November 17, 2006
BuildingSMART™ Week Recap
The week starting on October 30, 2006 in Washington was billed as "buildingSMART week" and a whole series of events occurred that are all related to furthering Building Information Models penetration into the way facilities people will do business in the future. The underlying event was the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI)-International Council meetings which saw over 30 international visitors in our fair city with nearly 20 of them coming from Norway. "buildingSMART week" started with two days of technical meetings, industry day on Wednesday and two days of International Council meetings on Thursday and Friday. The IAI event provided an opportunity to also host several other events including the Federal Facility Council meeting on Tuesday and the AIA TAP Building Connections: 3rd Congress on Digital Collaboration in the Building Industry on Thursday. I am reflecting on the events of the week, remembering the highlights and also seeing some areas for concern.
One notable comment during the week was that this may be "the most significant transformational event in our business for the past 500 years". It was also noted that we should not be comparing this to the entry of CAD, as that technology was fairly easily assimilated since it really did not change how we did business only automated it. The BIMs we have implemented thus far, for the most part, have not changed the way we do business much yet either. Many of the BIMs are still in their information stovepipe and we are really now only creating "cylinders of excellence". True BIM is going to break down those cylinders and allow information to flow from the inception of a facility onward.
I will describe my journey during the week as there are many paths that one could have traveled through that week and someone else could likely end up with different feeling depending on their experience. I started the week with the IAI International Technical Management Meeting which was held at the Cosmos Club. This is the down and dirty aspect of IAI. There were so many letters flying around the room that if one was new to IAI they may think we all spoke in code or worked for the government. Sad part is I knew what IFC, IFD, IDM, ITM, ISG, NWI 241, OGC, ECTP, CIB-W78, and MVD meant and how they relate, for the most part. The problem is that outside that "inner sanctum" nobody really cares—or should need to care. Like Chuck Eastman from Georgia Tech said later in the week, does anyone really care about ASCII anymore, yet everything we do today still depends on it. I believe that is really the goal of the buildingSMART initiative—elevate all this so it is understandable by the average practitioner in the facilities business whoever they may be.
The next stop was on Tuesday at the National Academy of Sciences on Constitution Avenue and the Federal Facilities Council's "Government/Industry Forum - Engineering, Construction, and Facilities Asset Management: A Cultural Revolution". After a welcome from Steven Hagan of GSA, the Deputy Commissioner of Public Building Services, Anthony Costa spoke and told of the bold steps GSA had taken to require BIM's for all new projects. GSA is focusing on space management in their startup phase of BIM's primarily because that is the most critical problem they need to solve. They have done it right; they had the primary vendors all test their products so they would be ready to support their customers, the designers of public buildings. Next Admiral Thad Allen, the Commandant of the Coast Guard took the stage and mesmerized the audience with his descriptions of the work he led in the aftermath of Katrina. I think the entire audience would have followed him as a leader. He described how important spatial information was in resolving some of the problems and speeding up the process of regaining control in New Orleans. One example was using GIS information to determine if whole sections of the city were considered a total loss for insurance purposes so money could start flowing to rebuild. In the past a building by building assessment would have had to be done and we would probably still be in the damage assessment phase. It was noted that the levees were not designed for any category storm, because that ranking system had not gone into effect when the levees were designed and constructed. He fully supports the effort to move to Building Information Models, as having visible and accurate information available in a time of crisis does save lives.
Next a panel made up of GSA, COE and USCG representatives took the stage. Dave Hammond of the Coast Guard described some of the details of their program, cementing in the words of ADM Allen. MK Miles after "clarifying" come of the levee issues discussed their roadmap to BIM which focuses on Centers of Standardization designing a number of generic facility types. To date, this process is moving forward very successfully. Calvin Kam of GSA then discussed their 3D 4D BIM approach and the guidelines that they have now made available to all on the web.
The next panel demonstrated some examples of BIM related products. I think this panel demonstrated to me the necessity of higher level coordination required for BIM to realize its integration potential. Each of the projects discussed by Spencer Moore and Doug Christensen of the Air Force for projects in Alaska, Bill Brodt of NASA and Bill East of CERL discussing COBIE and Alex Viana of NAVFAC discussing pier design could potentially drift away from a focused BIM concept and fall back into information stovepipes. Each of these efforts needs to be able to pull information from a source and then provide it to follow-on efforts after theirs that use facility information to be most effective. Since those source and downstream partners have not yet been identified the work appears to be islands of automation, although the potential is there.
