By Steve Rizer
When it comes to building information modeling (BIM) technology, building owners across the United States by and large “are not engaged quite yet,” buildingSMART alliance Executive Director Deke Smith told ConstructionPro Week (CPW). This is one of several interesting comments he made in the wake of a new McGraw Hill survey indicating that while 88 percent of owners in the United Kingdom are formally measuring the impact of BIM, only 18 percent of their U.S. counterparts are doing so.
Other results of the survey, outlined in McGraw Hill’s “SmartMarket Report: The Business Value for BIM,” were just as sobering for proponents of wider adoption of the technology across the U.S., which, unlike the U.K., does not require the use of BIM on all national public projects by 2016. Only 14 percent of surveyed owners in the U.S. reported that they have “high capabilities” to leverage BIM for building operations and facility management, 40 percentage points less than that reported by U.K. respondents. “By 2019, almost all (92 percent) U.K. owners expect to have high capability to use BIM for building operations, a sharp contrast to the U.S., where just 49 percent expect to be at that level.”
The survey results “do not surprise me in the least,” Smith said. And, he believes “the results will not change unless we do something substantial and proactive to make them change. This is not something that will occur by osmosis. It is going to take a real concerted effort, and it won’t be easy.”
The ConstructionPro Network member version of this article includes a slew of additional comments that Smith made during CPW's interview with him.
