Despite the transition from paper to digital media, hand-off of data and documents from construction to operations and facilities management is still cumbersome and often requires manual entry and duplication of effort. This paper presents initial findings from an ongoing pilot project that began in spring 2011 on a digital information exchange standard called COBie (Construction Operations Building Information Exchange). Through interviews with key participants, we analyze existing practices as well as proposed changes to be made to these practices. Across a large organization, digital information is not trusted-nor is information neutral. Information is connected to particular jurisdictions who currently control the creation and management of their own datasets. We found that despite availability of digital information, people generally prefer to obtain information from colleagues with direct knowledge of the project or from paper documents. Digital information was considered to be either too difficult to access or not viewed as trustworthy since digital data was not consistently maintained. As more digital information is amassed, including information from COBie and building information models, organizational cultures and practices need to be developed around these new datasets.

Engineering teams collaborating in virtual environments face many technical, social and cultural challenges. In this paper we focus on distributed teams making joint unanticipated discoveries in virtual environments. We operationalize Dossick and Neff's definition of "Messy Talk" as a process in which teams mutually discover issues, critically engage in clarifying and finding solutions to the discovered issues, exchange their knowledge, and resolve the issue. Can globally distributed teams use "Messy Talk" via virtual communication technology? We analyzed the interactions of four distributed student teams collaborating on a complex design and planning project using building information models (BIM) and the CyberGRID, a virtual world specifically developed for collaborative work. Their interactions exhibited all four elements of Messy Talk, even though resolution was the least common. Virtual worlds support real time joint problem solving by 1) providing affordances for talk mediated by shared visualizations, 2) supporting team perceptions of building information models that are mutable and 3) allowing transformations of those models while people were together in real time. Our findings suggest that distributed team collaboration requires technologies that support Messy Talk--and iterative trial-and-error--for complex multidimensional problems.

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