of the industry. Google Docs has some nifty features but it falls a long way short of providing the functionality and sophistication required for an industry project. There are some fundamental requirements that Google Docs can not perform, such as workflow reviews, web forms for correspondence and reporting for outstanding overdue items (or any kind of reporting for that matter).
2. Having a system that allows docs or files to be deleted is bad for the audit trail and court-worthiness of a system.
3. Google docs has limited storage capabilities - and you can delete items to stay within the storage limits - which is very bad for capturing the full history and audit trail of the project.
4. Google Docs does not have an organization-employee and project structure, which does not suit large construction and engineering projects.
5. Allowing users to share data while also allowing areas for data that are private to particular organizations is critical in wide adoption of collaboration systems on projects. If everyone can see everything, or even if the admin organization can see everything, then people will not widely adopt it. We have seen systems that have a similar security model to Google Docs being implemented on construction and engineering projects and they either fail totally, or the amount of data captured is a small percentage of what is captured by a system that supports collaboration while also allowing privacy (because people will go outside the system for anything that they want to keep private). And - ultimately - capturing all the data is the best way to reduce risk on a project.

So, while Google Docs is a good tool for people that want to share some docs in a very basic way, it does not suit collaboration on projects (particularly medium-large scale) that require industry-specific functions and workflows, indelible audit trails and reporting features.

Labels: Global trends, Good practice, Technology