Recognizing what’s limiting current levels of collaboration

Here are four things that can often affect your ability to collaborate with project teams:

• Closed data: Have you ever seen an “Access Denied” message pop-up? Restricting access to data that should be shared makes BIM processes difficult to achieve. One of the biggest barriers to collaboration is that one generator of information, like a landscape designer, doesn’t have access to the data of another, like an electrical engineer, on a project that requires outdoor lighting design. Perhaps they’re using obscure file formats or only providing locked-down, PDF-style outputs. Agreeing levels of permission for project teams and creating your information with other users in mind can be powerful.
• Security concerns: Maybe you’re involved in top-secret projects full of spies in dark glasses and long coats, but even just on a regular project you probably have access to pieces of sensitive company data or people’s personal information. Thus, you want to be confident about the security of file storage or file transfer systems any one person on the project is using. Work with your IT teams and digital security experts to develop a strategy that protects commercial interests but also allows appropriate levels of sharing and access. The UK document PAS 1192:5 is a useful foundation for this process.
• Attitudes and personalities: People can be awkward about sharing data. Maybe they think a commercial advantage exists in protecting their content, but actually the awkwardness can come down to fear of weaknesses or poor work being found out when they display it to the project team. Also, as Chapter 12 discusses, it would be great if everyone involved in projects was keen, dynamic, and enthusiastic, but you find (at least) one or two grumpy people in the construction industry. Make your project team meetings a place where people feel comfortable that they can bring their problems and questions as well as their expertise and solutions.
• Collaboration tools and technology: Sometimes the tools for collaboration simply aren’t available, or worse, aren’t used. Currently, the most common tools don’t integrate very well. However, we think this is probably the least likely reason that collaboration doesn’t happen. Blaming technology is easy when people are actually the problem. Selecting tools that have the highest chance of working together is a good idea. Related to this is the need for forms of procurement that encourage project leaders to engage a full team including contractors and specialist consultants as early as possible.

Looking at Level 4 BIM

The industry is close to agreement on what forms the Level 2 suite of standards for BIM compliance. Chapter 7 looks at the BIM maturity model and at Level 3 in particular. But what happens after that? Understanding that BIM maturity also has the potential for Levels 4 and 5 is fundamental to realizing the future of BIM. We provide more detail in this chapter, but in simple terms the BIM levels can be described as follows:

• Level 2: Coordinated digital information, but generated in separate software.
• Level 3: Increased integrated sharing of data using collaborative software, leading to added value and cost/energy savings.
• Level 4: Behavioral change: using BIM to influence the real-world impact of your projects.
• Level 5: Projects that form part of smart cities/grids, providing real-time information to operators and users.

Digitizing the world

When you’re in a meeting, what do you make notes on? Are you using a pen and paper? A laptop? A tablet? Some industries have been transformed by digitization (the move from analog forms of data and media like printed books and handouts and handwriting to fully digital, electronic processes that can be connected together into a vast network of online transactions), such as the finance sector, where analog processes like ledgers and checkbooks are nearly extinct. In other sectors, like media, although digital is clearly the future, paper holds on for dear life, and people still buy newspapers and magazines, full of brochures, coupons, and leaflets. Enough of a market exists in the non-digital realm to keep producing paper products. The physical books market remains strong alongside a growing e-book and digital publishing industry. All industries are digitizing, just at different rates. The development of digital economies varies across the globe, too.

A report by Strategy& (part of the professional services group PwC) ranked different industries by their levels of digitization. In sectors where it was relatively simple to move data inputs and outputs into the digital world, like finance and media, digitization has been underway for decades and generates new efficiencies every day. However, the construction industry and the hospitality sector are at the bottom of the pile. These industries are seen to be very labor intensive with many analog processes still in existence.

