CHAPTER SUMMARY
This first chapter aims to provide educators, trainers, employers, and practitioners the background as to why developing building information modeling (BIM) talent is a significant yet unfulfilled undertaking of the journey to implement BIM in the architecture, engineering, construction, and operation (AECO) industry. It discusses several ancillary supporting and related efforts going on in the industry that have a significant impact on the approaches developed and elaborated throughout the book. The expectation is that the industry will continue to evolve and improve, yet the fundamentals presented in this book are foundational and are critical for future advancement. They will continue to be essential to the long-term success of current and future practitioners. This effort is certainly not specific to the United States but applies to a much broader global community of practice that is learning, implementing, and advancing BIM. Practitioners around the world need to share a common understanding not only of their roles but also of the roles of all others involved in the process of delivering the built environment.
1.1 THE BIM JOURNEY AHEAD OF US
Historically a building information model used for design has acted primarily as a 3D visualization tool that helps eliminate clashes between design elements such as beams intersecting with ductwork. This activity is possible because a building information model is a mathematical description of a facility or infrastructure asset. In the AECO industry, many stakeholders remain independently focused on BIM uses for project phasing and scheduling. The business processes have been developed in silos over time when individual practitioners focused on their efforts independently of others as much as possible. For example, with the traditional designābidābuild (DBB) project delivery method, contracting for design and contracting for construction are two separate transactions, while the only information passed between the designer and contractor is a set of blueprints and specifications. Although certainly other project procurement and contracting models are in place today, DBB remains the dominant approach, especially in public projects. Even fewer are sharing information across the project life cycle to include facility management (FM) professionals. The consequence of this business paradigm is that BIM has significant yet mostly untapped potential for defining information flows throughout the AECO industry, including the supply chain based on new business process models. To date, individual practitioners independently come to a level of understanding of BIM predicated on their company's level of innovation, experimentation, and risk tolerance.
Education is the key to creating a shared understanding and expanding the capability of BIM by profoundly changing the workflow and business processes associated with the AECO industry. For example, the retail sales industry has had significant disruption to its business processes from online sales for almost every product ā from food to automobiles. This disruption, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, quickly transformed how people buy items and how soon people expect them delivered. Even for home renovation projects, when ordering plumbing supplies, they can be delivered the same day at very reasonable prices. The retail sales industry has had to transform quickly or find themselves out of business. Banking is another example. A brick-and-mortar local bank is no longer even needed in many cases unless the customers are depositing cash. To unlock the full potential of BIM, educators must provide emerging practitioners with specific BIM enhanced knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). These KSAs are potentially universal worldwide as virtually every human on the planet seeks cost-effective housing, a place to work, a way to move between locations, receive health care, eat, and play. The KSAsācentric education will not only build a comprehensive foundation for basic BIM job tasks but also allow us to build upon that foundation to achieve even a higher level of collaboration over time. This transfer of expanded knowledge will ensure the AECO workforce can perform more basic tasks and will encourage others to continue to push the industry to higher goals. Hence, this book is needed not only to start the dialogue but also to provide a baseline from which to build in future years. This body of knowledge (BOK) is not the end but only the beginning of a long process to change the facilities and infrastructure industries and more closely link the AECO industry. It will not be a quick process, but if we begin the transformation now society will benefit only that much sooner. This chapter will examine, document, and explain the process proposed to realize that journey.
1.1.1 Lack of Standardization
Many aspects of BIM and BIM standards continue to emerge in the United States and the rest of the world. Unfortunately, as an industry, practitioners have not done well at adopting standards even before BIM. As just one example, practitioners cannot agree on the phases of a project. AIA (US), CSI/CSC OmniClass, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 12006-2:2015, buildingSMART International (bSI) IDM, HOAI (Germany), and RIBA (UK) all define project phasing differently (Figure 1.1). As time passes, the industry does not seem to blend toward a solution but continues to expand the approaches. While this issue was significant at one point for payments of work in place, the somewhat clear lines between phases have continued to blur. Phasing is but one example of this lack of standardization. While standards for the sake of standards are not helpful, standards for communication and collaboration across the AECO industry are essential, especially as the industry continues to expand the span of practitioners attempting to become interoperable over the entire life cycle of a project.
There are few if any real AECO standards in place and being broadly used at this point. While some are defined at the ISO level and others at the country level, few are commonly used across the AECO industry. The first significant effort to standardize BIM in the United States was the National BIM Standard ā United States (NBIMS-US) developed at the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS). At the same time it was evolving, the British Standards Institution (BSI) Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 1192 was being developed in the United Kingdom. BSI 1192 has now evolved into ISO 19650 with little US involvement and no visible coordination. This issue is most troubling to m...
