The High-Bandwidth Profession

-- Consulting-Specifying Engineer, 1/1/2001

Engineers have always relied upon current technical information to make their designs work. Increasingly, that information is coming over the Internet, where 80 percent of engineers go for product information, and about 70 percent for specification data. Project extranets are more common as well, with about a quarter of the engineers surveyed using a Web-based project collaboration tool.

Use of the Web by respondents doubled from 1996 to 1998, but in Consulting-Specifying Engineer's most recent National Engineering Survey, the two-year growth had notched back a bit to only a gain of about a third.

Still, most engineers report learning of new building products from magazines, and product catalogues have not yet been entirely replaced by the Internet. More than half of the firms reported that they still prefer receiving the old binders.