In order for a digital economy to work, you need certain things in place:

• A physical infrastructure for digital: the cables and pipes, power, and networks.
• A regulatory infrastructure for digital: the standards and agreements, security, and safety.
• A workforce ready for digital technologies: Generation Z + Generation Alpha. These terms are popularly used to describe those born (approximately) between 1995–2009 and after 2010. Generation Z is the first generation to have never experienced life without the Internet or digital media and so is more equipped to access the information it needs than any previous generation in history. Generation Alpha is the next generation and the first to have never experienced life without social media, mobile devices, and collaborative education. This group is sometimes called digital natives.

Simulating and augmenting reality

Interestingly, you can discover a lot about real-world human behavior, psychology, and decision-making by looking at online communities. In games like World of Warcraft and League of Legends, developers bring in economists and psychologists to make the experience more realistic. Academics have used the glass-box, laboratory-like world of online games as a rich mine for social study. Recently, US media scrutinized Facebook for a series of psychology experiments it tried with hundreds of thousands of users, artificially changing news feeds to show happier or more miserable updates and seeing what effect it had on users’ own posts.

Simulation — and the power to run multiple versions of similar computations over and over and see the results – is one of the main advances of BIM. Interestingly, many of the online games use many separate servers, which means the makers can measure each of the behaviors in unique situations and apply various changes to affect only one set of users.

The following sections examine how you can apply simulation to the built environment and how modeling simulations, including augmented reality, can optimize the performance and construction of built assets.

Enforcing interoperability

Part of the future of BIM is about encouraging interoperability, if not legislating it. The industry has made great steps forward in collaboration, but it’s not very integrated. Standards, like BS 11000, talk about building a joint approach and collaborative working relationships based on mutual benefits. The incentive is that the relationship adds value to the project and encourages long-term working arrangements to maximize these benefits.

Until the regulations and protocols begin to enforce interoperability and increase the requirements for open standards and formats, such as IFC, contracts ideally need to be chosen with collaboration in mind and may be used in tandem with a BIM protocol to ensure the commitment is there from the outset.

In addition to interoperability, other considerations such as capability assessment measure the competency of the supply chain. A number of elements are needed to move toward an integrated BIM, not just a collaborative BIM. The ideal principle is a single, central model rather than a federated collection of individual models. Not only that, but as you start to think about connecting everything in the Internet of Things (see Chapter 20), interoperability is pretty much essential.

In Chapter 10, we help you get your head around collaboration via Construction Operations Building information exchange (COBie) and IFC. It’s important to point out that they may not exist in a few years’ time, at least not in their current forms. COBie is the lowest denominator to transfer data from you to someone else, because most people have access to basic spreadsheet software. Honestly, though, it’s not very sophisticated; these formats are just stepping-stones to real, coordinated solutions that can make the information easier to understand quickly. Open data is vital, and the industry will find new ways to make information interoperable. See Chapter 8 for more information on producing a master information delivery plan (MIDP), which is one of the key components of defining collaborative needs in BIM.

We hope and expect that governments with construction agendas will stimulate interoperability across the supply chain through regulation and new contracts, and promote open standards in other sectors too. Positively, some governments lead the way in opening up their own data for public consumption. Take a look at the United States (www.data.gov), the European Union (http://open-data.europa.eu/en/data), and the UK (http://data.gov.uk).

Trusting people and developing skills

Trust is pretty fundamental to BIM implementation being a success across an organization or across the industry. If you don’t trust the other members of a project team you’re working with, sharing data can be a risky business. Eventually, you’ll work in digital environments where the legal framework is firmly built to defend the rights of designers and authors, but those discussions are still in their infancy for BIM. We cover security, ownership, and legal issues in Chapter 14.

It’s probably not going to be easy to get people to share their data with you. Silos will take a long time to disappear. A lot of people will be protective over their data far into the future, especially if that data has provided the commercial advantage that’s been their livelihood.

What new skills does your organization (and/or you) require for the future of BIM? In particular, think about how industries like finance, technology, and pharmaceuticals … in fact, any big business really needs data, statistics, simulations, and the relevant professionals to interpret the information. We think increasing numbers of businesses will focus on the analysis of the construction industry’s data.

