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Richard Robinson
President, UK & Ireland, United Kingdom contact form+44 1925 23 8302
It’s 2011. The UK government’s BIM mandate has just landed, and the construction sector is scrambling to embrace the digital tools necessary to enable BIM and ensure ongoing compliance. Yet we all know what happened next. Rather than falling behind, companies quickly adopted new tools, and the UK emerged as a global leader in BIM.
More than twelve years on, as we approach a unified Information Management (IM) protocol, the lessons of the successful BIM rollout are especially relevant. The UK is no longer an undisputed leader; other countries learned from our approach, and several have now surpassed us. If we are to lead the way into AI, the next great wave of innovation, we must first mandate better practices around information itself, just as the BIM mandate paved the way for digital collaboration in the built environment.
Information, enhanced
Although we’re migrating towards a more integrated understanding of information, where data is not just another asset but a core component, there’s still a long way to go. Unfortunately, many projects are still beset by laborious, manual data retrieval systems, impeding collaboration and preventing seamless interoperability. With key information scattered across databases and filing cabinets far and wide, trawling this information is a time-consuming process, unduly delaying projects, obscuring the insights necessary for rapid, confident decision-making.
Planning is another difficulty. It’s a big issue in the UK, where it has become a byword for labyrinthine laws and regulations, and which has proven difficult for policymakers to simplify.
Exacerbating the issue is a lack of capacity. We do not have enough staff to process backlogs, and while increasing funding will help in the short-term, it does little to address the long-term shortage. As distinct as these problems are, they both have a common cause: data. Our legacy methods for accumulating, processing, sharing, and storing it have embedded inefficiencies which sap productivity.
The future proof
Similarly, we need a digital register for our buildings, enabling all manner of efficiencies across the board, from retrofitting to decarbonisation. These aren’t distant possibilities to be undertaken by the next generation: they’re possible right now.
For example, the geospatial commission’s National Underground Asset Register (NUAR), built by AtkinsRéalis, is a compilation of all below-ground utilities. Providing companies with access to a comprehensive database of underground assets eliminates unnecessary surveying, while improving safety and minimising disruption on projects. In turn, this accelerates the path to planning permission, saving billions. And yet a minimum viable product for NUAR – covering the whole of England and Wales – was developed in only two years.
The latest IM mandate review aims to integrate the BIM Mandate with the current IM Mandate, creating a holistic framework for the entirety of the built and managed environment. By replacing inscrutable incompatibility with common standards, and replacing ambiguity with clarity, it can expedite the adoption of innovative, cross-sector collaborative processes. In doing so, it can pave the way for AI adoption, which is hampered by ‘walled gardens:’ proprietary silos, limiting both the data set from which models can learn and the range of their potential applicability. Removing silos entrenched by idiosyncratic data standards increases our collective potential and decreases the risk of rework and obsolescence, ultimately benefiting everyone.
Lesson learned
The challenge is daunting. But the successes of the past should give us courage that two of the hardest problems - collaboration at scale, and boosting productivity - can be overcome.
In our fragmented sector, collaboration is hard. Yet despite this, we have already shown ourselves capable of widespread cross-sector cooperation. The Construction Playbook is a collaboration between government, delivery bodies, and industry to create an operating manual for best practice delivery of infrastructure projects. It’s hard to implement, and is yet to achieve its potential, but it is still a huge achievement, and a world-first.
Productivity, meanwhile, has remained stubbornly low in spite of the widespread increase in digital proliferation. But look more closely, and there’s a clear counter argument, demonstrating that our sector can change at speed: the pandemic. Throughout the lockdowns, construction kept going, translating legacy processes into digital equivalents in a matter of weeks. Rather than hobbling our industry, this rapid, cross-sector digital transformation yielded a tangible positive contribution - productivity in construction actually went up during the pandemic. It’s a precedent that can give us confidence that the benefits of collectively embracing innovation outweigh the risks.
Still, it won’t be easy. But if the UK can rise to this big challenge, the rewards are correspondingly large. We now have the opportunity to achieve a huge leap forwards in IM standards - just as we did with the 2011 BIM mandate. To shape the future, we must learn from the past.
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