Construction industry professionals use a variety of software for project management, design, and financial and legal compliance. They also spend valuable time and money getting one set of applications and platforms to exchange data with another.

What are the actual costs? According to Navigant Construction, the average total cost to review and respond to a single request for information – just one form of collaboration – is $1,080. All data-related costs incurred by project owners and operators, contractors, architects, and engineers industrywide add up to $15.8 billion a year, according to the National Institute of Science and Technology.

Inefficiency with data isn’t unique to construction. The finance industry started working to simplify the exchange of information through software 20 years ago. “It’s very hard to get someone to invest in a company that they don’t know anything about. So we were very interested in making financial information more accessible to ordinary investors,” says Alfred Berkeley, a former president and vice chairman of the NASDAQ Stock Market.

Demonstrating how powerful standardization could be, NASDAQ teamed up with the Semiconductor Industry Association and other technology and finance partners to host data from regulatory filings on the NASDAQ website. Businesses, investors, and anyone else wanting to analyze semiconductor company data could instantly pull relevant information into a database instead of drudging through manual data entry.