Processing with cloud power

You can now access computing processing power in the cloud of a level that once was so expensive that it was out of the reach of mere mortals and the processing power itself was almost unachievable. Cloud computing can increase your ability to work responsively in real time.

Instead of needing to invest in pricey in-house infrastructure, cloud virtualization takes the outlay cost and maintenance overheads of IT off-site. Accessing apps or virtualized software in the cloud, instead of needing processors at the point of use, means that power can all now be remote. Recently, we heard about an office that’s gone through this hardware sea change. Instead of spending $3,000 (£1,950) on a new, high-spec laptop, all users can have $300 (£200) laptops and access everything they need in the cloud.

More and more, BIM is going to need the power of the cloud and the huge data centers providing hosted desktop offerings that will lower the cost of handling the federated models you’ll soon encounter, which are likely to be significant file sizes.

We’re firm believers in the idea that BIM doesn’t equal expensive. Some people choose to invest thousands of dollars or pounds in new kits and all kinds of leading-edge software. Vendors everywhere try to convince you that their hardware, tool, or platform is essential and fundamental to doing BIM. We think this simply isn’t true.

Of course, some software, programs, and platforms will make your life much, much easier. What’s important is looking at your budget and your processes and working out where you can make the biggest efficiencies or time savings. A simple idea like building a master library of BIM objects, specification data, cost information, and technical standards could save many days on a live project.

That computing power will allow for two further shifts in the industry:

• Extraordinary levels of visualization will allow project teams to simulate and demonstrate the effect of a new building in terms of its environmental, social, or physical impacts and display this in virtual and augmented worlds.
• Running near-endless algorithms and calculations to optimize design geometry will result in new engineering and construction outputs never previously attempted because of their complexity.

Keeping your digital data secure

Digital data security and cyber security are at the top of many businesses’ agendas for investment. As Chapter 14 demonstrates, many of the key standards, like PAS 1192:5, are taking the digital security of BIM very seriously. The UK government has gone as far as to use the phrase “security by default” as a rule for future software/hardware solutions and investment.

It’s no longer a question of work and business data moving between discrete technologies; a new age of data security needs sensitive data to move safely between trusted and personal devices as well. More data exists and it’s moving faster between more people. Quickly, the construction industry will move closer to the financial sector in how companies will transfer files.

The security of your data, especially what you consider private, personal, or confidential, is going to be subject to increased risk in the Internet of Things. Yes, buildings can generate all this amazing real-time data, but the risk is that this data will leak in places, potentially to people who would use it unlawfully or to do harm. What about malicious attacks on building management systems? Buildings need to become as digitally secure as they are physically. Even the Mission Impossible-style “self-destruction” of data won’t just be the stuff of spy films but will become an integral part of modern business applications.

Collecting building data and real-time telemetry

One of the key visions for the future of BIM is about using building sensors and real-time monitoring or building telemetry. Telemetry just means automatic or remote measurement of something. These sensors can then transmit data to monitoring systems as part of building intelligence and management. For facilities managers and owner/operators, many possibilities exist, such as:

• Sensors to indicate wear and tear on mechanical parts in elevators, escalators, and moving walkways, to trigger alerts or alarms when servicing is due, and even to predict when other components are likely to fail.
• Sensors to measure resource use from electricity to water and to clearly understand where demand in a building is highest and when in any given period of time demand peaks and falls.
• Sensors to alert managers of security breaches, fire, and damage warnings, providing the ability to quickly locate issues on model visualizations.

Nanosecond procurement means that real-time information will likely demolish trading boundaries that are traditionally in place between nations and across borders. It will open up huge global opportunities. (We discuss nanosecond procurement in greater depth in Chapter 20.)

