Data handover

The handover package, in its traditional form, delivers documents: findable files, correctly indexed. Data handover raises the bar to information: the owner receives the plant's facts in structured form — every tag with its attributes, every document linked to the tags it concerns, hierarchies and relationships intact — loadable into maintenance, integrity and operations systems without an army re-keying PDFs. The demand side is codified in owner information requirements and in industry specifications written for exactly this purpose (the process industries' CFIHOS, built on the ISO 15926 foundations; the ISO 19650 framework in buildings), which define the classes, attributes and formats owed.

The economics are unforgiving in both directions. Specified at contract and delivered progressively, structured data costs the project little — the information exists in its systems already. Unspecified, it does not arrive; and reconstructing it afterwards, from documents, is the expensive archaeology that half the industrial-data market exists to perform. The failure is thus almost always a procurement failure with a technical costume: the contract asked for documents, the owner needed data, and the difference was discovered at go-live of a maintenance system with empty fields.