A colleague in a company I am currently working with was telling me how his brother, a Design Manager in one of the largest Design-Build firms in the Middle East was suddenly asked to drop everything and work from home due to the Coronavirus measures imposed by his government.

Despite the fact that his firm has a huge IT budget covering all their offices in from North Africa to the Gulf, a lot of challenges were being met working from home. Sure emails and Word and Excel will always be there, but what about the other, project critical applications many of them requiring users to be in the office on hardware-powerful PCs or for stringent security policies. What about those large CAD files that need to be downloaded with every change? Even with VPNs, what you get ultimately are hybrid systems with different pieces that a user needs to jump between to get any work done. Many of the “legacy” systems may be “VPNable” (and we all know how slow and limited this can be) while others are simply offline and a few hosted. Too many methods are required to access scattered data, if accessible at all.

On the other hand, my colleague, a user of BlackSmithSoft for BIM integrated with BIM 360 Docs, mentioned to me personally of how accessible his work is when everything is in one place and on the cloud. Being a project controls engineer, his day-to-day work of reviewing engineering documents, sending transmittals, reviewing model changes (in different formats), overseeing site progress, managing payments and earnings, reports, scheduling, etc is made simple from one place. In these tough times, keeping it simple and accessible is essential.

As he put it when I met him a few days before the offices went quiet: “…working in the cloud is going to minimize lost time and increase our people’s productivity while working on the projects from their homes.”

At BlackSmithSoft we see the cloud in our industry as a key tool for not only recovering lost productivity due to Coronavirus, but also supporting business continuity in these tough times.

I would like to end this blog post by a quote from John Chambers, former executive chairman of CISCO that “At least 40% of all businesses will die in the next 10 years… If they don’t figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate new technologies.”