to maximize analysis, teams often feed this information back to their factory headquarters and then back to the racetrack. Think about the speed of your home Internet connection and consider how fast the communications need to be to relay data transmissions back and forth during a race.
You can take another great lesson from NASCAR and Formula 1. In selecting pit crews, the racing teams evaluate the applicants, and through the right assessment can work out where their skills and weaknesses are. The teams then provide training tools particular to that situation, rather than putting everyone through the same training or making everyone learn to do every task.
Also, some of the crew are former athletes, working in this new industry for the first time but using skills from their previous sports. In the same way, which of your colleagues can you see adapting to BIM and data management roles who can bring a different kind of expertise to the table? Where can someone add value to your organization’s BIM implementation?
The main advantage of information modeling is quite simple: no one owns information. You may be familiar with the traditional view of the concept of ownership: “This is my steelwork design! Why should you have access to my drawings?” or, “If you really want, I can tell you the height of that door, but I don’t see why you need it.”
Every single person on a team has a responsibility to make his information open and accessible in shared locations. BIM is more than just an innovative tool that helps some of the design team and an integrated central data platform that the client requires you (and everyone else on the project) to use in an open and intelligent way. Eventually, at handover, the client or the eventual building owner can take ownership of all the native model and exported data. BIM is a lot better than receiving hundreds of boxes filled with paper.
For example, consider the construction industry, which has traditionally worked in silos, usually reflecting the job titles or qualifications of each team or office, such as architects, structural engineers, quantity surveyors, mechanical engineers, and landscape architects. Everyone has his or her own set of data, probably using different software programs and managing information coordination in-house, releasing just what the client requested or another team needed as the project progressed. This is in direct contrast to the idea of BIM, which allows everyone in the supply chain to add content to a unified model.
The construction industry is one of the last areas of global business to adopt standardization and refine information management processes in order to generate efficiency. You can argue that construction activities are manufacturing of a sort. Construction is the creation of an object made of many components; that object just happens to be a very complex project containing hundreds of thousands of advanced sub-objects like steel beams, timber, bricks, and concrete. Nothing prevents construction from leading innovation rather than playing catch-up with the manufacturing sector, but it needs to understand the power of information.
Realizing That Information Is the Heart of BIM
Think of how you currently share information with others on a project. Perhaps your inbox is full of emails with attachments, or you receive paper documents via postal mail. Even when you access shared, digital information by using central drives or cloud-based storage, often the information is a certain kind or accessed only by a specific team.
Construction is full of data, but most people have never really made the most of it. For decades, in order to access data you needed to have a physical copy of it, on CD or paper, or digital versions, such as a PDF. Now multiple users can see the same data online at the same time. The industry needs to move from a mind-set of multiple users owning their data individually, to collectively maintaining one accurate and up-to-date version of the information, with many people accessing it whenever necessary. You can describe this as moving from documents to data. In a literal sense, information is the middle word in BIM, and you should think of information as the beating heart that keeps BIM moving. Building modeling has existed for a long time; the addition of consistent and open data to the mix gives BIM its power to change these traditional processes.
Of all the information embedded in your virtual project, everybody needs access to at least one piece of information. Some need to run thousands of queries, and some need access to everything in order to coordinate the model. Information flows from concept to demolition.
✔ Generators of information: They are BIM users, such as the client or concept designers, who will be generating initial information, adding data as it becomes known, and continuing to improve the model by evolving existing parameters in the model. Information generation happens all the way through the project timeline.
✔ Reviewers of information: They are the users who need to make decisions to progress the design or construction work who will be analyzing the data already in the model and reviewing how to achieve the required levels of performance or to collaborate to avoid clashes in geometry. The majority of a project delivery team will be reviewers.
✔ Receivers of information: They are the end-users of the data in BIM, using either live project data or exporting the documents, reports, and drawings. For instance, the caretaker janitor of a public school or library may want to generate maintenance information from the model or pass information to the client.
You can begin to see how information is the heart of BIM when you see how the data evolves and grows as users add to it and how it will be interrogated and extracted by others across the project timeline. The following sections look at the generators, reviewers, and receivers of information in greater detail.
Generators of information are the briefing, design, and early development teams. These teams produce the fundamental information at the start of the project. Alongside the design geometry at this stage, think