Just three years ago, the debate in this issue’s round-table discussion on BIM would have been unthinkable. BIM was featuring on the industry’s to-do list, but it had the feel of an aspirational target where the industry would make the right noises, pay a bit of lip-service and fundamentally carry on as before.
And there is still an element of the industry that puts BIM in the same category as “partnering” or “open-book contracting”. In other words, while these things exist and hold out the prospect of better outcomes for anyone who reads the textbook, in the real world everyone knows they’re more for external consumption than internal change.
Nevertheless, somewhere in the common ground between evangelistic exhortations, straightforward commercial self-interest and the march of digitisation in every area of our lives, Level 2 BIM really does seem to have taken hold. Unevenly, of course, as our online pre-mandate survey makes clear, and with a straggling supply chain. But to a sufficient extent to change the culture of the industry, and with enough momentum to bring further progress.
So how did the industry pull off such a bold piece of change management? There was a focal point in the BIM Task Group, a degree of government funding (thought to be about £8.5m for Level 2 BIM), the promise of better project outcomes, and the threat of sanctions for BIM non-conformists after April 2016.
Construction’s BIM agenda also coincided with the “fourth industrial revolution”, as digital technologies broke apart old business models in the wider economy and replaced them with digital operations. In the industry, this climate of everything being up for grabs has allowed innovative ideas to take hold and a new generation to come to the fore.
But an equally influential factor was the fact that BIM mobilised thousands of construction professionals, hoping to change the industry’s tired old narrative, in its support. They volunteered their expertise and time to the BIM4 groups or local BIM groups or CIOB events. They booked speakers and meetings rooms, organised conferences and CPD events, read articles and wrote blogs, tweeted and shared. Collectively, they helped shift the culture away from “me, me, me” and towards more meaningful collaboration.
But having achieved so much, where do we go from here? The BIM Task Group’s answer would be Level 3 BIM, or Digital Built Britain. In the context of ongoing digitisation, robotisation, automation and virtualisation all around us, that certainly seems realistic. Plus, £15m from the back of the government sofa to develop the standards for Level 3 BIM won’t hurt.
But if BIM is about promoting genuine collaboration and shared enterprise, then it would help if that culture extended to the support structures for BIM itself. The BIM maturity diagram is set at an ambitious incline, but it rests on the efforts of thousands of BIM enthusiasts, many of them CIOB members.
Elaine Knutt, editor
