"Bluescape offers tremendous potential to enhance productivity during meetings, making them rich and contextual," said Russ Drinker, managing principal at HOK in comments quoted by the vendor. He anticipates significant efficiency gains in preparing for and capitalizing on meetings, which can be "archived" as piles of marked-up, version-tracked documents that can be reached simply by sweeping the display back in time with the wave of a hand. "Also, the cloud-based aspect of Bluescape allows us to make updates and revisions on the fly from any device, anywhere, anytime," Drinker added.

Matthew Dierolf, network systems manager at New York City-based EA firm STV, says coordinating across locations and servers to make sure everyone has the latest version of a design is slow and arduous, with lots of room for confusion. To address this, STV turned to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology, which simultaneously delivers data visualization from a central server to multiple user screens, eliminating synchronization issues. "Our teams are often spread out across various project sites, which proves incredibly challenging for collaboration," says Dierolf. But first efforts were not successful, he says, because it was difficult for remote users with tablets and laptops to work with big 3D models in the field. Models had to be simplified to keep them manageable.

Dierolf says STV recently beat that problem by upgrading to a next-generation VDI that adds powerful graphical processing units (GPUs) made by NVIDIA to the servers. They now deliver rich graphics to remote users in the field. "What really made VDI 2.0 successful was the implementation of new hardware in the data center," he says.

Latency, or sluggish data exchange, is a challenge the server-based GPUs do not address. However, STV is countering latency by upgrading its wide-area network (WAN) to a much higher bandwidth, as well as by implementing SilverPeak WAN optimization devices.

Eric Quinn, IT manager at C&S Cos., an AEC firm based in Syracuse, N.Y., says effective collaboration requires swift communications and instant access to both general information and project data. Communications are much improved, but latency still drags down remote project data access, he says. To address latency, Quinn and others have turned to managed data storage services in the cloud, while keeping applications local. Two strong storage service competitors for the AEC market are Nasuni and Panzura, which rely on locally installed hardware in every office to mirror and synchronize local data in the background with centralized data in the cloud. The systems give users the illusion of working on an in-house model.

Quinn, a long-time Panzura user, says "Until recently, we were limited by the technology in bringing the design team together in any really efficient manner." Now, across eight offices, everyone is connected to each other and to all the project data in real time, giving every member of the team every needed resource. "That is the speed of collaboration today," says Quinn.

Adds Andy Knauf, vice president for information technologies at Middleton, Wis.-based AEP firm Mead & Hunt, "This is the sexy solution—to drop a controller in the office and not have to worry about it. It doesn't take a lot to get it to work, either."

Jason McFadden, a project manager in the Southfield, Mich., office of Barton Malow Co., says, "We have absolutely ramped up our use of a combination of mobile devices, cloud computing, cloud storage, file transfer and data syncing services." He adds, "The tipping point is a direct result of the realization that one tool or software system will not drive project-team efficiency—there is no one-size-fits-all software solution. But when you deploy software tools for a specific value and focus on the integration of all the tools, you will achieve unimaginable results."

Yet McFadden—and most of those offering insight for this article—notes that, even though advances in technology enable better collaboration, all the collaboration in the world will barely move the needle on productivity unless designers supply bidders with fully coordinated, accurate, high-level-of-development building information models ready for quantity takeoff and tender.

"What's holding the industry back today is the notion that architects and engineers can persist in producing design-concept drawings and that can be compensated for by contractors doing construction models," says structural engineer Gregory Luth, president of Gregory P. Luth & Associates Inc. For a few marquee projects, his firm has refined proof-of-concept,"high definition" constructible building information models that reduce contractor risk and the need to build in contingencies. "Right now, there is a vanishingly small pool of structural engineers who have the inclination or capability of doing what we do," he admits. "That pool will not increase unless owners and contractors start insisting that architects produce a constructible model." When they do, he predicts, the construction industry's big, long-sought productivity rocket finally will take off.