BIM Management, 2.0
In the past, when I was traveling educator of BIM, one of the big points I would make to a new room of people there to learn Revit is this:
"We are not here to learn Revit to make us relevant today; we are here to learn Revit to make us relevant tomorrow."
I say this squarely because whatever comes out tomorrow is going to be so far away from using AutoCAD, it will make AutoCAD out to be the VCR of the AEC.
That was yesterday and now its time to get out of bed because we have Dynamo, Grasshopper, Forge, AR and VR immersive technology and an arms long catalogue of information specific project management software. None of which give a damn about a DWG.
What this means though is that BIM is changing too, or more so, the management and coordination of BIM work. No longer does the world revolve around Revit and Navisworks; we now have a network of scripts and tools with which to write the next landscape of information modeling deliverables. It is the wild west...and to be considered a successful leader in BIM now demands exploration and taking chances on new software...
3 Major Changes:
1) Architecture firms will begin to model technology firms (in practice). What we will start seeing as work becomes automated through visual programming is project templates going away as catalogues of scripts create specified ones on the fly, making them as important as family libraries. This means that firms will have to key into technology practices to maintain this automation. They'll need to establish version control, have an understanding with the script library of what will and won't be compliant by input, and setup development of tools in an agile fashion: This means looking at what will be easiest to solve first and planning to stagger the bigger tools for development within utilities like Dynamo and even Forge.
2) Planning will become king. Specifically, the role of the Strategic Planner. With new tools offering greater automation, directly connecting to the numbers in a requirements log for a building program will simply be expected. That means the weight a Strategic Planner carries into any project as a leader of design will be exemplified. Smart firms will have already realized this and done what they can to bring as much of the initial planning in house. This offers a multitude of benefits, from marketing to better client relations, but the greatest advantage may just be getting an earlier start. After all, with BIM its quality in, quality out...and the earlier you get on that start the better.
3) Each firm is a snowflake. This new generation of tools is geared towards development, not process. Rather than, say, a landscaping firm trying to shoe horn best practices out of Revit, scripting and data management place a firm as a developer of their own resources. What does your firm have to trudge through? What point in the project does your firm like to manually design? How do you present? Do you wish a door could share information with a wall? The answer to all of these questions can be wildly different. This means that a tool kit built around a company's needs will have minimal effect outside of the walls of the company that built it. Intellectual property will really be environmentally specific and new staff will have to learn an office's ways almost as if it was a new program itself.
It's a brave new BIM world, and I'm excited to see where it takes us today...and what effect it will have on the next tomorrow.
*Images courtesy of CADline Community, Mike Foster @ DUSPviz & Augment