DENVER -- As John Geffel sees it, the construction software industry goes through so-called "generational shifts" once a decade. These shifts -- essentially new ways of both selling and using technology -- are important for contractors, to be sure, but they also matter to construction software vendors, Geffel, senior vice president of Sage CRE Business Unit, said during a chat at this week's Sage Summit. (CRE stands for construction and real estate.) The last shift, Geffel surmised, centered around Y2K; many companies upgraded their systems as a means of avoiding the massive data chaos that was expected in legacy applications. Right now, though, construction software is undergoing another generational shift -- collaboration and the Internet. This current shift is a little different from the previous one, for three somewhat complex reasons.

• While Y2K was largely motivated by external factors (the threat of apocalypse), collaboration has been more of an "internal sea change" for construction companies, Geffel said.
• Moreover, the online collaboration trend has been a long time coming, since paper-based collaboration among architects, engineers, subcontractors, suppliers and projects owners has been going on, in its inefficient and costly form, for quite some time.
• At the same time, many dotcom-era Silicon Valley firms jumped into the market too soon, betting that contractors were ready for supply chain management or equipment purchasing sites when, in fact, many hadn't even embraced email. The moral of that story? It's hard to determine the "inflection point" of next-generation technology, Geffel said.

So how should a good collaboration tool work? At a basic level, it should provide what Geffel called "the same version of truth," so that everyone has access to the same RFIs and the same specifications, with role-based restrictions in place wherever necessary. However, construction collaboration software is more than just a document repository out on the "cloud" that users can access whether they're in Denver or Dubai.

• First, it needs workflow and governance, Geffel said. For example, if there's no consistent process for handling change orders -- that is, if everyone does it his or her own way -- then the project manager is going to suffer a lot of headaches.
• In addition, the collaboration software needs to integrate with the back office, particularly with accounting software.
• Along those same lines, collaboration software has to work well with CAD software, especially as the design/build construction methodology continues to gain steam and teams need to better adapt to changes.

All this points to where software vendors will feel this generational shift the most. Project management software built with collaboration in mind will have to behave differently than traditional construction project management software, Geffel indicated. It also needs to be flexible. As the construction industry's upheaval only continues, contractors very well may find themselves taking on different jobs; here a product built specifically for residential construction might not work if a firm starts a light construction job, Geffel said. Because of that, collaboration software vendors need to help contractors get on an appropriate "growth path," since not everyone is going to be ready to upgrade at the same time. Those vendors who have developed a longstanding relationship with their customers, and vice versa, and those vendors who are not tied to a particular segment of the construction industry, will be able to develop a "growth path" to prepare their customers, and themselves, for the impending generational shift.