Focused Sharing of Information for Multi-disciplinary Decision Making by Project Teams  

Today's electronic and paper-based approaches to the sharing of project information do not scale to the information sharing and interaction challenges of multi-disciplinary project team meetings. The inability to share and interact with information easily and effectively is one of the biggest bottlenecks in using electronic (online) information for collaborative decision-making. Through scenarios from recent construction projects, this paper summarizes existing approaches to the sharing of information and assesses their effectiveness in supporting multi-disciplinary decision-making by project teams. It then discusses recent research into interactive information workspaces where, with minimal software overhead, participants can share information that is relevant to a particular context to establish a common focus. We believe that the construction community can make significant progress quickly in leveraging existing and future investments in information infrastructure if it not only pursues information sharing through the use of product models but also formalizes the focused sharing of information and separates information interaction and view control from software services and underlying data as outlined in this paper.

Liston, Kathleen, Martin Fischer and Terry Winograd. Stanford University (2001). Articles>Collaboration>TC