Digital Vision Automation

The rapidly changing global economic and environmental landscapes demand efficient life-cycle building management processes. While proactive, knowledge-based capital reinvestment processes have been successfully applied, such as Capital Planning and Management Systems; these depend upon quantitative physical and functional facility information and enable multi-year “what-if” analyses to optimize capital reinvestment in concert with an organization’s mission and goals. Integrated and adaptive construction project management has proven elusive. Clear benefits and risks are associated with facility capital reinvestment decisions, including life-safety, “downtime”, financial impacts, as well as the overall ability to perform an organization’s stated mission. On a broader scale, buildings directly impact global climate change and the world economy.

The convergence of BIM and Cloud technologies provides the catalyst, tools, and collaborative environment to drive sorely needed cultural changes within t...

1. BIM, in conjunction with Cloud Technology enables efficient building life-cycle management.

2. BIM embeds robust life-cycle managment PROCESSES within technology to enable rapid implemenation, scalability, transparency, collaboaration and assure consistency.

3. The ‘I’ within BIM, INFORMATION, in terms of standardized definifitions, data architectures, taxonomies, metrics, etc. is a core component of BIM.

4. BIM and CLOUD processes/technologies are disruptive and will alter the AEC sector significantly. Everyone’s role changes, as well as how we work and communicate with each other.

5. Owners must take the lead, they pay the bills… period.

6. Efficient, collaborative, and integrated construction delivery methods are central to BIM – Integrated Project Delivery (IPD), Job Order Contracting (JOC)- the latter is IPD for renovation, repair and sustainabilty projects.

7. BIM is NOT 3-D visualization, how...

Today, the issues have shifted and some aspects of the implementation of BIM and integrated delivery are rapidly becoming defacto standards in the design and construction segments of the construction industry. There are however a number of thought patterns that are hampering or retarding implementation.

1. Not understanding the difference between cooperation and collaboration.

   • Focus on wrong social and organizational structures.

2. Not understanding that many of the problems that the industry faces, are wicked problems that cannot be resolved with linear solutions.

   • Lack of system thinking.
   • Lack of strategic vision.

3. Approaching BIM and integrated processes as technology.

   • Focus on 3D not on Integrated Decision Making
   • Reliance on and fear of changing legacy systems and processes.
   • Not understanding of the power of Open Standards and interoperability.
   • Requiring sys...

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting our work on the construction of the Louisiana State Museum and Sports Hall of Fame by Trahan Architects at the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) BIM Forum in Chicago. The event is meant to “facilitate and accelerate the adoption of building information modeling (BIM) in the AEC industry and lead by example and synchronize with counterparts in all sectors of the industry to jointly develop best practice for virtual design and construction (VDC).” I also got a copy of Chuck Eastman’s new edition of his BIM Handbook which served as entertainment during the trip and which I’ll refer to later in this post.

It was my first time at the forum. Here is what I learned about the adoption of BIM by the industry and how it is understood.

1. There ar...

So what is the deal with sharing data between the various BIM applications? Why can’t we open a Revit file in ArchiCAD, or Bentley, or SketchUp or Autocad, or Illustrator? Wait a sec - is Illustrator BIM? The reality is that each of these very powerful BIM (and non BIM) applications have unique capabilities that do not always translate easily form one application to the next. Interoperability as defined by buildingSMART is ultimately the solution but… the reality is many of these applications are NOT even compatible with their previous versions of the same tool.

As new features get added to BIM applications they can do amazing things. So it is not surprising that they may not be interoperable with their previous versions. So how will they be compatible with their competitors? It is not an easy task, but open standards is the beginning of making them share data. It may not be perfect, and a moving target, but… get over it. As professionals working with BIM, we have to deal with ...