Level 3 BIM will deliver the culture and behaviour change that finally neutralises the industry’s problems with payment and “Orwellian” contracts, according to Mark Bew, the chairman of the government’s BIM Task Force.
Bew was speaking at a discussion event hosted by BIM+ earlier this week on the “Digital Built Britain” document, the government’s Strategic Plan for Level 3 BIM.
To see a 4-minute video summarising the event, click here.
The document says: “Construction industry reform has been led in the past by many including Latham, Egan and Wolstenholme. However these laudable, iterative approaches to industry reform lacked the compelling transformational forces of transparency and feedback made possible through technology.”
Expanding on the theme, Bew said that the technical advances expected in Level 3 BIM – a 10-year programme leading up to 2025 – would create a “transparent” environment where people and companies feel more comfortable about collaboration.
Bew said: “For example we’ll be developing data standards that allow paperless contracts to be executed on the web, and the expectation is a lot of the payment mechanisms will be completely transparent.
“That drives better behaviours around procurement and payment profiles for SMEs and that starts to enable all the things we talk about around collaborative behaviours.”
Dave Glennon: “Resonance”
“It’s about people being comfortable – at the moment we have these Orwellian contracts that are about creating data black holes. But because we won’t need to compartmentalise anything, there will be transparency in the supply chain, people will tend to be more comfortable. In 2018-20, the early adopters will demonstrate this is real life,” he added.
The event, with the BIM Task Group’s David Philp FCIOB, Neil Thompson, a BIM integrator at Balfour Beatty, Dave Glennon of Aecom’s data solutions team and Sonia Zahiroddiny of the information modelling programme at Transport for London, was the industry’s first chance to consider the ambitious document.
Dave Glennon commentedd: “I was pleased when I saw this document, as it already resonates with what our clients are trying to do, you can see they are going along the path we’re trying to aim to.”
The discussion included how digital innovation could be driven by SMEs then scaled up by the major software vendors.
According to Neil Thompson: “There are SMEs on the fringes of construction that have heard about BIM, and at the same time the costs of development of software has [come down], so I think that SMEs are going to be the next software houses in developing information systems.”
The need for the industry to connect with university computer science departments was also a theme, to ensure that construction gets its fair share of digital innovators.
David Philp is to head a new working group looking at how the industry can bridge the gap with academia on BIM.
Neil Thompson: “SMEs are going to be the next software houses”
