NCCTP: Flogging a dead standard?
The collaboration providers who are members of UK-based industry group NCCTP met on Wednesday to discuss progress towards an industry-wide technical standard to support data exchange between collaboration technology vendors. This was a follow up meeting to that discussed in Paul Wilkinson's blog post last month. The attendees were Aconex (me), Asite, 4Projects, Business Collaborator, Causeway and Sarcophagus. Cadweb and BIW were not present.
The aim of the meeting was to ensure that all NCCTP members were compliant with the data transfer standard (or, at least that they would be by September 1st). As Paul mentioned, there is a difference of opinion on whether the standard is worth pursuing or not. The meeting also discussed whether the standard should be enhanced and whether we should move to one that uses web services to transfer data.
The original rationale for the standard came about several years ago when the collaboration space was relatively new. Vendors were recently established and, in some cases, not yet financially secure. A common question from potential clients during the sales process was "What happens if you guys go out of business? Can I transfer my data to another provider easily?" We simply do not hear that objection any more and this is due to a number of reasons:
Firstly, the collaboration market has matured, and so has the attitude of clients. They have confidence in the delivery of software as a service (SaaS) and now trust that their data is backed up and secure. (In fact, data is almost always more secure under SaaS than if managed using the client's own IT infrastructure).
Secondly, the leading collaboration providers are now established businesses with strong revenue streams and future order books. Financial viability is no longer a major concern. Now the only question a client may have is whether a provider has the leadership and financial clout to continue to invest in product improvement and platform performance (but that is a separate issue).
Thirdly, many providers have already done scores of data transfers between respective systems - and these transfers have been done predominantly without the use of the technical standard. In fact, one of the key objections by members (including me) is that the standard is a "lowest common denominator" and that the richness of data can be lost when the standard is applied to do the transfer.
The technical standard, taking Aconex as an example, touches only a small proportion of the functional and data set. Even if the NCCTP technical standard was available, many collaboration providers would choose to not use it. Aconex falls into that camp and I know of at least one other provider that has expressed the same view. Rather, we would look more closely at the respective data sets involved and come up with a transfer method that maintains as much of the richness and functional utility as possible. We know that if we used the standard to transfer data from our system to a competitor's and then took that imported data and immediately transferred it back (again using the standard), we would lose a large amount of data and utility in the process.
Finally, the technical standard was specified a number of years ago. Even at that point, it suffered from being a lowest common denominator effect. Fast forward three years and the functional offerings of most of the providers have progressed significantly - leaving the standard even further behind.
Improving the standard to be an all-inclusive and (at the same time) a one-size-fits-all data set would in my view be extremely complicated, difficult and costly. It would be like trying to make a single size, cut and style of jeans that would fit a dozen random people and at the same time make it suit all of their fashion tastes. For this reason, I sense the standard is ultimately doomed and destined for irrelevancy.
So, while the NCCTP has an important role to play in educating the market and in promoting online collaboration within construction, I cannot see the value in diverting development resource from improving our respective functional sets to getting a data transfer standard that gives us a poor cousin of what providers are already doing quite well already.
Labels: Technology
