by Michael Tardif, Assoc. AIA
Contributing Editor

Summary: The quest for improvement in productivity, efficiency, and quality in architecture practice is largely centered on the technology used for design. Less attention is devoted to the problem of information management and workflow, a second cousin once removed to building-design technology. We have become so inured to the annoying presence of this slovenly distant relation at the family holiday table that we have resigned ourselves to its unpleasant company. But now it has moved in. Many architects spend more time managing information than they do designing buildings. The dominant software product in architecture offices is not a CAD or BIM application—it’s Microsoft Outlook. A less efficient system for managing information—particularly time-sensitive and critical building information—could not have been conceived.

Newforma: “Tell us where it hurts”
Information management is not a particularly glamorous market space for a software company or exciting technical arena for software programmers. Start-up software companies do not pitch business plans to venture capitalists to carve a niche out of this market. Several years ago, a small group of people with long pedigrees in the AEC software industry—led by Ian Howell and Bob Batcheler—set out to leverage their vast experience and knowledge of AEC design software to blaze a new trail, hoping to make a real difference—and a little money—by cutting a few Gordian knots that no one else seemed able to untie or cut. Their plan was to listen to potential customers, develop a visceral understanding of “pain points,” and create new software solutions to ease their pain. Shortly after starting the company they called Newforma, Howell and Batcheler wrote an insightful white paper that succinctly described the state of AEC design software, its history, its successes, and its seemingly intractable shortcomings. If you had read this paper as you would read tea leaves, all signs pointed toward a new BIM product.

Then the Newforma team started talking to customers.

It turns out that one of the biggest pain points among design professionals is e-mail. The volume and unwieldiness of it. The difficulty of searching, sorting, and filing it. The unavailability of it if you were not copied on it. The inability to store it with other project files. The ease with which attachments get lost. The lack of security, tracking, and verification controls. The time spent managing it. The list went on, and on, and on.

True to their word, they stuck to their plan. They had identified the pain points and resolved to resolve them. “We went back to our investors and said, ‘Look, this is what customers need,’” says Howell. “That was the basis of our initial funding and the blueprint for hiring [software] engineering staff.” The only upside is that solving these problems is so un-sexy from a technology point of view, Newforma pretty much had the market to itself.

Wide-open market
For the first year, Newforma worked with 130 customers to translate the pain points into something that could be committed to software code. They spent another year testing the product with these “lighthouse customers” on actual projects, incorporating their feedback into the commercial product that began shipping in early 2006. The Newforma team estimated that 20 percent of a project manager’s time is wasted looking for or recreating information. The lighthouse customers said that estimate was far too low.

Mackey Mitchell Architects, a 48-person firm in St. Louis, was among the early adopters. “From my perspective, having been engaged with technology for 20 years, this has got to be among the top two or three [innovations],” says firm principal Dan Mitchell, FAIA.

“Our ability to track and record information on behalf of our clients has been enhanced significantly, particularly for out-of-town clients,” says Mitchell. “It works from within Outlook, which we use all the time. You can put a transmittal together, along with very large files, and when the primary or any other recipient has downloaded it, you have a record of it.”

Fellow principal and Chief Information Officer Tom Peterson, AIA, appreciates the ease-of-use of Newforma’s document markup features. “For any graphic file, you can mark it up and send it out to a contractor or client [without having to open the native application]. Before, [depending on the file type] you might have to scan the document or have Photoshop knowledge.”

FTP on steroids?
Newforma found that firms used project management software—or “extranets” as they were originally called—on only about 10 percent of projects. Firms resented having to pay for data storage to provide external access to files they already had stored on their servers, while gaining little more than an audit trail for transmittals, RFIs, and submittals. Many firms continued to rely on the simpler, less expensive, and generic file transfer protocol (FTP) technology, which lacks audit trail and other data security features. “We challenged ourselves to put FTP on steroids,” says Howell. “Notifications, expiration dates, transmittal logs, [document] download logs.” Part of the solution is a feature called “issue manager,” which allows users to elevate any information, problem, or document to an “issue” that can be managed with tracking features.

Newforma is built upon three concepts:

• Make it easy to organize and find project information, whatever the file type or information source
• Make it easy to communicate and share information with team members, whether insider or outside your firm
• Enhance the utility of day-to-day project information such as e-mail, transmittals, and submittals by making them easy to reuse.

Additionally, the Newforma team resolved not to accomplish these objectives by increasing a firm’s IT management burden, interfering with or adding to a firm’s security infrastructure, or requiring a lot of additional employee training.

Three-part solution
The technical solution consists of three parts. Newforma Project Center Server resides within a firm’s firewall and coexists with Microsoft Exchange Server and the central file server. Newforma Project Center Client resides on every user’s workstation alongside Microsoft Outlook. Newforma Info Exchange Server resides on the network but outside the firewall to support information exchange with external team members via the Web.

A key feature of the product is its ability to index on the fly all of the electronic files on a firm’s server and return meaningful search results. Another is the ability to store e-mail messages with other project files and access them like any other project document. The first addresses a clearly expressed client need: don’t require us to organize our documents according to a hierarchy in order to find them. The second addresses a major pain point: liberate e-mail messages from individual team members’ inboxes, so any project team member can find them. “It reads everything, stores it in a database, and knows automatically [whether it’s relevant to a search],” says Mitchell.

Firm finds it easy to use
Mackey Mitchell has found the resistance to adoption of Newforma—a tremendous obstacle to success for many technologies—remarkably low. “You can master 100 percent of the features within a short period of time,” says Peterson. “You might choose not to use certain tools, but you can become very familiar with them very quickly. The initial product had 8-10 productivity tools. Not everyone will use them all. But there are three or four that every architect [in our firm] finds indispensable.”

Howell claims similar results at other firms. “In the first 12 months, more than half of our customers have gone enterprise-wide very quickly.” In August, industry giant HOK joined that group, deploying Newforma Project Center for its 1,600 employees in 26 offices worldwide.

The innovation continues. “They just re-released a workflow process for submittals,” says Peterson. “We didn’t like the first version and we told them we wouldn’t use it. They re-did it, and [the new version] is exactly what we need.” And Newforma still has its eye on BIM. “We’re trying to make A/E’s more efficient one work process at a time,” says Howell. “Ten to fifteen percent of projects are now being run on BIM. We’re starting to see enough BIM data for us to focus on how to manage it, or, more important, how we can build some support process around the successful use of BIM.”

Copyright 2007 © Michael Tardif.