What’s in a name? How Integrated Project Collaboration software is changing the industry.

It’s clear that a new class of web-based collaboration software is beginning to make a major impact on the design and construction industry, both in North America and worldwide. What is so different about this new option? Project websites and extranets have been around since the mid-1990s, but after much early fanfare during the Internet boom, their adoption rate slowed significantly as designers and builders found that most of the solutions available on the market at the time had significant limitations or failed to work the way that the industry was used to working. In recent years new technologies (including the emergence of cloud computing) and more attention to building applications that are intuitive and easy to use for AEC professionals has resulted in a growing use of web-based software again. Multiple other publications have noted this, including the Construction Management Association of America’s (CMAA) whitepaper, “Managing Integrated Project Delivery”, and a cenews.com article I cited in a previous blog post, “A neutral platform enables the trust behind successful project management”, by Dexter Bachelder.

But what’s the right name to refer to these web-based collaboration tools? “Project website” and “project extranet” are outdated terms that don’t reflect the advancement in technologies or the increasingly sophisticated role of web-based solutions. The CMAA whitepaper uses the term “Project Management Information Systems” (PMIS), but I personally feel this term is misleading. It is easily confused with traditional “project management” or “project information management” software, which have come to refer to internal software that focuses primarily one project team member instead of the entire integrated team. For example, Newforma is a widely used project information management tool for architectural firms, and Prolog is a widely used project management package for construction firms. Both Newforma and Prolog are typically hosted on servers located inside the firm’s offices. Both offer great benefits to the party that owns them, but outside team members have only limited access through web portals, limiting their benefit to the rest of the project team members.

To best describe the new class of web-based applications that clearly differ from past technologies and traditional in-house software, I prefer the term “Integrated Project Collaboration” (IPC) software. This title makes sense for a number of reasons:

Integrated = Available to the entire project team, all team members seated at the same virtual table

Project = Project-based with information for the specific project that the integrated team is focused on

Collaboration = Designed for shared use, with equal access and accountability for all team members

A distinguishing characteristic of IPC software is that it is web-based, hosted by a neutral third-party and accessed through the Internet by all team members. And what does this mean to the future of our industry? It means more options for efficient collaboration, increased shared accountability and transparency, ultimately leading to better project outcomes. IPC software is the convergence of cloud computing technologies with the industry’s focus on Integrated Project Delivery methodologies, and in an era of increasing collaboration, it makes a lot of sense.