When we talk about a Common Data Environment (CDE), it can sound as though everyone is working inside the same type of system. My recent survey experience suggested something very different: the standard may be common, but the digital workspaces behind it are not.

Why I looked at the platforms behind the process

I have been exploring how automation could support information governance aligned with ISO 19650. During that work, one practical question kept returning: before we automate a review, approval or information-sharing process, what platform are people actually using to carry it out?

ISO 19650 describes the information-management workflow that a CDE should support. In practice, information containers move through controlled states such as work in progress, shared, published and archived. The standard does not require one particular software product, and that flexibility is valuable. However, it also means that two organisations can both describe their process as ISO 19650-aligned while using very different technical environments.

To get a small snapshot of this landscape, I included a question about day-to-day CDE software in an exploratory survey of 26 BIM and digital-construction professionals. The survey ran from 2 to 16 June 2026. Participants could choose from several named platforms or select “Other”.

What the snapshot showed

The responses did not point to one dominant product. SharePoint was the most frequently named individual platform, while dedicated construction CDE products collectively represented a slightly larger share.

Dedicated construction platforms (BIM 360, ACC, Trimble Connect and Asite) accounted for 38.5% of responses in total. SharePoint alone accounted for 34.6%, and the unspecified “Other” category represented a further 26.9%.

The finding that stood out to me

The most important result was not which product came first. It was the level of fragmentation. A general-purpose collaboration environment appeared alongside several purpose-built construction platforms, and more than a quarter of respondents used something outside the named list.

This matters because a CDE is more than a place to store files. Its value comes from the governance around those files: permissions, status codes, review gates, approvals, revisions, transmittals and audit evidence. The same governance intention may need to be configured very differently in SharePoint, Autodesk Construction Cloud, Trimble Connect, Asite or a bespoke internal system.

In other words, agreeing on the process does not automatically give us a common technical route for implementing it.

What this means for automation

The survey reinforced a design principle that I believe deserves more attention: governance automation should begin with the required behaviour, not with the features of one preferred platform.

For practitioners and developers, that suggests four practical priorities:

• Define the governance rule independently of the software for example, who may move information from “shared” to “published”, and what evidence is required.
• Map that rule to each platform’s permissions, metadata, workflow tools and application programming interfaces (APIs).
• Use a consistent layer of information requirements, naming, status and audit logic wherever the technology allows it.
• State platform limitations openly. A workflow that works well in one CDE may need adaptation rather than direct replication elsewhere.

This approach does not mean building one universal tool that behaves identically everywhere. It means separating the governance objective from the platform-specific implementation. That separation can make an automated process easier to test, explain and transfer.

A note of caution

This was a small, purposive survey, not a representative market study. The responses were self-reported, and the “Other” category was not broken down into individual products. The results therefore should not be used to estimate market share or to rank CDE vendors.

What the snapshot can do is highlight a real implementation question. If a small group of practitioners already reports this range of workspaces, any proposal for automated ISO 19650 governance should explain its platform assumptions from the start.

My takeaway

ISO 19650 gives the industry a shared language for managing information, but a shared language is not the same as a shared software environment. For me, the key lesson from this survey is simple: platform diversity is not a side issue to solve after designing an automation workflow. It is one of the main design constraints.

A useful next step would be to repeat the question with a larger group, identify the platforms hidden inside the “Other” category, and compare how the same approval or state-transition rule is implemented across different CDEs.

What does your organisation use as its working CDE, and where do you see the biggest challenge in making governance automation transferable between platforms? I would be interested to hear your experience in the comments.