Open BIM? Are we living on the same planet? Working in the same (AEC) industry?

Really, get real!

AEC is an industry that en-masse fights tooth-and-nail the release of any type of digital file to another party.

Archicad and Tekla are old enough to know this.

Yet, they act like naive children.

If they were participating in a warfare-exhibition, they’d be bringing little peace-flowers as their offerings.

While this could be considered provocative and/or cute, it is unlikely to impress the heavyweights shopping for the latest and greatest in weaponry.

I consider myself to be a peace-loving person.

Still, enough war-history has brushed over my family even in one century to be able to distinguish a ‘tool’ from a ‘weapon’.

But this ‘open BIM’ thing is neither, just a ‘let’s play nicely together’ ploy.  

And it is not going to work.

Adding to injury is basing ‘open BIM on IFC’.  

I sure have tried using IFC time after time. Have ended up with twisted columns, disappearing slabs.

Indeed, in my last experiment when I compared an IFC export from a relatively simple Revit file with a file resulted from a two-stepped-translation (Revit-DWF-3DS), the second file was significantly closer to the original.

Yes, it was a totally ‘washed out’ file, no intelligence, but give me dumb any time if I can be sure that the geometry will be fine, as opposed to ‘false smart’ with columns twisting this way and that.

The Hama Beads theory

‘Please help me to convince my management to go for BIM’ is a request that regularly pops-up on blogs, real and virtual forums where AEC professionals gather.

It is often responded to people offering well meaning recommendations, strategies to employ, tools to use.

I usually (mostly internally) question the idea that you can, or even ‘should-try-to’ convince anyone to go BIM.

Any manager operating in the ‘post-gambling AEC’ era worth his/her salt should have by now considered BIM.

Even if s/he did not know it existed, s/he should have searched for something like it by now, or has had his/her head in the sand and little knowledge about his/her own project.

A waste of time attempting to influence.

To back up this theory, I present you with the latest (and probably lamest) of my BIM-analogies.

Simple it may be, I challenge anyone to disprove it:

Non-BIM AEC projects are run like this:

The project-information is a jar of Hama beads (pictured).

Every time, anyone needs to do anything to anything related the project, the person goes to the jar, and looks for the relevant bit of information.

It may be there, may not.

It may be on the bottom or in the middle. May take seconds to find, or an eternity.

Next time, next person, same story.

Smart AEC-managers use BIM, to fight the ‘jar-problem’.

On giant spaghetti and BIM User groups…

My friend Bhanu presented last night at the buildingSMART user group’s monthly meeting.

An enthusiastic Revit supporter, I respect Bhanu also for his open-mindness and preparedness to listen to alternative ideas. So, I went along.

I was also interested to see where he’d taken the ‘giant bowl of spaghetti project’ we jointly started up about a year ago and I had abandoned while still at the earth-worm stage.  

Bhanu duly acknowledged my presence (thank you) and certainly impressed me with the completed file. 

Clash detection give-or-take, this spin-able, coordinated digital model was well worth the effort. Especially when I recall the media used for design interpretation prior to Bhanu’s model being in existence. 

Admittedly, there was a pretty good Sketchup model coming from one of the specialists, a petty for all, that due to its heaviness, no computer could manipulate it within the office.

Driving home, another question kept annoying me: ‘BIM user groups’.

Why are they called such?

Shouldn’t they be ‘BIM practitioners’ groups’ instead?

The latter term sounds more appropriate to me, yet ‘BIM user groups’ prevail in all searches I’ve conducted.

It may just be an innocent residue from dominant software user-assembly naming practices, I wonder.

Unless, of course the members boldly wish to convey a message I was so far unaware of.

‘We use BIM to achieve something!’…

But what?

Hmmm…

I have a dream...

It goes a bit like this:

A weekday afternoon, evening almost, the streetlights on for the special effects, just got home from work, the backpack left at the front door.

I go through the local rag; husband is cooking dinner, something nice involving spuds and chicken, kids glued into their tumblers and bbms. The cat is squeaking at the back door, longingly looking at the inviting darkness of the handkerchief garden we carefully maintain.

