Recessions have the powerful effect of accelerating shifts in technology to gain efficiency.  It is important to note the Federal Government and financial institutions are speeding up the adoption of standards for transferring electronic due diligence data in the quest to eliminate paper reporting and reduce error prone data duplication.  Driven by a business crisis, business leaders and software architects are meeting in committees, adopting electronic protocols, for structuring the transfer of real estate/facility information.  In the near future A&E Consulting Firms will be challenged to adopt transformational IT strategies to become integrate information providers.

A&E Consulting Firms have had little incentive, or tools, to streamline their work process.  From field surveys to reporting, many of the observation, data capture, analysis, and report generation techniques and process have changed little over the past 20 years.  The Federal government adoption of GASB 34 and a following executive order requiring all Facility Condition Reports to be delivered in a “data base format” have prompted creating IT architectural standards, such as Core Architecture Data Model (CADM), a government favored model designed to capture and transfer data following a standardized IT structure. 
 
New technology and software innovation are bringing a major disruptive software evolution to all industries, offering a genuine advantage of a new set of open source technologies to interconnect massive data transfers in live time, interrelating business practices across Client/Vendor domains.   New applications coupled with cloud computing can deliver powerful new business capabilities that can make substantial gains in productivity to warrant the cost and risk required for transformational change.   Being on the forefront of Enterprise 3.0 application development in the real estate / asset management industry, I have identified four key Enterprise 3.0 application components necessary to work interactively in the design of a successful due diligence Enterprise architecture model:

1. Content Publisher Application: Integrated data acquisition tools designed for the capture and conversion of a large volume of property data in a, “Content Publisher Application”, to develop structured data at the point of origin, making it immediately available for review by team members, and allow for information delivery across platforms, including RSS.  By developing structured information a company creates added value while decreasing acquisition costs. 
2. Centralized Data Store: Replacing document management with content management and interconnecting with other information stores allows for a "Google experience" where data is stored and discoverable based on secured permissions, allowing for self service data delivery as a service to clients which can be billed (SaaS), increasing revenues while decreasing costs of internal discovery, which are often grossly under estimated in the A&E industry.
3. Portfolio Project Management: Is where a group of current or proposed projects interact with management, business intelligence, and resources collaborate in real time to service the client.  The fundamental objective of the PPM process is to determine the optimal mix and sequencing of proposed projects to best achieve the organization's overall goals expressed in terms of hard economic measures while concurrently managing expected timelines, expenses and personnel schedules and the inter-dependencies with other projects in the portfolio.  At one firm I worked with there was a 40% increase in efficiency by implementing a PPM!
4. Enterprise communication: In a Enterprise 3.0 design communication is “social” and ubiquitous.  At any business core are person-to-person relationships, Enterprise 3.0 systems are designed to bridge all the channels of collaboration between people, either inside the organization or beyond its walls; videoconferencing, text messaging, email, VOIP phone services, web conferencing, allowing for employees to build the kinds of dynamic relationships around the natural interaction at work that individuals do already in social-networking sites. 

Software innovation is disruptive and Enterprise 3.0 is no different bringing both promise and risk.  It is a major investment at a cost today for creating benefits in the future.  The challenge of success is not in the technology, but in the internal ability to intelligently adopt and execute a long term IT reorganization plan backed with proper resources and the commitment of management to see it through.  My advice in the end: select the enterprise software architect that knows your business and the technology, not the promises of a consultant.   Remember: An enterprise system is only as good as the DESIGN.