Why has information technology had such an impact on our world? The one-word summary would be "automation". Information technology has enabled us to automate many tasks which previously took a long time. It started with basic things like calculations, but progressively has evolved to encompass every area of human activity, whether personal, like making and keeping up with friends (via social networks), or business-related, like keeping track of accounts and logistics. At first, the benefits of automation seem obvious - it used to take an hour to perform task X, and now it takes a fraction of a second. But this obvious benefit masks a deeper, more transformative quality of automation.
When you turn a sixty-minute task into a fifty-minute task, all you gain is ten minutes. But when you turn a one-hour task into a sub-second task, you gain the ability to do things that were simply not conceivable beforehand. Communication is a great example of a human activity that's been transformed in this way, thanks to technology's magic touch. It used to be that to send a piece of information to someone in another town would take at least a few hours, if they were relatively close, or it might even have taken weeks if you were sending that information to someone in another country. Communications technology transformed this reality: today, we can send messages instantly around the world. The result? Internet forums that span the globe, and enable people to collaborate on work that they would previous have had to do on their own.
Any time you reduce the time cost of a task by a factor of a hundred, there's going to be this kind of qualitative change in the air soon.
One of the processes that Woobius enhances is what's known as the "issue" process, whereby an architect issues newly updated drawings to the design team, the contractors, or another entity involved with the project. A long time ago, before the internet, this would have taken a couple of days, to print out the drawings, sort them, mail them, and wait for them to be delivered. Ten years ago, some collaboration tools were developed that cut down this time to an afternoon or so. That was an improvement that enabled larger projects to be conducted more efficiently. Today, with a tool like Woobius, this process has been cut down to a matter of minutes.
In the video below, Bob Leung and James Goodfellow, two architects, take you through the simple steps of issuing a set of drawings. It's so simple, one might wonder how it could ever have taken so long to do it in the past - much like today's teenagers probably wonder how the world ever functioned without mobile phones.
