Bandwagon jumpers are typically not respected for some reason. If you snarled and muttered about the Boston Red Sox for 80 years and barked about how they never should have traded Babe Ruth, then you may not have been as welcome at the celebration party of their 2004 World Series win. However, if you cranked at the construction industry's switch from hand drafting to CAD about 30 years ago, and still cry about how good drawings were "back in the day" there is good news for you; you will be more than welcome in the wonderful world of Building Information Modeling - as long as you don't create more problems of course.
On Tuesday, I went to a panel discussion on BIM implementation put on by Microsol Resources who is a dealer for AutoDesk products. Microsol did a good job of making the event less of a sales pitch and more of an informational discussion with presentations from several members of the AEC industry including an insurance and legal representative. But really the best part about it was that it was free.
I attended a BIM conference back in March by McGraw-Hill Construction that cost me about $150 and really wasn't as good. But just as McGraw-Hill did, the first slide that went up was the productivity curve of construction vs. all other non-farm industries since 1964 done by the Center for Facility Engineering at Stanford University.
Basically, this tells us that according to the folks at Stanford, non-farm industry productivty has far exceeded that of the construction industry which has actually decreased it's productivity since 1964.
Of course there are many reasons for this including but certainly not limited to, weather, labor availability, and overall fragmentation of the industry. However, the progressives including those who presented on Tuesday are suggesting that BIM could be the breakthrough that we need to at least improve productivity instead of moving backward. Ben Ferrer from Turner Construction suggested that the integration of subs early on in the modeling process could be the most significant opportunity for cost and time savings associated with the implementation of BIM.
What I think is the biggest fear among architects and contractors about using BIM are the potential legal and insurance related problems. With such a collaboration of input from designers and contractors, it may be easy to assume that one party could become responsible for another party's negligence. A representative from the insurance industry, Kenneth Wortley, from WortleyPoole (no relation) presented a possibility of using an umbrella insurance policy over designers much like an owner controlled insurance policy (OCIP) is used for contractors. This would allow more free-flowing communication and collaboration between designer without the fear of excess liability. Also, two attornies gave presentations on the new AIA document E202 which is a contract addendum that pertains specifically to projects drawn in three dimensions. The legal representative explained that the E202 does not necessarily create a "United States of America" for the project team but rather a "Confederation" of united but independent entities.
Pretty soon we'll be drafting the "Declaration of Independence" and we can leave two dimensional plans on the other side of the Atlantic.
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