Several changes are on the way in the world of building information modeling (BIM), and professionals in the construction community need to prepare for them, Design Atlantic LTD President Finith Jernigan told attendees of a two-part webinar series that WPL Publishing hosted Sept. 14-15.
In the future of BIM, distributed model servers will play a prominent role, Jernigan said. “Distributed model servers are a technology that is coming. It’s basically going to, out on the cloud, have all of your projects, all of the things you’re working on, all of this data, all of this information, held in a way [in which it] stays alive and is workable and real all of the time.”
Distributed model server systems have entered the marketplace but have yet to be fully distributed, Jernigan said. “They tend to be in places here and there. Those model servers are going to become a fact of life and are close to being a fact of life….”
The webinar, “Getting Started in IPD and BIM for Small to Medium Firms: An Interactive Online Workshop,” was targeted to construction managers, public and private owners, contractors, subcontractors, architects, engineers, among others.
Jernigan also asserted that upcoming BIM development and most transactions will occur transparently. “You, the general contractor, you’re doing clash detection between steel and mechanical system, [information about which will] go into the model server. As clashes happen, … the right people [will be notified] to get the job done to get the corrections made. [Information about work] will get automatically [and] transparently updated. That’s rapidly coming, maybe in five years.”
To prepare for the future of BIM, Jernigan further advised attendees to master a particular skill involving BIM because specialized skills will be highly valued. The construction professional who is broad based and “good at everything but not really the master of anything” will still play an important role, “but it’s also going to be important that you master something. It could be mastering Revit. It could be mastering ArchiCad. It could be mastering managing data. Those are the people who are going to become the most important. If you own a firm, those are the kind of people you should be looking for because those are the kind of people who will thrive in this.”
During the webinar, Jernigan and Collaborative Construction LLC President James Salmon also discussed barriers to progress, integrated decision making, measuring return on investment, training for BIM, effective BIM tools, and alternative dispute resolution.
