“Sorry darling, I don’t DO Revit!” Or why is it all but impossible to fine-tune a Binary industry

Had dinner with my HR friend recently. Things aren’t looking that great in the AEC industry at the moment, globally and here. She is considering going back to the UK and catch a bit more of the BIM-Bonanza that still seems to be going on there.

She knows nothing about BIM, but has been successfully recruiting BIMmers for years.

She knows, that I know, that she knows nothing about BIM.

This has no negative impact on our friendship. In fact, she still tries to tempt me with the occasional BIM role in the region.

She knows BIM is Revit around here, she knows I do not do Revit.

In fact it was her that once flattered me with, ‘Making you work on Revit would be like asking a piano maestro to play daily on a child’s toy keyboard’.

Revit aside, we do talk agreeable about BIM and its present and future prospects, here-there-everywhere. We keep a brave face to it but neither of us is quite able to be truly optimistic about it.

See, there is a major problem with BIM, that its ‘host’ industry is Construction.

BIM as an approach supposedly developed to improve (let alone, the well favored ‘revolutionize’) the industry, can do little to an industry that is so ‘binary’ in its nature.

Simply said, it has two modes, off or on. When it is on, things go well, there is lot of work in construction and everyone is making money and not giving a toss to how that money is made (sustainably, efficiently, logically, ethically….).

When the switch is turned off, everyone panics and is regrouping, strategizing and self-preserving but hardly investing into long, tedious, expensive processes of developing working BIM solutions.