If you missed the AEC Technology Strategies 2008 conference put on by Zweig White a couple of weeks ago, you don’t have to miss one of the important conference sessions. The Collaboration Puzzle: Fitting SharePoint and BIM into a Collaboration Framework is now available for a second-chance viewing online. This blog’s own Carl Azar was joined by Derrick Beasley at Burns & McDonnell Engineering in presenting the session. Carl spoke about the “three C’s” of collaboration  – Communication, Consensus, and Control, and Derrick gave a case study example of what Burns has found.

Most everyone knows what metadata is. And, we know that if we are organizing and categorizing electronic files, “metadata” can be our best-friend.

Perhaps the simplest definition of metadata goes something like this: it is all the “data about the data”. In other words, information that describes a file or its content. It can be basic things like ‘when a file was created’, or ‘who created the file,’ etc. But metadata can (and should) extend much deeper to be fully useful in the management of information.

Let’s say, for example, you are a project manager and your projects involve thousands of critical documents, emails, and faxes. You might need to organize this information for several reasons; you might want to be able to quickly retrieve it later, or you might want to easily hand it off or archive it at project completion. How you choose to describe your files – how you apply metadata – will impact your success in finding and organizing information later on. A project manager might, for instance, want to have metadata that describes the project name, the project ID number, the project team member name, the project client name, and so on.

With metadata, there is one most basic consideration to keep in mind. Determine at the outset what metadata you need to capture. The main factors to consider are all the ways you might want to organize, search, and categorize information now and into the future. For instance, if you think there is any chance you might want to sort or find files based on the ‘project account rep’s name’, start capturing that data from the start.

This Document Management Blog’s very own Carl Azar will be speaking on a topic of current concern in the AEC industry this week at ZweigWhite’s AEC Technology Strategies Conference in Las Vegas. He will be joined by Burns & McDonnell Engineering’s Vice President and Chief Technical Officer Gregory Gould, as well as Project Manager Derrick M. Beasley in a discussion on: The Collaboration Puzzle: Fitting SharePoint and BIM into a Collaboration Framework. If your not able to make, stay tuned here for a second chance to catch the presentation later.

We’ve all seen it at one point or another. The “paper chase” is that routine paper-driven process that happens over and over again, but for some reason is still operating in an ancient pre-digital area.

Accounting offers a good example, where some companies are ahead of the curve, and others are still passing paper. Here’s a pretty generic scenario that applies to just about any type of company: invoices come in and they are routed for approval; sometimes they need to seen by higher-ups for uber-approval based on dollar amount or budget; they get sent back to accounting for processing; the data gets entered and… if everything is successful, the bill is paid on time.

In a paper world, this process is slow, invoices get misplaced, data is manually entered, people forget to approve, and you get the picture. Yet for many companies, a paper-based process is still the norm.

In the digital era, paper-based processes such as invoice approval can be easily automated. Updating the invoice approval scenario would look something like this: invoices come in and they are digitized, capturing data that is automatically incorporated into accounting systems; notifications with electronic copies of the invoices go out to approvers; some simple workflow steps take care of the odd circumstances where higher-ups need to review; accounting receives notification of approval and all is well.

The big benefit is time, and time is money. Time is saved by eliminating the need to ship, fax or send paper; more time is saved by capturing data electronically; even more time is saved by putting the process in a closed-loop system where invoices can not get lost, misplaced, or forgotten; and still even more time is saved by getting it right the first time and eliminating the need to correct mistakes later.