The bell rings.

Not an overly loud noise, almost drowned by the chatter of the girls and ‘weekday night’s jazz with Suzy’.

Thankfully, I hear it – get to the door – no one in a rush, to bit me to it;

The man standing there is in a business-suit, white shirt and a pastel tie, slightly askew.

Shiny shoes, two mobiles, some wiring coming from his ear, could be a handless-set left there in a hurry; Keys poke out from a trouser pocket.

He whispers feebly:

“I hear you are a BIM expert, a very good one.

We need your help! Can you come now?”

He begs, his face scrunched.

I turn around to grab my backpack, simultaneously kick off the slippers and put on my work shoes.

I jump into the car, within seconds we are whizzing on the highway readying to assist.

Oh, to be needed like this, just once!

The question of the questions

Presented at another conference, where the delegates only just outnumbered the speakers and one presenter went twice over his allocated timeframe.

A practice that annoys me immensely, more than the offending should reasonably warrant...

The range of teas on offer was sadly, also pretty ordinary...

Still, something profound was said.

Can’t quote the ‘gem’ verbatim, went a bit like this:

“when our clients ask the questions, it is much easier to give them the answers”

Even in my ‘straight’ architectural days, I realised that some services needed two-layers-of marketing to sell, while others only one.

Promoting architect-services to residential clients involved a ‘create-a-need’ stage, despite most clients ‘knowing-what-they-wanted’.

Contrast this with a person suffering from a sore-tooth.

As a dentist you wouldn’t need to sell him he ‘needed’ to see one.

Nor to a bride-to-be, the importance of wedding-cakes, give her a choice of good cake-makers instead.

BIM is like architecture, a two-tiered service: first you need to create the ‘need’,

then you sell yourself as the best one to fulfil that necessity.

These days, some potential BIM clients ask ‘questions’ unprompted, as opposed to have to place them in their minds first.

I still rate them as ‘first tier’ questions and judge their BIM awareness:

The Dumbest is ‘What software do you use in your organisation?’ and the

Smartest: ‘Who BIMs within your organisation?’

BIM surveys

I get these often, 1-3 every month, on average.

Requests to participate in BIM-related surveys.

The people involved are generally nice-enough; politely ask for mere 10 minutes of my time.

Ten minutes are not a big deal for me; I frequently squander much larger chunks of-my time on activities that bring dubious benefits to the people around me, let alone the entire BIM community...

Still, most of the times, I decline the opportunity to participate.

I have my reasons. Two, at least:

·       The first one is my strong-held belief, that BIM is not a ‘science’ that has a shortcut to-it, you’ve got to earn your stripes by doing the hard-work in a related, ‘real’ field. 

And over quite a long period of time.

Not that one should not start on BIM early, absolutely must, straight from kindergarten – but not as a career, rather a means, to an end.

·        The second reason of mine is highly subjective too, based on some bad experience:

I do not trust BIM-surveys!

Far too often the results of these ‘honest investigations’ become ‘instant validations’ to questionable claims, bases used to build on theories with wobbly foundations.

I may be letting down the BIM-industry through my refusal to be BIM - surveyed – so be it.

Let the future be the judge. 

Barking down the wrong weed... (haunted by the ‘drawing’)

When I first switched camps to join the construction side of the industry ten-or-so-years ago, it still felt like a ‘breath of fresh air’ to be working in.

Tough and competitive, but also with clear-enough objectives:

‘go and build’, ‘find the consultants’ mistakes on the way, make some money too...’

Somehow, over the decade that passed since, construction got infected by the same virus that the design-end of the industry had been suffering from.

This virus causes the ‘cancer of the drawing’ and no project escapes once infected.

The construction people of the construction workflow do not seem to mind this disease, as it gives them a good excuse for just about anything;

(i.e. could not pour concrete, erect steel, tile bathroom...etc, had no shop-drawings;)

The engineering people of the same workflow aren’t appearing to be too bothered either, perhaps because the ‘shop-drawing-custodianship’ gives them something to live for.

