Where is the promised Holy Grail of an IT enabled building industry, working faster, smarter, cheaper, and sharing information for the good of the industry?

The grand vision was for an industry connected, product information on line at the click of a button, intelligent virtual buildings and technology that would make design and construction better, cheaper, faster - unifying the industry and making everyone more productive.

Over the last decade the building industry, like most others, has followed the trend of constant upgrades, steep leaning curves and massive IT investment, as well as being swept up in the evangelistic fervour that relegated rational business decisions, which did not embrace the latest IT upgrade, to the 'Luddites' corner.

The question we can ask now is, has it been worth it?

Businesses that look back, particularly over the last 5 years, to weigh up if their IT spending has been justified, will find a string of broken promises, visions that have not turned into reality and software that is overly complicated, difficult to learn, costly to upgrade, yet still does not deliver the basic needs of users.

The novelty factor of checking out the latest web site or 'playing' with the latest software is 1990's history, long gone and rightly so for now we are at a point where we should pause and take stock of what we really need from IT in our industry.

That businesses are asking questions and are now demanding real benefits from IT spending is manifest by the hard times the IT industry is experiencing.

The reality of the building industry, in 2002, is that most designers still work in 2D and prefer print to the web, the Internet is mainly used as a vehicle for email, computers are irrelevant to the trades on site, and working with IT hasn't moved much past the early advances and benefits of 1990.

The complication of IT is now outweighing the benefits in all but the most basic of tasks and there is a growing backlash from users against this complication that has begun to dominate day-to-day office work.

In the early 1990's IT development was largely driven by the basic needs of industry. But from the mid '90's on development was driven by the self-propagation of the IT industry - Web sites designed by web developers to show their programming skills and software developers intent on cramming as many useless novelty features as possible into menus - all the while ignoring the basic needs of industry users.

Consequently we have a plethora of wonderful IT solutions that have no problem.

The IT industry must recognise that their job is to provide solutions to real problems. Often these problems are very simple and the solutions must also be very simple.

They must be constantly reminded that the end objective of all our efforts is to build buildings not websites.
In the building / IT industry relationship we must remember that we are the client and need to provide the IT industry with a clear brief as to what our problems are, what our priorities are, what our budgets are, and what the return on investment should be.

Philip Brown © email

Philip has spent most of the last 12 years involved in one way or another
in how IT fits into the Building Industry and is currently working with Boral Plasterboard developing software applications for architects and builders. He was also a director of director of the International Alliance for Interoperability for three years. This article does not represent the views of either organization.