“Insurance is all about risk management”

...Says Walid Shidani in his interview given to Rupert Wright, this week.

Mr Wright’s weekly column in the National is one of three reasons that make our little investment into the paper’s annual subscription worthwhile. The other two are the crossword and the designer sunglasses that I would have never bought had it not been for the ‘free’ subsidy that came with the subscription.

But, back to insurance...

Earlier in my BIM promoting phase I naively believed that the insurance industry, specially the part related to construction would welcome the development of BIM based tools and services with open arms.

Soon enough I had to face the fact – not only could most of the insurance agents I talked to hardly spell the three-letter-acronym, with no exception, they all advised me to review my own PI insurance cover, if I was to dabble in such fringe activities.

Nowadays many agents believe that BIM is a liability to practitioners and I have not come across one that would recommend developers and/or public owners mandate BIM processes on their projects in order to reduce or better manage risk.

“Insurance is all about actuarial forecasting...” Mr. Shidani reveals in the above mentioned interview.

For me, the high level of transparency BIM can bring to construction projects makes it an ideal risk-management and forecasting tool.

Should be promoted as such.