Or work for! In current, challenging economic times that reason is not to be ignored.

In fact, it is a major driver for engineering departments of construction companies from all over the world to fight fiercely for archaic shop-drawing production processes to survive.

This mirrors the bad behaviour of the design fraternity that most of these practitioners have left to invade the construction fields so badly, that any hope for BIM to gain traction is evaporating.

BIM and how the Indians have taken over the corner dairies of New Zealand...

A disclaimer to start-with: I am not a cross-country-migration specialist, nor someone that would encourage – or on the other hand, discourage migration on any scale, small or large. I take no political stance on the issue and no aspiration to feed arguments for or against it.

I have been an immigrant most of my life and have seen over time the significant impact (positive and negative) it had on a country, a region, a large part of the world, but also – and probably even more importantly for my area of interest: on an industry.

Few people in New Zealand under the age of 30 know of dairy owners that are not Indians, first or second generation immigrants. Very few local bakeries are run by people not of Chinese or other Asian-origin.

Rightly or wrongly – the ‘take-over’ has happened, under the noses of the people and in a relatively short timeframe.

When it comes to BIM – and its employment within the AEC industry, ‘expert-migration’ is yet to make any significant impact. The potential nevertheless is there!

Not that anyone is seriously and publically prepared to analyse this ‘opportunity’, typically highly politically and emotionally charged.

That is unfortunate. 

The opportunity exists, to source the type of people that will drive the cultural change needed for the approach to flourish – without rocking the boat too much.

Initially, anyway.

A different breed of BIM out/in sourcing... ...is what could be a great catalyst for the change, this industry is waiting for.

I admire many individual architects, engineers and construction managers operating within the AEC, still I regard this layer of the ‘building creation machinery’ to be a major obstacle for a ‘culture’ to emerge that would be progressive, efficient, BIM-friendly and enjoyable to work in.

I often refer to them as the ‘middle-managers’.

They operate somewhere between the ‘top cheese’ that make the strategic decisions on how things are done in the organisation and those that actually do the ‘visible part ‘of the work.

(let’s leave the ‘intellectual part’ out for the moment).

Their biggest sin (in my eyes) is their ‘hands-off’ attitude to information management.

I’ve been accused of personalising this problem, attacking the ‘people’ in it.

I believe in clearly pointing out the need to discard/replace a practice* that obviously is not working industry and worldwide:

De-privilege this middle-management within projects, get them to take full responsibility for what they are supposed to do and the industry will jolt itself out of the hole it’s been stuck-in for decades!

But, how to get this de-privilege-isation happening when strong, vested interests keep ensuring its continuous survival?

My latest hope is in the out/in sourcing firms, smart people that run them, entire-countries even that may size this yet ‘invisible’ opportunity.

No, offering modelling, coordination or (God-forbid) clash-detection-services will not do.

But there’s something-else that may just....

* This ‘practice’ is delivering buildings through second-hand information creation and manipulation and I have already written quite a bit on this subject in the past.

Arm me with BIM!

AEC analysts love to compare the building-creation industry, its workings and productivity (or lack of) with that of the manufacturing.

I find this quite weird;

I see more commonality with other ‘unrelated’ fields like travel, hospitality, education, even healthcare.

The most striking resemblance still, is with the finance and gambling industries – a connection very few people are prepared to acknowledge.

This is unfortunate.

The way ‘treasures have been shared’ within the participants of the industry has largely been determined by speculation, manipulation and luck for quite a while;

Facing up to this fact – would do a lot of good for all of us operating within the field.

Such collective enlightening  would not just make the game more sophisticated, but also assist the true uptake of BIM, no end.

For a start, we all would stop hoping that a general practice of ‘play nicely’ will spontaneously emerge and instead will all learn to survive – or even – thrive in the game that is tough, hostile and brutal.

Secondly, we would recognise that building owners/developers are ‘just’ another player at the table. Their stakes may be sometimes bigger than others’ but very often are not too.

Therefore, we should stop looking at them with expectations to single-handedly dampen the gamble and instead better arm ourselves to increase our own odds to win a fair share of the ‘booty’.