Does Building Information Modelling matter?

Hi Umit, great article! I have some thoughts on the questions you’ve asked. I believe that the application of BIM in the UK construction industry will involve a significant cultural shift to a new co-operative and positive work approach. At this point all industries involved must be open to working together in fundamentally new ways. Both the use of technology and collaborative work processes are essential. Additionally, there are also the security risk implications of BIM that need to be addressed before we can assert that the construction industry is ready to move toward an integrated way of project management using BIM. The IET has written a paper outlining the associated risks of BIM, with a specific focus on cyber security, which may be of interest to you and your readers: https://goo.gl/yqR8h4

Umit Isikdag, Here is my take on your questions. 1. At some point it may be that BIM will make a difference in how AEC projects are completed. However, in today's world of architectural design (from my experience) is that BIM is occasionally used by the larger firms for the purposes of detecting conflicts between disciplines to avoid problems during construction. The detailing from what I have seen cannot be done in BIM and that reverts back to vanilla AutoCAD. 2. The construction industry in general is not ready for it. It would mean that they did most of the construction work from electronic media and I do not think that they are ready for that. There are also quite a few non-English speakers working in the industry and some of them have trouble with paper plans and I think it could become worse if they went to digital media. 3. At this point in time I think that the clients would be better served with a BIM (Building Modelling Management) of their project when it is done by professionals as an "As-Built" product. Why? Simply because in today's world the production of As-Built drawings are an extra service and most clients do not want to pay for it. However, if the client were to pay for an as-built BIM of their project based on the actual conditions after completion then they could incorporate that BIM model into their total building control system. Trying to do that from the design BIM would be potentially difficult or impossible due to changes that had to be made during construction.

Dear Prof. Is?kdag, Thanks for this post about the status of BIM and future expectations from BIM. As you also stated in the post, the current boom of BIM in construction industry pushes the companies to revise their existing work flows and strategies. I would like to answer the questions with respect to my studies and previous experiences: 1) The answer of first question is actually mentioned in third question. When we think about the lifecycle perspective, BIM has different impacts on AEC projects. For design phase of a project, yes, BIM makes a significant difference to manage the "design" phase. Since the existing BIM software applications have various capabilities with their object-oriented modeling structure, such design activities like revising models, rendering, etc. is performed effectively. Moreover, as you stated, BIM applications provide effective show-off solutions such as walking in the 3D model, see the sections of building with a click of button. And yes! they impress clients. On the other hand, I cannot say that BIM brings significant difference for the phases after design 2) Yes and no... Companies load different meanings to BIM. While some of them think BIM a good "technological tool", others see BIM as a "platform" for better collaboration and information transfer. As far as I concern, many companies think that BIM is a technological application. Therefore they prepare themselves for BIM by investing software solutions and related trainings. Many BIM-related software provide product (design) related solutions. However, everyone is not looking for product related data but process related data which cannot be produced and managed effectively via existing BIM applications. Therefore companies still need their traditional methods while they are adapting themselves to BIM. My other comment about the second question is related with the fragmented nature of construction industry. Almost every party in a construction project has different responsibilities and liabilities. Therefore they want to save both themselves from risks and the profit slice coming from the big pie. Within this kind of challenging and harsh environment, it is difficult to adapt an "integrated" way of project management. 3) For contractors, yes. The main problem of many contractors (depends on the work they handle) is the poor quality of design (or drawings). As I mentioned the fragmented nature of industry in the previous reply, there is a lack of coordination issue between the parties. From my experience, the biggest headache of a contractor is coming from the lack of design details and the previous completed or on-going works according to this design data. For clients (and owners), the biggest issue is money. Instead of the technological or managerial aspects of BIM, they care about the business value of BIM. Therefore for them, the post construction lifecycle is one of the most important thing. A construction project can be designed and built within 3-5 years (depends on the size and complexity) but the effective life of the building is estimated at least 40-50 years. As many of the academics and profesionals are aware about the NIST report (2004), almost 60% of the lifecycle costs lays down on the operation and maintenance (O&M) phase. However, the capability of existing BIM level is limited to reply the requirements in O&M phase. While various product and process data of the lifecycle is requested during the O&M phase, BIM can mainly provide the product related data. There are some well-known and accepted developments such as COBie to facilitate the data management for O&M. However, COBie transfers the product related (design) data "automatically" but the process (operation) data still should be entered manually which means "you can transfer the data which you designed in a BIM modeling software". There are also sofware applications which assert they "exchange and transfer" the BIM data and process data by "integrating" BIM and building automation systems. For me, this is anothter buzzword which is used many times. These software applications do not integrate or exchange the data coming from two different ontologies but represent both data in the same user interface. As a summary, for me, BIM is still a design level technology. It became a little bit long, but I hope it helps for this post. Thanks.

BIM - M changes the game from modeling to Building Information Management where everyone in a contributor and a consumer. I will respond to your excellent questions.