The last panel of the day was entitled "BIM: Pushing Standards to the Edge". Standards are typically something that comes later, after the dust settles. Yet the four speakers on this panel are very much in the middle of the dust storm. Yet the coordination is impressive. We are all working together in lock step. I discussed the National BIM Standard and its version 1.0 role in providing a coordinating baseline for those currently immersed in BIM development; this was followed by Tom Faraone discussing the successes that AISC had been experiencing with CIS/2 and how they were integrating IFC's into their current efforts. Roger Grant next described the critical role CSI was playing with OmniClass and how it was taking standards that are already part of our culture and integrating then to be more useful in a BIM environment. Mark Reichardt of the Open Geospatial Consortium next described the work they are doing with OWS-4 and the one thread most important to us concerning CAD-GIS-BIM interaction. All of these efforts will come together in the NBIMS effort. Read more.
Patrick McLeamy, President of IAI International and CEO of HOK provided a close for the Federal Facilities Council symposium day on the "way ahead with buildingSMART".
That evening we attended the first IAI-International reception and buildingSMART awards ceremony at the National Building Museum. Due to space I will not list all the recipients, but the North American members are clearly numbered with the international luminaries of this effort.
Wednesday brought the actual buildingSMART Day. This day started with welcomes by David Harris, president of NIBS, Jim Broaddus acting Chairman of NIBS Board and Norbert Young, Chair of IAI-North America then went right to a panel on client requirements. This is important because practitioners and facility participants really need to be the ones to define what is needed so that the vendors can support our needs. This is a much better approach than going only where a specific vendor wants to (or can) take you. Of note this day also was the announcement from Statsbygg, the Directorate of Public Construction and Property of Norway that they would be doing their building code checking in an automated fashion from this point forward. That means that BIM undergoes code checking in an automated fashion to validate compliance. The reality is that that is a far more effective review and can be done 24x7. So you don't have to wait weeks or months for review.
The next installment of "Seeing Is Believing" was conducted with a dozen or more participants all working on the same model, the HITOS project in Norway was used as the BIM. This demonstration was larger and even more involved than the demonstration we had seen a year ago at the Regan building. Design and analysis was preformed on the model by an international group of participants each looking at a different aspect of the project using different software applications on stage in real time. It was unfortunately overwhelming. The concept of virtually building and completely analyzing and modifying a product prior to the first physical action is mind-boggling. Now we just need a better way of doing that demonstration for the average Joe. I believe it was filmed and possibly through the magic of editors and inclusion of some explanations it may yield a marketable product.
The day closed with a vendor panel with representatives from Autodesk, Bentley, Graphisoft and Oracle. They were well behaved for the most part and we did get a sense that there is intense co-opetition in play. After all they are all attempting to win in the end. The audience asked some really good questions to test them also.
This day was also closed with comments from Patrick MacLeamy.
Thursday brought the AIA TAP - "Building Connections: The 3rd Congress on Digital Collaboration in the Building Industry" also at the National Academy of Sciences. Chuck Eastman of Georgia Tech led off and summarized all the work being done. This was intended to help eliminate repetition later in the day and I thought it was a very successful approach. This allowed us to get to the more meaty points of our discussions. There were perhaps 40 active participants and it was truly amazing the level of coordination that is going on in this effort. I don't think I heard about anything that I was not already aware of so it was an excellent opportunity for everyone to get an update on activities as well as discuss how things could be working together even better. Concerns were raised about the small sub-contractor who is not automated and some architects that don't want their plans to be converted to electronic media. While there was concern over their plight and a goal to try and take actions to let them down easy, they will likely be negatively impacted in the long run. This is where the rubber meets the road when we say convert or parish. Clearly the world is changing and while some people do still use snail mail and write checks, those days are also clearly numbered. So to is it for the draftsman...I guess we are hearing that there are still some practicing. Education was also discussed and that is another thorny issue which we did not solve. It appears that each school is approaching the issue in different ways. The question is how do we develop the BIM modelers of the future that will be in such demand?
The IAI-International Board joined us at the end of the day for some additional discussion and a reception in the great hall of the Academy.
In the end I was proud, we put on a good program for our international visitors and we learned much from them, renewed old friendships and made new ones. One heck of a week, now on with the real work of making it all happen for all players in the facility industry.