Mentioned Autodesk yesterday, Archicad, Microstation, Vectorworks, etc...
I will come back to the battles that these products fought (and keep fighting) with each other in the building design/documenting landscape, later.
There is one party that has by now become a major ‘collateral damage’ to these battles – the entire construction industry, left to ‘lumber on’ using devices from the middle ages.
Other industries moved with time – the retail industry, for example has managed extremely well to separate what is ‘mundane’ from what ‘matters’ (see previous blog);
You go to the supermarket, fill up your trolley, pay for it; The machinery that supports this simple action is highly sophisticated, controlled, risk managed behind the scenes; Low level (as in skills and pay) people are employed along the process but the area that they can ‘mess up’ is very limited;
In contrast, construction is run like a corner store. Along every one of the steps from ordering, transporting, storing, through sorting, selecting, to paying for, packaging and consuming, the products are managed by people of various skills, understanding and knowledge that work within an unstructured framework – within haphazard systems. Any step can be messed up, and big time for that!
You raise this issue, and the answer is often: ‘construction is not retail, the same rules do not apply!’
Why not?
I have a suggestion, why not. Tomorrow.
While I will agree that construction is the step child of "BIM" your corner store is a bit off. There are mom and pop general stores along with the highly specific and service oriented specialty stores. In the construction world there is everything in between. I have seen and worked with all kinds. I think it is not so much construction in general but the lack of continuity and understanding between the disciplines that make up the AEC industry.
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