True; there is no market, no industry, nor process that isn’t undergoing fundamental change as computing permeates systems. But is computing the new bubble in construction?

I’m reminded of the scene in the movie The Matrix where the evil agent Mr. Smith touches Keanu Reeves and golden molten metal spreads out from Smith’s fingertip, assimilating the human into the Matrix. Talk about transformation.

But when talking about technology-enabled change, it’s easy to get ahead of ourselves. In our excitement, we tend to forget that technologies are tools fashioned by humans to simplify, speed or bring scale to work. Nothing more, nothing less. Computers are just hammers, and databases are just levers. When we fall into the trap of worshipping the technology, whatever it is, we tend to forget to check to see if, in fact, it lives up to its promise as a hammer or a lever.

Last week I attended a symposium on BIM (Building Information Management), and I can’t help but wonder if BIM is proving to be a case of technology worship, without real understanding. BIM is often described as a commitment to generate and share construction project information between the people who need it for design, like architects, and the people who need it for building, like contractors. BIM information is intended to live from design concept through building operation. Underneath the process and the data is commercial software that helps with drawing, predictive modeling, material lists, project instructions, and some say, an eventual dashboard from which the building owner may monitor performance and health or pinpoint problems.

But BIM adoption has been slow. 

Today BIM focuses on helping designers to test and express their designs, and on contractors to build or rebuild faster and with higher quality, assuming good data is available. BIM can be complex. Architects are asked to use unfamiliar tools, contractors are confronted with foreign tools, and too much data can threaten some basic modeling functions. 

Experts at last week’s meeting add that they remain concerned that competing software and computing platforms still don’t share information well, because the vendors didn’t choose the same development platforms, or they want to protect their niche markets and customers. So-called ‘interoperability’ issues make sharing data between stakeholders very tough. 

So we were told that until the people that own, live and work in buildings begin to value an online operating manual for their space, the rest of the supply chain won’t step up to the plate, and BIM won't reach full potential.

I think this misses the point. User demand, or lack thereof, isn’t the reason for BIM’s delayed adoption. It’s slow to emerge because not everyone is convinced it is valuable as a hammer or a lever.

Most importantly, BIM appears to be creating work, as opposed to saving it, in some key areas. So important players in the construction and operations cycle are reluctant to adopt, and with good reason.

For instance, BIM-ready models of key machines simply don't exist in a useful format, yet. Most manufacturers have converted manufacturing drawings to CAD drawings, but BIM doesn’t care about the thread count on a metal screw or the shape of a door. In fact, component level dimensional or manufacturing data just takes up space and bandwidth and bogs down the model. Instead, BIM craves performance and parametric details about a device:

• How much energy does the device consume during peak and load periods?
• How smart is the equipment? Can its control scheme be included in the building model to estimate and manage lifecycle costs?
• How hot will it get and when? What factors make heat?
• What is the anticipated life expectancy of a specific component?
• How will the equipment respond when something else breaks?
• Might live data eventually feed the model?

And here we’re talking about information that a supplier (and perhaps a user) may want to keep private, may not know or feel confident supplying or, more often, that they simply don’t have the resources to compile, supply or respond to usefully. And since the construction and aftermarket services supply chains remain mostly discontinuous and ad-hoc, there is really no incentive for people upstream, downstream or post-project to embrace it. They have to supply the model with data but may not benefit from it.

BIM won’t go into mass adoption when users demand it, because it is unlikely that many will. Users want good equipment and buildings, made fast and right, and if the suppliers on whom they depend don’t benefit from a BIM investment, users won’t force them to use it. People don’t change because of wishful thinking, they change out of necessity.

True, some state and federal agencies are writing BIM into their project specifications. But in the US commercial market, we don’t have the political will (found in parts of Europe), even among long-standing industry consortiums, to demand a new process standard that affects a fragmented supply chain, even if it has large long term potential.

Yet BIM appears too promising to just fizzle into a bunch of small simulation packages. If advocates are not careful, this may prove to be the future for BIM.

The long ball, it seems to me, would be to take lessons from the open source world (think about how Linux made servers cost effective and reliable and the internet came to life) and fashion BIM into the biggest, most effective hammer for change. Today’s construction market is built on three flawed and wasteful assumptions: that we have unlimited energy, unending financial backing and a steady stream of innovative engineers and skilled workers. The recession shows us that none of these things are true. BIM is poised to be among our best tools to find the waste and remove it and then to focus finite resources to do the most good.

To see how, let’s do a little abductive reasoning:

1.) Can BIM be used to fix the most inefficient supply chain ever, making it an highly efficient one instead? Perhaps. If it has the power. A discontinuous and serial construction cycle would have to become flexible and the companies in it would have to agree to collaborate through BIM, to mutual benefit, at a very minimum. At the extreme, the supply chain would be significantly reorganized, perhaps through consolidation.

... Why would the players agree to that? Perhaps competitive advantage or just basic survival. So let's then ask:

2.) Can an organization link and rethink everything in construction to create an highly efficient, lean, and lifecycle-oriented delivery system using BIM? Perhaps. If it has the right information and uses it well.

... How?  Let’s try re-focusing BIM on what it does best:

To start, BIM could be adapted to become the neo-ERP  (Enterprise Resource Planning) platform for the new breed of design-build (DB) and design-build-operate contractor (DBO). These are the firms poised to use BIM to the fullest since they control much of the project process already. BIM already helps some of these firms to shorten and control project cycles and lower costs. And as a user group, these firms would define data minimums and standards required to play that don’t add work, but can automate or at least speed it. Still, suppliers would have to be motivated to support with make-ready resources in the near term, so these designer-contractors will have to make strong purchasing commitments that protect from undercutting or lost future business. After a time, BIM could reach into or replace the systems used by suppliers. More than just visualization and simulation to share ideas, BIM would provide the data to support de-bottlenecking and cellularization decisions throughout the supply chain, and would eventually evolve to become the core of an ideal operating system for the most complete and leanest environmental building supplier(s). 

Imagine an ideal, non-linear, flexible organization that could efficiently deliver everything or anything from concept to component design and manufacturing to environmental and aesthetic innovation, from cross-trained trades building services to facility management, from decommissioning to recycling buildings and equipment. All the while, producing the cleanest, most reliable and most efficient products in the shortest time and with the least waste. And on the front end, the BIM dashboard would provide continuous process, schedule and cost transparency to the project manager and the end customer. 

It’s a truly resource-aware, talent-aware, performance-based and customer-oriented production and delivery organization that doesn’t exist yet in construction, but could, because of tools like BIM. The difference is that instead of hoping someone will enter data so others can benefit from it sometime later in an inefficient serial process, the whole model is made flexible and viable by the efficiencies that the underlying information technology makes available. And the tool has become the lever for change and progress. Talk about transformation.

Until then, BIM seems like another construction bubble.