Forbes- Design Technology Contributes to Billions in Losses

Published by Forbes Tech Council
Written by Mitch Hughes, CEO of ViZZ
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With technology comes the elimination of the "old" practices in the construction industry. One of those is the plan room. Remember the plan room? If you were born after 1980, then probably not.

In the days before computer-aided design (CAD), the plan room was the central repository for a building's paper-printed plans. After a building was fully constructed and operational, a big truck would arrive and deliver case upon case of documents, drawings and photos from the architect's office for storage. This was the literal handoff from the design and construction phase of a building to the facilities management phase.

If you had a question about the building, how it was constructed, a mechanical system or the size of a structural element, you consulted the plan room. The process was sometimes a slow one — it required the pulling down of bound drawings from the drawing rack and a manual search through the books — but it resulted in information and knowledge transfer.

Today's transfer of information no longer carries the smell of ammonia-soaked blueprints; in fact, the big knowledge handoff comes with little paper at all. Today's building information transfer typically occurs digitally via a cloud link, email or jump drive. Things have changed, as they always do, but is this change for the better?
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Read more at Forbes.com.