In Chapter 18, we mention that mergers and acquisitions are probably going to form giant superbrands in the construction industry, just as they exist in consumer food, technology, and pharmaceutical spheres. Now consider that these global brands will be able to trade on an unprecedented scale with clients, project teams, manufacturers, and management companies. BIM on just one project isn’t really big data, but think about how buildings and infrastructure connected via the Internet of Things are producing huge amounts of data. These construction superbrands will be collecting so much information in the way they understand the use, operation, and performance of the built environment that they’ll approach levels you can call big data. You can be sure that clients will clearly monitor and publish carbon cost.

People across the industry will feel the effects of building telemetry:

• Buildings will be part of sensor-rich networks and connected smart grids.
• The industry will produce rich, unstructured data.
• The business model for new projects will become about feedback gathered in-service.
• Post-occupancy evaluation won’t exist; it’ll be remote and constant.
• Clients’ focus will be always on the constant analysis of their assets and where they can improve performance.

Influencing and changing behavior

BIM makes the industry more efficient — great. Everyone saves a ton of money in capital expenditure and the basic cost of the built environment — fantastic. The industry lowers the numbers of injuries and its carbon impact, and even becomes more domestically reliant through increased off-site manufacture — amazing. Governments realize that a huge amount of the cost of a built environment asset is in its operation — so any savings made in operation are worth far more than trying to shave off costs in design or construction phases.

But that’s not all; here is governments’ big dream. Can you change people’s lives with the built environment? What if …

• A well-designed hospital actually makes people better more quickly?
• A well-designed school actually makes students more likely to find jobs?
• A well-designed digital business district encourages entrepreneurial activity that puts money back into the economy?

That’s worth far more than the energy operational savings from a building. The result of changing lives is one less patient-costing healthcare, one less unemployed person needing welfare, and one more business contributing taxes. You can call this behavioral data. Some people call this collection of personal information through the entire life womb-to-tomb data. In Chapter 1, we suggest that the acronym BIM can also stand for Behavioral Information Management.

Will BIM even exist in the future?

Many people who think about the future of BIM as we do suggest that even Level 3 BIM will serve a purpose only for a relatively short period of time. What’s interesting is considering whether Level 4 (integrated, behavioral BIM) will actually just be a common part of a connected global system of information exchange for every kind of procurement from built environment to product manufacturing.

Figure 19-2 shows an extract from the UK Government’s Digital Built Britain strategy document for Level 3 BIM and beyond. It starts at the base, with the traditional BIM description of the delivery phase of a built environment project, in the lowest blue pyramid. The pyramid is made up of regular data exchanges in response to key business incentives, building up an increasing dataset of information about that phase of work across a whole portfolio of projects.

The assembly of more data increases the strategic importance of information and the ability of an organization (like a government) to use that knowledge for decision-making farther up the pyramid. Above the base pyramid (and connected to it) are similar datasets for the operational and performance management phases of a built asset project. Using big data analysis, you can understand more about the future needs of users.

The long-term vision, shown by the layers of the diagram, is that this kind of analysis and data development extends to transportation, water, power, and eventually entire populations of people. That lifecycle management will help people make much better decisions about infrastructure and the built environment, and by then the industry may not even call it BIM!

Fundamentally, whatever it’s called, the process is about information and how it’s managed and exchanged. The biggest improvements to the future construction industry will be more open (in terms of collaboration/cooperation) and secure (in terms of cyber risk) ways to host, exchange, engage with, and interrogate data from projects at every stage in their lifecycle.

Noting the political landscape

Governments and public organizations likely will have strong opinions on the future of digital information in construction. Just as occurs with financial and pharmaceutical companies, your global strategy is highly impacted by political attitudes or restrictions. More nations are beginning to require electronic submission of digital information.

Construction strategies are generally pretty safe from government to government. Leaders rubber-stamp anything seen to encourage efficiency and cost “GOOD” (with a digital watermark, of course, not a rubber stamp on paper).

That said, keeping an eye on the changing political landscape is worthwhile to see how the government can influence the future of the industry. If anything, most changes in leadership result in tougher targets and accelerated programs, as an extra incentive to boost the construction economy or to make additional savings.