Construction is famously fragmented, with dozens of companies on a given job using their own software, processes and formats for working, producing information and communicating data and materials. This problem is not new, and in fact it is why the industry has produced standards such as the Construction Specification Institute's MasterFormat, Uniformat and OmniClass. Standards like these exist so that we can organize and keep track of the hundreds of thousands of items that come together to become a building, and communicate the quantities, costs and schedules required for that coming together — otherwise known as construction.
The problem is that different phases need different things. Designing focuses on what gets built, whereas construction focuses on how it gets built. Translating the work product of different teams in different phases wasn’t an issue when that meant a human looking at one sheet of paper and interpreting information to fill in on another sheet of paper. Humans are much better at this than is often recognized, despite the odd transcription error. So, the industry adopted practices such as material takeoffs — it’s easy to forget that term means the process of “taking” the number of some item, like wall panels, windows, or door knobs, "off" a plan. The trouble is that humans are fantastic translators, because we understand the context of a plan, and the numbers in it; but we are not great transcribers, so errors creep in. The speed, expense and errors of humans as transcribers is one of the reasons why we went digital.